Airflow and watercooling question

ishiiiishiii Cold lake, AB, CA
edited October 2003 in Hardware
Hi guys;

I have been puting allot of thought into building an acrylic cube pc case and making it watercooled.

First question.
I am thinking of using two Black Ice Xtreme Rev.2 rads. With 120mm fans on both sides, but only the suck fans on all the time. I would like to have the blow fans controlled by a matrix orbital using the software to turn the blow fans on and off under load.
Is this a bad idea?? Would two fans keep the idle temp decent? I dont think ill have an insane oc going, so I wont need the full cooling all the time. The answer to this question is important because this is the main reason I want the matrix orbital lcd.

Second question.
I am thinking of using Modders mesh on the top, or part of the top of the case. I remeber reading somewhere before that the best cooling is in a sealed case with good design, it creates a mind tunnel.
So would the open top reduce air flow? or only cancle out the wind tunnel effect?

And one more question.
I am thinking of reducing some of the fans (not rad fans) from 12V down to 9V. Since 9 is 75% of 12, is it logical to assume that a 100cfm fan would work at 75cfm??
Sorry for the multiple questions, but they have been nagging at me.

Comments

  • TheLostSwedeTheLostSwede Trondheim, Norway Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    Hi ishiii :)

    1, Depending on the rest of the hardware, you dont need more than one rad with one 120mm fan on it. In fact, if you use a delta @ 7 or 9 volts, you will have both good flow and a near silent fan. The best part with wc is that if you won´t overclock serious, you will have as good temps as a very good airsetup but dead silent. Remeber, the water can only get as cold as the room-temp theoretically and it doesnt matter how many rads and/or fans you use.

    As of the rest of the questions, i only have a hunch and i am not sure of the answer so i won´t answer them yet.

    My own setup is only going to use 1 single casefan and that is a Papst 120mm thats normally running at around 27 db, but i use it on 7V and i can´t hear it. One thing i have noticed is that if you put your harddrives as high in the case as possible, the heat from them won´t get to the mainboard as easy. I use adapters of all 3 harddrives in the cdrom slots. If you could combine that with a 80mm hole in the top and suck the hot air out, you have a winner as far as casecooling is concerned.
  • TacoguyTacoguy Colorado
    edited October 2003
    Hi Ishiii

    I am not a gamer but an EE. You raise some interesting questions. Thermal engineering is quite complex and I found a recent article about the G5 cluster at Va-Tech :

    http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/10/29/osxcon_g5cluster.html

    an excerpt from this:

    With a traditional air-conditioning setup, the calculations showed that instead of emptying out the air three times an hour as would be typical, they would need to empty the air three times per minute. Computers tend to each cool front to back. So the plan was to arrange the computers in rows back to back and pull the hot air out of the hot aisle. This would have required wind velocity under the floor of more than 60 miles per hour and still would have resulted in some hot spots. They decided instead to use a refrigerator-like system. Chillers cool water to 40 degrees to 50 degrees, which is then used to chill refrigerant, which is piped into a matrix of copper pipes. Effectively, you have a distributed refrigerator.

    Granted .. you do not have a cluster but I find this philosophy interesting .. pulling out hot air rather than pushing hot air out.

    This just begs gamers and others to rethink perhaps the cooling isssue.

    Best as always

    TG
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