Project: Hush! - A scratch-built passive radiator/case

[Monkey Puzzled]

Very interesting concept. Can't imagine how much it will weigh completely filled. If you wanted, you could add a large fan on top to circulate more air around the entire case, but based on the temps you have shown I am not sure if it would be necessary or beneficial. Nice work and keep the updates coming.

I think I worked out it weighs around 34-35kg (5st) fully filled with hardware and water (it holds about 1.7 litres of water btw). Weighs about 25kg unfilled. Very heavy but not unmanageable.

I have dabbled with the idea of running some fans. Would probably go for 9 x 120mm fans on an automated fan controller though as there are much higher quality fans available in that size. I bought a sanyo denki 9S1212L401 1500rpm fan and a 1450rpm Scythe gentle typhoon, and whilst they're both superb fans (if somewhat pricy), they're unnecessary as temps are fine atm. Who knows, might go for that if I start runing multi-GFX cards down the line and temps get out of control. Would be nice to have fans that stay off until temps get dangerously high.

awesome work!!!

but IMHO 2 car radiators (for engines) with rare fins will cost MUCH less money, time and efforts. and in Your case "warm" air from bottom section goes up, pick some heat from MB/video/ram, and than "cool" upper section?
any tests with separated airflow for sections (cardboard etc.) possible?

Thanks Vetalar!
Two car radiators would suck for passive airflow though. Why would someone design and build their own case from scratch in order to save time and money? besides which, watercooling has come on a bit since car radiators...

I don't think the heat from the motherboard makes a massive difference tbh. I mean, Mobo cooling blocks are really for aesthetics rather than anything else... I could stick some cardboard around the motherboard, but as the system is designed to run fanless it seems a little pointless as I'm not going to add a fan to cool it! Plus the motherboard etc adds its heat to the water when it is warmest, when it has just entered the radiator..

The case is actually designed to make act as a counter-current exchanger with warm water from the loop entering at the top, getting cooled by air that has already warmed slightly and risen through the case, going down the pipes against the flow of rising air, and then going throught the finned pipes at the bottom and being cooled with the coolest air. Of course, more heat would be transferred to the air if no fins were cooled by any slightly warmed air and only received fresh cool air, but that's not possible in this situation due to space limitations. It's a good solution for transferring heat, chemicals etc used widely in biological and industrial processes and systems. Having said that, as nice an idea as it is, I recently plumbed the loop up with the water going first into the bottom and I'm not sure how much difference it actually made to the temps.

dude you must have put alot of man hours into that thing why not just get some mora 2 or 3 pros for a passive system nice fabrication work nonetheless

Yep, a lot of hours. But even though tedious in parts (ahem, soldering 4000 joints), I enjoyed making it. Sort of like people who wax their car. Not much fun, and time-consuming, and that dust and grime isn't actually doing much so what's the point?...

It's not about costing money really. I naively mentioned when I started this project that current passive-cooling tubes like Innovatek Konvekt-o-matik or Cape Cora tubes cost a lot. The reality is that scratch built cases cost a lot in time and materials. Even with getting copper at much less than what the metal is worth as scrap (I paid about £100 for over 25kg of it already cut to strips for me) the project has still cost over £300 I think for raw materials. But people don't make cases to save money over a case off the shelf. They do it because it's a hobby, just as making your own furniture is an expensive hobby compared to buying a set of chairs from a Swedish furniture warehouse.

my scrolling finger hurts, for a good reason.
excellent work, you should put a temp probe on some copper to see their temps, relative to your cpu/gpu temp

Yeah, I'm planning to get an aquaero and have temp probes in the water (before and after rad maybe), simple flat probe for ambient and one stuck for heatfin temp to get an idea of water to heatfin delta and see how much heat is likely being dissipated by radiating and how much by conducting.

A lot of problems in this build

Yeah, the main problems were from sealing the ends. It's big enough that making molds for sealing the plenums (in polyester resin) and before that keeping bits clamped together for sealing with solder and epoxy is a . Plus I was a litle impatient at times - only recently got it with me and so before that work was restricted to weekends etc. so work did tend to get a bit rushed when I knew I could only get a day or two's work done.

Install an inline filter that uses stainless steel mesh before the loop That will catch and gunk floating around before it gets to your waterblocks. Then you can clean that every now and then if/when you need to.

Hmm, never liked the idea of filters. There shouldn't be bits of crap in your loop anyway, so a steel sieve causing massive restriction and getting clogged up seems pointless. Even if there is rubbish in the loop, a microfin block will get clogged up and collect it for removal anyhow.

Gotta love EES, someones a mech eng. Loving the build, also learning EES in one of my classes right now haha.

I'm not an engineer, though I did some basic haemodynamics (basic fluid mechanics) covering Poiseuille's law, laminar and turbulent flow etc. at university a few years back. I just stumbled across EES when looking for freely available modelling software. It's a nice little program, though the numbers are out for my set-up and it doesn't explicitly state how it's modelling and what assumptions it's making, which makes interpreting what it says difficult. That's probably my fault though. I just downloaded the free version; I didn't have any classes or the accompanying textbook to explain it.

Now THAT is a water cooled case. mad props to you.

Thats pretty dam impressive there! I'm now tempted to make something the same!

Hats off to you. Great stuff.

Very impressive!

Holy smokes that thing is a beauty

Wow

really great job, congrats to you mate.

Very nice build...

The words 'EPIC BUILD' does not even come close to describing this insane build

LEGEND in the making

Thanks all!

Wow, that's amazing.
If this doesn't end up as mod of the month on some website.... man.. i don't know what will.

I can't even imagine what something like this would cost if it was sold....

Sadly not - was entered for Bit-tech's MOTM competition back in January at the stage where it was just burnt-flux-covered heatfins soldered to tubes.

Monkey - Congrats, one of the very few projects here at XS, that was actually designed from a true heat transfer point of view. For a week or so, I was doing a worklog of my most recent build when a poster asked me about passive heat flow and radiance. I didnt want to besiege him with math, so I had intended to answer that is a column standard radiator form (what you have), you need something like 28,400 grams of thin copper to conduct a roughly 500 watt radiance and stay at 50 deg C. (of course, as you read from the heat transfer text, 3D configuration is utmost in passive radiance)

Now I wish I would have had your pictures to show instead , LOL. Much simpler.

Cheers Jay. I don't think the mass of copper's important other than allowing heat to flow throughout it - I'm using 0.9mm thick copper and I'm sure that's massive overkill for ensuring heat is spread easily and evenly throughout the heatfin surface, akin to cabling up an LED with pylon cable.. Commercial watercooling radiators use incredibly thin fins... As it happens those figures happen to be pretty similar to what I calculated though - I have 4.3m^2 of radiative surface area which gives a figure of 630W of purely radiative cooling (for a black painted surface; emissivity 0.95 and with a surface temp of 40C and an ambient of 20C IIRC)... Wish I could find the online heat radiation calculator I was using..

[Monkey Puzzled]

Update time!

Not a massive update, but took quite a bit of time. I've been tidying up the aluminium frame. It had been covered in polyester resin, which was a nightmare to get rid of. I've sanded the frame down , though it still needs more work and there are still some small blemishes and scratches that I need to get rid of. I'm not 100% how necessary a mirror-shine is, since I plan on anodising the frame either gun-metal/carbon grey or black.

Anyhow, here's some pictures. Enjoy!





And here's the back of it. The slits are for the 37 copper heatfins to sit in. They'll later be set into these groves, probably using polyester resin.



Here's the right-sided upright aluminium angle leg. The row of 9 holes is to attach to the copper wall of the radiator. The 3 finger cuts set into the top and bottom are to accommodate the copper pipes of the radiator.

The slit is for a slimline slot-loading DVD drive to sit behind. Still planning on a no-5.25" design for the front.







Here it is with the counter-sunk screws in. The one on the bottom left is stuck in place - think I must have forgotten to tap all the way through and it's got caught in the aluminium. I'll have to drill it out on the bench press next time I go visit my folks. Until then I can't sand around it or disassemle those two pieces. I still need to adjust the countersunk holes slightly to get the screws exactly flush, but most of them are level with the surface.













And here it is assembled:



Might take some better photos later on.

[WaterFlex]

sick bravo mate

[Monkey Puzzled]

Time for an update.

I decided to replace the backpanel I'd used from another case that has the fan hole. It's a bit dusty.







I wanted to have a simple aluminium back panel.

To have it sit flush with the aluminium frame a 10mm x 1.5mm step was milled from the inside side of the aluminium top and bottom frame and a 1.5mm sheet of aluminium cut and filed to leave the 1.5mm back panel sitting flush with the frame on the inside:








Next thing will be to cut out the hole for the I/O and PCI bracket to sit it in. This is going to be inserted from the back so you can't see the folded aluminium of the motherboard tray where it attaches to give a cleaner look when viewing from the inside of the case.

I used a stepped drill to make the 2 19mm holes for the antivandal switches; one for power, and one will be wired up to replace for the button of the slot-loading slimline dvd drive.



There had previously been holes in the 1/4 aluminium frame that were made from machining bits breaking when milling the slots the copper fins sit in as so:



To hide these I had a 1.5mm deep stepped section cut out for an aluminium cover plate to sit in. This will have front panel ports; USB (USB 3 if I can find some), audio, eSATA and firewire ports, and will allow me to make a new cover panel for different ports etc in future after the 1/4" thick aluminium bit of the frame is permanently secured to the copper radiator.











I also did a little more countersinking to make the screwheads sit nice and flush.





Still a bit more to do on some of them though.

[Captain_Harlock]

Everytime you do an update I feel the need to look over every single photo from the previous posts. Which is fine, but I cant help but spend an hour or two because it puts me into some sort of geek trance, lol.

^_^

[Rukks]

Still amazed by this build

I haven't looked back but it would be cool if the every component was watercooled (you may have it that way)

EES is a semi-good program, useful for fluids and thermodynamics. I'll definitely be using it on my next builds. Check out the built in functions if you haven't already, they will give you some useful feedback.

[Boulard83]

Yep ... its really some geek :banana::banana::banana::banana: here !

BRAVO !

[Movieman]

All I can say after reading and looking thru this is:
God Bless your pointy little head!
You my friend have moved the hobby a step forward..or 10..

[Martinm210]

WOW!!

[Monkey Puzzled]

Bit of an update: upgraded my graphics card to a GTX 480 with full cover block. I was a little concerned it might screw up my temps but only seems to have bumped up idle temps 4 or 5C to 32-33C with the GTX480 set to 900MHz core and 2200 for memory at max volts (1.138Vcore). The i5 750 processor is at 4.2Ghz, 1.42Vcore. With Intel Burn Test and Furmark running together I'm getting temps of 49-50C on the GPU and max of 63C on the CPU.

The eagle-eyed may spot the severe kink in the primochill 1/2" ID, 3/4"OD tubing between the GPU block and the pump. Think I may need to go for some 45 degree rotary fittings to solve that.







Here's the 1.5mm thick aluminium backplate. I've cut a hole for the pci/io bracket and an extra 1mm width to allow for the motherboard tray. There's also a hole for the PSU to vent through, though I still need to cut slightly into one of the supporting legs for the PSU kettle plug to go through

The PCI&IO backplate is attached from the back - it's not attached by screws yet - it'll have some countersunk screws hidden behind the pci bracket thumbscrews.



I don't have a metal break, so I clamped aluminium angle with G clamps and bent the flap of the backplate above the PCI bracket to a right angle with a hammer against the clamped alminium angle. Unfortunately I missed a few times, and theres two small dents. I'll try getting rid of them with by clamping the backplate between two flat plates, but if that doesn't work I might need to use filler and spraypaint the backplate...














Here's a poor photo of the back of the case:



Not that easy to see, but I've filled in the irregular creases in the polyester coat on the ends. Still needs filling with polyester resin on the top and bottom of the bottom plenum, and then I can sand it down. I'll probably end up spraying the plenums black.



I added a ball valve for draining the loop, attached to a bitspower rotary adapter. I had tried a less compact rotary fitting but it leaked. :/

Hidden away...



Swiveled round for draining. A 90 degree turn of the black tap and the system drains.

[DexNfX]

Wow, now that's massive!!!

[THE JEW (RaVeN)]

This is one of the coolest worklogs I've seen in a while. Mad props.

[Utnorris]

You should resubmit it to Bit-Tech, this is would win easily. Congrats on such a great job! You have some mad skills and the patience and fortitude to go with it. Awesome job!! One thing that would be utterly over the top would be to polish all the copper to a mirror finish. That would be just friggin awesome.

[asura]

+1 for polishing the copper. Though unless you want to make re-cleaing it every month a chore you'll need to lacquer it after it's shiny!

[dreamaxx]

That's awesome!

Get your friend to cut you another logo the right way up! You'll want this perfect when it's all done If you do stick with polished aluminium, then totally see if it is possible to nickel plate the copper, would look absolutely amazing.

Great work!

[Monkey Puzzled]

You should resubmit it to Bit-Tech, this is would win easily. Congrats on such a great job! You have some mad skills and the patience and fortitude to go with it. Awesome job!! One thing that would be utterly over the top would be to polish all the copper to a mirror finish. That would be just friggin awesome.

Cheers buddy - though I don't think I can resubmit it.

The copper would be a nightmare to try and polish - it's been sandblasted for one thing, and it's too fiddly to get between the fins and pipes.

+1 for polishing the copper. Though unless you want to make re-cleaing it every month a chore you'll need to lacquer it after it's shiny!

I'm thinking of using liver of sulphur to blacken the copper - creates a black reasonably durable finish. The thing is that shiny copper radiates very little heat, whereas a black thin coating will still allow convective/conductive cooling with the air and radiate hundreds of watts more energy (for a water temp of around 35C and air 20C) compared to a shiny surface.

That's awesome!

Get your friend to cut you another logo the right way up! You'll want this perfect when it's all done If you do stick with polished aluminium, then totally see if it is possible to nickel plate the copper, would look absolutely amazing.

Great work!

Cheers, but I don't think I'll bother remaking the plate- it's a lot of work; milling 37 slits for the fins, milling an 1/8" deep x 2" step at each end, milling a 1.5mm x 10mm strip on the inside edge for the backplate to sit flush with, countersinking 12 m4 holes and then drilling more holes inside to attach the backplate. That's quite a bit of work to correct something that's not normally seen anyhow. Besides which, he's sold his CNC!

[Monkey Puzzled]

Here's a PSU bracket I've made. Not secured in to the rest of the case yet.
















It's a little ugly with the screw-heads, but they'll sit hidden under 1cm thick neoprene cushioning. Still undecided on whether to remake the PSU bracket from thick aluminium plate (~1cm thick), and simply cut out the fan hole.



Here's the back of the case from the back



Here's the back of the case - Using countersunk screws inside means I need to have nuts on this side. The I/O bracket is inserted from the back to unclutter the look inside. However, the 1mm aluminium IO&PCI bracket has flaps to attach to the case. One of these extends down at the bottom where the nut is at the bottom of this pic. To get everything sitting flush a 1mm step was cut into the inside of the thick aluminium frame with a dremel milling bit.







I decided to use more countersunk screws for a nice clean finish inside.







IC cooling are kind enough to send out free samples of their Thermal interface material if you agree to test it against your previous paste and send them the results.







So after sorting out the kink in the watercooling loop and testing my previous paste, MX-3, using Intel Burn Test, and using InterBurnTest and MSI Kombustor/Furmark simultaneously (to produce as much heat as possible - around 550W!) I swapped out the TIM and remounted the blocks.

[Monkey Puzzled]

I've made a replaceable front plate for usb, eSATA, audio etc. Still need to get my hands on some USB 3 ports though, so leaving it as just a flat plate for the moment without holes for the ports for now. Anyhow, the plate is removable so I can attach the aluminium plates (the bits with HUSH milled in) to the 37 copper fins with resin (in the 37 slots in the back) once they're ready and anodised, and take out the plate to adapt to attach new ports (or replace) in future if needed. Only a small piece, but filing it to just the right size and the tabs to the right depth by hand took a while!



I did have a small tab of aluminium cut almost to size, but it's a different grade of aluminium and I expect it wouldn't anodise to be an indistinguishable colour, so instead I cut and filed a section from the piece of aluminium angle in the picture.



The finished piece with some of the tools used to make it... missing the big file...



The finished plate (upside down).







In place, viewed from the back:- I'll need to cut into some of the fins for the USB/eSATA/headphone ports to attach the the little inset plate....



In place and screwed down:













Thanks for reading.

[penguins]

I've been in love with this case when it was an unpolished turd. this this is beaaaaaautiful!

[Duh]

no more teasers?

[paulbagz]

I shudder to think of the cost of all that copper!

Amazing work!

-PB

[LeoAndrade]

I don't know if somebody said it defore, and I don't know if you're on this project yet, but the DDC pump works better with high restriction loops. It would be nice to test your little MONSTER with a couple of D5s...