[SGVLUG] water cooled cases.

[James Neff]

I know I'm new here, but I thought I'd throw in what little bit of
wisdom I have accumulated on this.

I never had a problem with heat in my PC until I started playing World
of Warcraft.  Other games I could run fine at full graphics with no
problem.  When I started playing WoW I would get the dreaded #132 error
anywhere from 5 mins to 4 hours into playing.  #132 is related to memory
errors and is generated by the application.  I would only crash to
desktop which made me think there was something defective in this game. 
I read through all the tech support forums and did everything the vendor
recommended.  I then came across a post on the forums about my
motherboard (Asus A7N8X Deluxe rev 2).  Someone mentioned memory errors
in this model because the northbridge chip wasn't properly cooled.  The
factory cooler is a passive heatsink attached with a thermal pad.

I spent $25 at Newegg for a northbridge heatsink/fan and another 80mm
intake fan for the front of the case.  After installing I had no more
problems with WoW.  It turns out that WoW was pushing my hardware to the
limit and thus generating more heat than any other application.  The
extra heat was enough to cause a voltage leak somewhere between my
northbridge and memory.  The thing that probably helped the most was
replacing the factory thermal pad with the Artic Silver I got from Newegg.

Moral of the story:  take into consideration all of the aspects of the
system, and not just the cpu temp.  My northbridge chip was only warm to
the touch after I received a CTD (which means the heat wasn't
transfering to the heatsink).  Spend the extra $20-40 on the aftermarket
coolers, you'll save yourself a lot of headaches.

--Jim




Dustin wrote:

>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
>
>
>  
>
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