[SGVLUG] water cooled cases.

[Dustin]

On Thu, 1 Dec 2005, John Riehl wrote:

> I dont seem to find anyone selling built (pc) systems with water 
> cooling,

Mostly for the same reason that auto companies don't sell cars with really 
hot blowers--then you have to back them with your warranty.  Better to 
either supply a pretty tame one and let the aftermarket people tweak it or 
don't put one on at all.

> Still, it would be cool to build this system, but the people have backed 
> off.

It's mostly a l33t ricer gamer fanboy thing.  Your customers don't sound
much like l33t ricer gamer fanboys. :-)

> The actual requirement for the system is that it is a dual-opteron 
> system, with 8g memory, and a decent (not cutting edge) graphics board. 
>   Disk requirements are essentially just for the os, because user disk 
> is nfs mounted. I did find an article by someone who water cooled such a 
> system.
> 
> The people who are looking at getting these systems are extremely noise 
> adverse.  (In 20+ years of sysadminning, I have never had a bunch of 
> users as noise adverse as these.  Seriously, they get upset at speaking 
> in a normal volume in their cubed office room).  I should offer 
> management an "alternative solution", i.e. headphones.

I think if you work hard enough at it you can get quieter than water
cooling without it.  I've never done it, but I can see how I'd start:  
fanless psu, big holes in the case for big (so I can run them nice and
slow) quiet fans from endpcnoise.com, on variable controls so I can
throttle them back to wherever I need to.  Rubber washers/gaskets between
the fans and the case to reduce vibration.  Really oversized ricer heat
sinks on the cpu, northbridge, and graphics card so that the air from the
big slow case fans will be enough to cool them.  And at least one exhaust
fan blowing straight up out of the case in the direction convection
already wants to go.

I'm sure it can be done, because I recall seeing a magazine article where 
they built a fanless Pentium 4 (!) system just to prove they could.

Part of the problem is that they want a high-end opteron system.  The
easiest way to get a quiet desktop is probably to buy one of the couple of
Pentium-M based desktop boards and start by reducing how much heat you 
have to remove from the case in the first place.

Dustin