I've had a watercooled pc few years back but I used it like less than a year and then went for total silence with air cooling. As much as I liked my passive aircooled build, I've still always had a passion for watercooling.So this summer I decided to go for water again and I started a little research to see what's going on in the watercooling scene nowadays. I read a lot of stuff about those magical Thermochill rads and EK & D-Tek blocks, but when I saw those prices..
So that's when the idea of using car radiator came along. I did look for new case for my project, but then I also decided to resurrect my old and faithful, Antec Sonata II. And yep, it needed a lot of work to become suitable again. Overall I tried to go for good cooling with low cost.
Main parts when I started this project:
Asus P5K
Intel E6420
ATI X1950 XTX
2 gigs of PQI DDR2 800 Mhz
Forton ATX-400PNF
Swiftech MCP655-B
Alphacool NVXP-3
50x45x4cm Car radiator from Mitsubishi van(?) - special thanks to Tommi L. for suplying this
Swiftech Apogee GT
O4P Magnum NB
12/15mm PUR tubing and 32/38mm PVC tubing
First I stripped the Sonata II:
During case modifications I tested the cooling parts:
IT'S MUTATING!Actually, I just blocked all unnecessary holes:
Black gloss. Sonata is getting sexy..
While the paint dried I made some modifications to the front panel. I cutted out some unnecessary parts of it and removed the front panel audiocable and the firewire..wire. Also changed those bright blue leds to something different, you'll see..
Cramped everything in to the case and started filling the loop:
Monstrous tubing:
Lights, camera, action!
Okay, so there's two 10cm red cold cathodes. One up in the top and other inside the front panel. Yep, those can be switched off too:
Gotta have some tunafish cans for leak testing
After two days and several issues with my X1950XTX, my mobo suddenly died. It just re-booted and after 5 sec uptime re-booted again, in a endless loop. I RMA'd it and went straight to nearest PC-store and bought Asus P5Q Pro and Corsair HX620W (because I was afraid of my PSU dying soon too). I'm superglad that I bought a modular PSU, now I have only mobo cables, one 6-pin pci-e power connector and two normal power cables coming out from PSU vs eight colorful cables from old FortonSo I had to bleed my whole loop and start everything over. At this point I decided to leave the new mobo out of water and get rid off that huge tubing to get the whole system look neater. Current setup is:
Asus P5Q Pro
Intel E6420 + Swiftech Apogee GT
ATI X1950XTX + Alphacool NVXP-3
2 gigs of PQI DDR2 800 Mhz
Corsair HX620W
50x45x4cm Car radiator
Swiftech MCP655-B
12/15mm PUR tubing
Some other random modifications are mainly the new HDD "racks", and I also fixed those sharp edges that came when I cutted out the back fan stock grill.
I'm having weird problems with my X1950XTX - again. I couldn't even get a post screen yesterday, but now I'm writing this with no problems at all. I had to keep my computer without power cable off for last night and this morning, and when I plugged it back on today everything worked just fine
My sidepanel still waits for being cut, I have the plexi for big window already. Also I still need to make a hole for the fillport but I don't have any proper tools to do that. But hey, critique is more than welcome, and keep in mind that this isn't even try to be anything as fancy as you guys show around here in XS, but this is my low-cost system that works for me.
Thanks for reading,
Lagaaja
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The problem with passive rad is that temps go up and down really slow.
Originally Posted by Vapor
These P45 boards just have million thing that can be tweaked from the BIOS so I think I'll stay with this for now.
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