Zds Project Log

Going through various mod project logs I ran across a CPU waterblock that looks rather promising: CPU Alphacool NexXxoS XP

Most likely I will go for jet-based CPU block and this is very nice-looking one. In reviews they have praised its effectiveness, but critizised its fairly restricted design. Restrictiveness will not be a too big problem to me, however, as Laing Delphi pump has very good head pressure.

With the clear acrylic cover it would the C case without massive modding and it’s available cheaply in Europe, just some 35 euros, including VAT.

I ran across this worklog today and spend best of the day going through it: TBCS Community Forums - TRIBALOVERKILL, “Blackout” Updated–> 06/24/05

It love the work Tribaloverkill has done there, and I have to say he raises my bar also higher than ever. Gosh. I need to find some arrangement on getting access to some decent workshop..

To get some rough idea about relative noise levels of the fans, I performed some subjective analysis to the two 120mm fans I now had - Silverstone FM121 and Thermaltake 120mm UV fan.

As my currently only fan controller is still installed to the machine I write this on, I ran the TT fan just on 12V and 5V. The FM121 comes with control knob, so I put them side by side and adjusted the FM121 until their noise level sounded the same to me.

Other test setup parameters: I took power from ancient 120W ATX PSU, which comes with the fan. It is fairly quiet and I muffled it as well as I could, but still it was the noise floor in this test. I will later on mod old 12V battery recharger PSU brick to provide current without noise, but now I had to live with what I had in hand.

Listening tests were performed in our only windowless room at 4AM, so ambient noise was very low, sans the aforementioned PSU and distant hum of our home server (in neighboring room, in closet).

I also measured airflow with such a primitive way as holding a paper in front of the fans and examining which one could bend it more. To get repeatable results, I used several different papers and turned each or them 180 degrees and repeated the test.

Results:

At 12V TT is quiet but audible. 2 meters was not far enough to not hear it at all when being in direct sound path. Adjusted to similar noise level FM121 seemed to push a bit less air. Both were pleasent to listen to, mostly just whoosh of the airflow with some motor noise. As FM121 is rated for almost double the airflow and double the RPM at 12V, it had lower pitch and it sounded a bit rougher, like bigger engine running idle. TT had naturally the advantage of running at its nominal voltage, so it had smoother character.

When setting TT to 5V and trying to match same noise level with FM121, I found both of them to be very quiet. In these test conditions at 50cm away in direct soundpath their noise ceased to be heard (remember the ambient noise). It was impossible to set both to exactly the same noise level so all the comparison at this voltage is even less accurate than the rest.

At this voltage TT had some irregularities in sound; it started ok at 5V, but now and then there either was or was not some resonance-like additional noise. However, that noise was so quiet that it’s hard to count it as a defect - I could hear it only from some 20-30cm distance. The FM121 had a bit more pleasant motor noise, mostly due to lower frequency and it also felt like it was moving a bit more air.

All in all, both fans sounded, looked and felt like quality workmanship. When soft-mounted and enclosed inside good computer case, the TT fan should be either entirely inaudible or barely audible depending on your other components and noise floor. At 5V it definitely is inaudible it not in direct soundpath.

Silverstone FM121 performs also very well considering that it is rated for whopping 120CFM at 12V. It undervolts nicely and at all speeds it has pleasant sound and good airflow per noise ratio. At full speed it’s of course nowhere near silent, but the noise is mostly just pleasant whoosh and it moves *a lot* of air. It looks and sounds like a very good compromise between wide operating range and noise.

I will return to this subject when I have time to disassemble some 80mm fans from my primary computer and set up closed loop for the Laing Delphi pump. Then I can hopefully say something more than “wow, they are nice fans”, since I can compare them to some fans with known noise level.

I will also test all the samples against each other when I get to that point, so I can give you some idea about sample variety. I will have three of both fans, which should be enough to count out some uncertainty, altough the all TT fans are from the same batch.

The nameplate of the fans read “Hong Sheng” and it indeed seems there is company with such name manufacturing air-cooling products and many of them look very familiar, even thou I have never heard about the company before. They look like a chinese subcontractor for the bigger names. Even the product images give me some serious déjà vu feelings, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually manufactured some very familiar products.

Anyway, I didn’t found exact match for the TT fan, but these are the closest. Technical drawing looks the same, and extrapolating from the three given models I assume TT is based on same design, but just runs even slower and is made of transparent red UV reactive plastic.

As some of you might have noticed, I’ve been a bit quiet for a while. I recently visited Rome and it’s been a lot of busier in work than normally, so these home projects have been on a lower priority. But now I’m back and full of ideas!

As the quietness, efficiency and bling-factor of the cooling are some of the most important aspects of the whole project, I have spent a lot of time trying to find perfect fans for both upper and lower compartment. It’s especially hard to figure how the UV reactive parts will look like in real life without seeing them.

Early in the project I decided to utilize 120mm fans for all my air-cooling needs. Besides the size, the Main criteria in selecting the upper compartment fans were:

• quietness
• good airflow per dB(A) ratio
• they had to look good with and without UV light
• and after lot of pondering: they had to be red

Amongst the finalist were Coolermaster, Antec and Thermaltake. After a lot of googling for real-life images and experiences about them I decided to go for Thermaltake: their UV fans come without leds (I want to be able to turn down the bling level easily), are one of the most silent and do not look pale, orange or pink in the normal light as many of the UV red stuff does. The specs from Thermaltake claim:

• sleeve bearing - must have for silencing enthusiasts
• 0.3A rated max current
• 1400+-10% RPM @ 12V
• max airflow 54.45CFM
• 21dB(A)

And those who do not follow the silencing front so closely: Remain sceptical about manufacturer CFM and dB(A) claims. They are usually something that can be achieved only in lab.

After unsuccesfully trying to locate a dealer to ship Thermaltake UV fans to Finland, I finally contacted first Thermaltake and then by their suggestion Jimm’s PC Store, who is their official dealer in Finland. And low and behold, after a bit less than a months wait I am now proud owner of three red 120mm Thermaltake UV fans:

They came in sturdy but easily openable (and re-closable!) package. Notice also the nice tidy sleeving for power input wires (in the bigger version of the image):

And here is the manufacturer information from the fan in a close-up, since I know you silencing folks want to examine it:

I really like the bluish deep red of the fans - they look yet better in real life than in these photos.

Here is another example of what ALE can do.

One of the source images:

After ALE:

After sharpening:

Of course since this is 1:1 size image taken with compact camera, the quality is not terrific in any of the pictures, but for web they are anyway always scaled smaller than 3MP.

One additional nice thing about ALE processing is that the resulting images can be had in 16BPP format, and thus there is a lot of more room to enhance the lighting without having color bands.

As you can see, upper and lower compartments are now modelled. Next I will concentrate on air guides and HDDs.

Unfortunately I am yet to find free CAD program with tolerable UI, so I have made all the design with just pen and paper. And lots of it. Here is a side view that’s maybe closest to what I’m actually implementing. Sorry about the bad quality, it’s just very difficult to reproduce this kind of drawings on computer screen.

The second one contains color coded legend for what are the parts of the drawing that are in effect and what they mean.

As you might already know, the main purpose of the upper fans is to cool down the parts that are not watercooled, like system and graphics card memory, motherboard circuitry, northbridge and so on. The three up-to-110 CFM fans in the lower compartment coupled with Volvo radiator are more than enough to keep the water cool.

So, I plan to go for pretty restrictive airflow in the upper compartment. The air that does not cool the MB and graphics card is waste of good CFM. This of course means that is the upper compartment fans are running at full speed, there will be a lot more turbulence noise due to restricted airflow path - but they will speed up only if the MB components need so, so I think this makes sense in the end. Unrestricted airflow is useless if it does not help cooling down the necessary components.

All this means that I shall have variable height airpath over the motherboard and that airpath will be pretty thin - just few centimeters over the MB. To be able to determine proper form for the air guides, I took image of my MB from Asus site and printed it out in color and in 1:1 size. This way I can make model for air guide that matches exactly the placement of the components on my MB.

Since acrylic is pretty expensive and I am already one order of magnitude over the original budget I figured I’d need a model before I start cutting and bending the most difficult part, top of the chambers and upper fan and MB mounts.

My first thought was to use PVC foam sheet in the modelling, but even it costs some money (altough just 50€ per sheet) and I have already used almost half of the 2000×3000mm sheet I have. So, back to the low-end: cardboard.

My plan is first to make cardboard model of the critical parts and then replicate some of the parts from PVC to have solid model for bending the acrylic. The cardboard parts are of course not 1:1 with the acrylic ones but they are there to give me some concrete 3D feeling about how things relate to each other.

I couldn’t resist taking some closeups from cabling setup and playing a bit with ALE. I have to admit that the lense of my compact camera is just not good enough for things like this.. But here is the result:

Here you can see pretty clearly the difference between natively black tube (far right) and painted ones.

To give you some idea how this setup looks without UV light, here is a picture taken under just incandescent light.

To get some feeling how my vision might look in reality, I used fair amount of masking tape and staged what bunch of cables might look like in the finished case.

Yes, image quality is poor and colors are skewed due to cheap CMOS sensor, wrong kind of lighting and by the fact that I am yet to buy the blue cable sleeves. But yet it confirms that this is the way to go. It has strong hint of that alienish machine-insect crossbreed look I am aiming at.

Great!

To give you some scale: That bunch of cables is about 80mm wide and the visible part is some 350mm tall.

I have to admit that deciding the color and appearance theme to go with has been by far the most intriguing and demanding aspect in this project. I’d like to see chrome, and I’d like to see plenty of colours, but OTOH I’d like to experiment with pure white and pitch black.. Decisions, decisions.

And after all I’d like the case to be pretty simplistic, feature same few visual elements repeating all over the case. So I had to decide which ones to go with and which ones to develop further.

So, however cool the chrome would be, it just wouldn’t fit my other materials: mainly smoke-grey acrylic and black plastic. And to make the effect, there should have to be plenty of it and with the tools I have handy it’s just not going to happen. Hence with heavy heart I abandoned hopes about chrome.

So, the main element will be black plastic covered by layers of smoke-grey acrylic sheets, or scales, if you will. Choosing the colors was easier: deep red and different shades of blue will be the main colors.

Armed with this decision I went to get some eletric connectors that would fit the vision I had in my head. The molex connectors, whichever color or variety they come in, are plainly just not elegant. So these are what I ended up with:

They are ancient DIN connectors, but they seem to work well. They are less painful to attach and detach than molexes and they are available in lockable version if you do not trust them to hold otherwise (the ones on the left are lockable, while the ones on the right are regular ones).

And on visual side, they are round, pretty modest in diameter and they are black. As you can see from the pic, they fit pretty well to the two sizes of decoration tube I have. You can also select from wide variety of pin configurations so I can get enough pins for both regular molex connector and PCI Express connectors. Better yet, 4-, 5- and 6-pin versions can be selected so that they do not physically mix - no chance in burning you precious electronics with wrong voltage.

They will of course look better when the tubes have been painted and their ends leveled and border between tube and connector has been shrink-wrapped. But this will give you some idea of how they look.

And of course there will be plenty of them. That’s the whole point :-).

EDIT: Forgot to explain the topic. In addition to these visually-pleasing ones I also bought dozens of regular connectors that will either give their pins to cooler colored ones or be used in places where they are not seen. 10+6 molex connectors, 2+2 P4 connectors, 6+6 fan connectors and a single 24-pin ATX MB connector. Shouldn’t run out of these for some time..