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Watercooling

Some pictures of my homemade watercooling system.

I decided to build one for many reasons:

The only silent solution to cool modern CPUs and GPUs
Overclocking capabilities, but wait, the main reason was...
For fun!

My waterblocks are made of copper which were drilled and soldered. I was inspired by some great technical drawings that Petar Lazarevski has made available through his articles on overclockers.com. The size of my pipes are 12/16mm (inside/outside diameter) which is much more than most commercial products available out there.

On to the pictures!

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This is the cpu waterblock.
Note the fixation which is made of a plexiglas plates and brass screws.
There's another plexi plate behind the motherboard.

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Closer view of the cpu waterblock.
As you can see I had to tighten the hose clamps quite hard to avoid leakage.

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Another waterblock for the video card.
It's glued to an aluminium plate to cover the gpu as well as the memory.
This piece was a pain to make since the cpu is slighty higher that the memory chip...
This time I've used nylon screws instead of plexiglas mounting plates.

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That's the video card waterblock before I mounted it.
You can see the soldering work and the polishing which is far from beeing perfect... It already took me a lot of time to have this result.

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That's a global view showing both waterblocks I've made so far.

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The system is powered by a 1000L per hour water pump.
The water tank is a simple plastic box, to start with.

More to come!

Well there's still a lot of works to be done. As you can see there isnt any component to cool the water. Most people are using radiators with large fans which are very loud. Fans are what I want to avoid! Some are using an evaporative device, which is able to cool the water a few degrees under ambiant room, but it also requires fans, and looses water as it evaporates. Right now the water is cooled by contact with ambiant air and floor under the water tank. The volume of water is fairly high (10-15L) so that it does not heat up too fast. Maybe I should build a metallic tank to have better heat dissipation.

And maybe some time I'll build waterblocks for the chipset and for the hard drive, that would allow me to remove the lasts fans from the case (except from the PSU which I dont feel like modding yet)