Here is picture of the beauty after swapping in the acrylic top and changing water inlet fitting to the top:
The waterflow cannot of course be judged at this point as it has not been tested with restrictive loop yet, but it looks very promising. Especially I like the acoustics: it is quieter than I expected, even at 12V. When holding it in my hand, I have to put ear quiet close to hear it properly and the sound is mostly lowband and pleasant.
My estimate is that when properly mounted and inside the case, the rest of the machine has to be really quiet for this pump to be heard at all.
Care must be utilized when mounting, however: the level of vibration from this pump is fairly high and as it lacks mass, it makes a lot of noise if placed on hard vibrating surface.
I haven’t yet made undervolting tests, nor have I made subjective tests against some noise source with known level, but these are my first impressions.
I think the acrylic top might also reduce the noise level a bit. It’s carved out of thick (19mm, 3/4″) piece of acrylic and the standard cover is just thin plastic. And the acrylic top also enhances the looks significantly and enables flow rate mod with just exhanging the inlet fitting and the top cap.
I really like this pump.
Before actually attaching my precious pump, I flushed the inside of the radiator with just plain tap water. After all, it is ancient and used piece of car engine. Here is picture with just 32/40 hoses attached:
After flushing it, I proceeded to install the connections described in the previous post:
As you can see, the construction is ugly but stiff. The 4mm wall thickness of the 32/40 tube really gives me plenty of headroom to tighten the clamps so that no drop ever comes out in the wrong place.
And in the end, the ugliness is non-issue here. These connections will never be visible, they are both covered and in the back side of the case. The connections that will be visible will be just standard computer water cooling parts, with all the bling you can ask for.
Additional bonus in this construction is that the clamps at the same time compress the glue between the cap and the Y-fitting and make sure it really does it’s job.
To further lessen the amount of dirt flowing in my loop, I first made an open loop and made water go through a regular coffee filter. While it’s not the most advanced filter in the world, it did the job in keeping the particles out, as you can see here:
As I wrote earlier, connecting regular water cooling tubes into Volvo radiator needed some creative thinking. As I want to be able to disassemble the system, or at least take radiator out and put it back, idea gluing the 32mm-ID caps was dismissed. So, I went on attaching 32/40 tube and 12mm-Y piece.
First I leveled the cap and marked place for the hole:
Then I leveled the long end of the Y-fitting and drilled a hole to the cap:
Fits like a glove:
Since I am unfamiliar with this kind of things, I tried both gluegun and epoxy. I turned out that epoxy was too brittle for plastic like this.
When I started pressure testing the fittings, I also found one layer of hot glue outside to not be enough for the 3+ meter head pressure Laing Delphi is able to produce. After wiping the floor I went back into drawing board (I really need 12VDC power supply to our bathroom).
There is no overkill, just a job well done. Filling the whole cap (excluding the inside of the Y fitting, of course) did the trick:
The glue is just drying in this pic, so ignore the irregular and ugly looks.
The dual-covered sleevings didn’t show properly at the previous pic and plastic packaging interfered, too, so I couldn’t resist taking some close-ups:
And here they are yet closer:
As you can see, the red molex plugs are deep red both in normal and UV light - Vantec has done perfect job. They do not glow as brightly as some others, but I didn’t want orangish or pinkish glow, however bright it might be.
Goods from performance-pcs.com arrived yesterday. They consist almost completely of wires, connectors and wire decoration. The reason to order them from oversees was both availability and price: In Finland you easily have to pay some 1.50-1.90€ per connector and from States I got ten for $9, and they are a lot better since they are easy-grip ones.
The UV image does not make justice to those fine items since my cheap DSC’s sensor is far too overreactive to UV and infrared light when compared to human eye and thus that kind of images have distorted colors even after heavy photoshopping.
Also performance-pcs.com had some specialties in their stock that are just not available readily in Finland, like UV reactive 24-pin ATX connectors and dual-colored UV reactive cable sleeving. 24-pin ATX connectors and 6-pin PCI-e connectors are not so mundane in changeover kits yet, but performance-pcs.com had several sets that had both of them included.
Also I have found only few places anywhere in english-speaking world that would ship UV-reactive eletric wires, so I ordered some of them, too.
This set is far from complete, but I will later order the more usual stuff like single-colored cable sleeving kits and such from some finnish supplier.
Lately I’ve spent quite a few hours shopping, planning, testing, cutting ang glueing solution to getting the Volvo radiator connected to computer water cooling tubing. Not so surprisingly there seems not to be too many ready solutions for connecting 32mm (outer diameter) radiator fitting into 8mm (inner diameter) tubing..
So I went into Teollisuus Etola for an hour and half and this is what I came out with:
Tubing: PUR tubing, 11/8 (OD/ID), 15/12 and 40/32.
Fittings: 8-12, 12-T, 12-Y, 8-Y, 12-straight.
Clamps: 8-14mm and ~30-45mm.
Caps: One with inner diameter of 32mm, another with outer diameter of 32mm.
The plan was like this:
-Attach either of the caps to the radiator fittings and secure it by wrapping 40/32 tube around both cap and radiator fittings and then tighten tube with clamps.
-Drill a hole to cap for 12mm Y fitting and glue it to the cap.
The reason I chose 12mm Y fitting is that I want to leave room for second pump. As I am going to use 8mm inlet for pump, it didn’t seem a good idea to put 2*8mm inlet worth water through single 8mm Y piece.
The solution was to get 12mm Y fitting and two 8-12 fittings and piece of 12mm tube. If I ever add reservoir to the loop, I can also lessen the pressure drop by taking 12mm tubing all the way from radiator to reservoir.
The 12mm and 8mm T fittings are for filling and emptying the loop - one for the topmost point, another to the bottommost.
As you might remember, I plan to have 3 Silverstone FM121 fans hidden in the lower compartment taking care of cooling the water. They look good and provide amazing range of airflow at very good CFM to noise ratio.
But that left open the question about the 3 120mm fans in upper compartment. But now I have pretty much decided to go for Thermaltake 120mm UV fans:
(Image courtesy of Thermaltake)
They are just *very* hard to get to Finland.. Not a single store here sells them, even thou other Thermaltake stuff is readily available at many places and I am yet to find even a single webstore anywhere in the english-speaking world that would have three of them available and that would ship to Finland.
I finally made a request about them to Jimm’s PC Store who is official Thermaltake retailer. Let’s see if they can import some.
Anyway, the Thermaltake UV fans are of high quality, silent and look good, at least per specs and reviews. They should make perfect top compartment fans, since they have to just take care of cooling graphics card memory, main memory and motherboard circuitry. Those three fans should have no problems cooling that stuff even at 5V.
Of course I predict that one or two fans running at 5V in both compartments should be more than enough when not doing something extra heavy. But there’s no such thing as overkill, just a job well done.
Here is flow rate graph for stock and modded MCP350:
(Image courtesy of http://systemcooling.com/)
As you can see, the modded MCP-350 pumps whopping 430 liters per hour even through the more restrictive real water-cooling loop. Not bad, not bad at all.
However, I plan to leave space for another MCP-350 to C case. It’s small and two of the in parallel might just kicks ass. As you might know, it has very high head pressure (ie. it can pump through very restrictive systems without dropping flow rate too low) but flow rate is nothing to write home about. Since my radiator has fittings for *32mm* tubing, at least it should work very well with two pumps pushing water to it through 10mm tubing.
But that’s then and now is now. I have no doubts about even one MCP-350 being able to cool my current system hands down. It’s just if I go for some crazy overclocking or fanless setup when I might need another one.
I plan to install chipset, HDD and memory waterblocks to complement the current CPU and GPU ones, but as they are fairly unrestrictive, even a single MCP-350 should have no problems pushing through them all.
First shipment of water cooling goods, this one from Coolputer, arrived on Wednesday. Another one is still flying over Atlantic in the hands of United States Postal Service.
Overview. Laing Delphi 12VDC pump (also sold by Swiftech with name MCP-350) is at front center. On the right next to it are plugin hose fittings to be used with it, then water additive for blue UV color and then acrylic replacement cover for the Laing pump.
On the very back is standing 1 liter bottle of AlphaCool water cooling fluid and around all of them goes green 10/8 mm hose.
The hose color is not what I actually expected, but luckily it’s cheapest one of these things..
What was very pleasant surprise was that the replacement acrylic cover has exactly the same threading in the plug on top of the cover than what is used for hose fittings. This means I can do the Laing pump flow rate mod just by swapping hose fitting and top plug - very nice. I had planned to do it anyway, and it’s nice that I do not have to do it hard way.
Here is close-up of the same items:
As you can see, the acrylic cover looks really nice, and of course comes with holes for leds to lighten it up. What I didn’t expect was that the rubber dampeners that came with it are of top quality - I had planned to toss them away, but I might actually use them. They have the definite afvantage of fitting exactly to the carvings in the acrylic block.
What is hard to see from the picture is how small the pump really is. It looks small in the photos, but in real life it’s yet smaller. No wonder people use it even in Shuttles.
I managed to finally found proper-looking black plastic tubing for electric wirings. Its downside is that its inner diameter is only some 8mm - pretty tight fit even for normal 4 molex wires, not to mention the thick speaker cables I have..
Anyway, as chromed shower hose is a bit too bright for my darkish scifi vision and plain shiny black plastic a bit too shiny and clean, I experimented with painting and filing them.
Shower hose got “metallic” some black paint and plastic one some “chrome” paint and then I grinded the paint away from the protruding parts.
I am not yet pleased with the results, but this is definitely worth experimenting more, maybe with some hobby paints and more careful painting and sanding.
Here you see both painted hoses and unpainted black hose around them. The shower hose in this pic has three different zones, from left to right: original chromed surface, unpainted but filed part and then painted and filed end.
Here is closeup of the same setting as above. You can see how the sanded bare steel differs from the shiny chrome. Plastic tube looks almost too post-holocaustic for my vision. I aim at livin alien bug, not shot down one ;-).
Here are opposite sides of the same tubes. Shower hose has fine black paintjob, plastic one has terribly uneven “chrome” surface.
Here is close-up of the filed side of the plastic hose. This image is closest to how naked eye sees it - it’s awfully hard to get good photos about partially shiny, partially white, partially black settings.
Beg me pardon, I could not figure out proper english names even for half of the materials here..
Anyway, the white foam in the background is actually noise dampening material I forgot to add to previous picture. It might get used in the lower part of the case or then not. It was cheap and it was acquired in a phase where my vision was a bit vague so it’s usefulness in this project is yet to be determined.
The bottommost of the black sheets is 10mm rubber foam one. It is softest of the rubbers I have and I plan to use it where maximum vibration absorption instead of firm grip is needed. It is not actually a sheet but largish pipe cut open, since I could buy it in smaller amounts and thus it was cheaper than real sheets.
Two sheets on top of it are solid rubber, 3mm and 1mm. I use them to attach fans, to add some anti-vibration stuff between hard plastic sheets, between plastic and screw spacers and in general softening and vibration damping purposes. I also plan to use them in case feet.
The tube and the ribbon on the right are made of rubber as well. The tube is actually meant for car engine fuel, it’s hardened with fiber. It’s thick and stiff and I plan to use it as a spacer around bolts and screws, for example to softly but firmly mount motherboard to its tray and tray to backing without squeezing acoustic materials too thin to work.
The ribbon is self-adhesive soft rubber meant for windows. It will be used in various air tightening and dampening needs.
The grey sheet between rubber and white foam is another type of plastic foam. It’s stiffer and often used in insulating water pipes and such.
Here is more images about the base structure shown earlier:
The plastic is actually more level than it looks in the last picture: the flash is just doing tricks.
As you can see, the radiator is both desperately in need of cleaning up (will do) and pretty non-restrictive. The fins are only some 15 millimeters thick and they block just some 40-50% of the area: fans should have no problems pushing through it even at low RPM.
Here is shown the acoustic dampening materials I plan to use:
Lowest one is 30mm multilayer sheet with thin membrane on the top followed by two layers of foam and sheet of heavy mass between them. On top of it is 3mm self-adhesive bitumen sheet. The two topmost sheets are self-adhesive car engine noise dampeners (20mm and 10mm) made of compressed soft material and covered with folium.
Bitumen sheet is from Teollisuus-Etola (local chain for industrial rubber and plastic materials) and the rest are from Biltema.
Here you can see the current version of the base structure. It still needs some fine-tuning, straightening some bends and bending, cutting and sanding the borders, but basic form is there and it’s sturdy.
In addition to cable sleeving, I am also experimenting in making bundles of cables look cool, too. I try to aim at a scifi-insect-like look or something similar. Cabling like vains, acrylic plates like scales of the shell, and so on.
Here is some of the more or less raw materials for starting this job:
On the top is hard acrylic tube. In a middle is chromed shower hose. In the bottom is electric installations hose that contains UV-red speaker cable and is painted with metallic black car paint.
One option is to set up a tangle of mid-sized black hoses mixed with red thin cables, possibly covering all of them into scifi-decorated transparent tube.
