Mike's Ramblings

The design of the Dell computer case is interesting... there is a single fan in the front of the case, sucking cool air in. Then there is some fancy duct work over the CPU heat sink (which is fairly gigantic) leading to another 2 fans at the back of the case, which blow the hot air out of the case. When the temperature within the case goes up, thermal sensors tell the motherboard firmware to increase the speed of the fans in order to prevent the CPU from overheating. Of course, if the outside air is relatively warm already, it is more difficult to cool the CPU and the inside of the case, and then the fans will run at top speed all the time.

It wouldn't be quite so bad if the air temperature in our living room stayed fairly cool, but in the summer (especially the past month and a half!!), the heat doesn't just seep into the house, it gushes in. As the house A/C struggles to keep the house temperature down, the computer case fans struggle to keep the CPU temperature down.

The exhaust heat from the computer doesn't help the living room air temperature situation much either; sitting at the desk working on the computer, it feels like there is a small space heater under the desk... this would be great when the house temperature is 30 or 40 degrees F, but when it's more like 85 F, the last thing I want is a space heater roasting my legs!

Of course one way to get around both the noise and the heat is to shut down the system when I'm not using it, which I've been doing lately, but since we run a few services off that system, such as the Orb service and our "common" printer, I prefer to leave it on. So I started looking at other possible solutions.

One thing that I thought would be interesting is liquid cooling since liquid is so much more effective at removing heat than air. When I first thought about it, I discarded the thought immediately; with my luck, I would get a flakey part that would break inside the computer after I had it all together, and water would squirt all over the insides of my running system... Water and electronics generally do not go together well; adding live electricity to that mix will typically make things a lot worse. Besides, all the liquid cooling components were sold seperately, and so getting all the separate pieces together would have been a pain in the butt.

Then I ran across some reviews of liquid cooling kits. Finally some folks had the brilliant idea of putting all the liquid cooling components together into a single kit so that "average" folks like me could buy one thing and install it with a minimum of fuss.

I decided to buy the Cooler Master AquaGate system (see review at AusPCWorld.com) through TigerDirect.com. I received it several weeks later (there was a bit of a shipping snafu, but to their credit, TigerDirect took care of the issue fairly quickly), and waited until yesterday to tackle the installation.

Opening up the package, I found what looked like a rather frightening collection of hoses, wires, screws, and miscellaneous parts. Fortunately, the instructions were fairly clear; it was the disassembly of the Dell system that consumed the most time. Removal of the plastics (front panel, side panel, internal ducting) was really tricky because I didn't want to break them and it was very difficult to tell how they are attached to the case. The installation of the cooling system also required the removal of the motherboard, which also meant that everything had to be removed from the motherboard (video card, audio card, hard drive cables, floppy drive cables, power cables, etc, etc) in order to get it out.

Once everything was disassembled, the reassembly went fairly smoothly. All the parts in the kit where there and all fit together properly, which was a relief. I chose to have the cooling unit external to the case and to put the control panel inside the case; that added a little bit of work to the reassembly process but it all worked out fairly nice. Despite the frightening collection of parts, the install was pretty easy:

1. install the cooling block on the CPU
2. connect the liquid hoses
3. install the small PCI card
4. install the LCD panel in a spare 5.25" drive slot
5. route and connect the cables to the PCI card and the LCD panel
6. route the liquid hoses out of the case
7. connect the liquid hoses to the cooling unit
8. connect PCI card cable and power cable to cooling unit
9. fill cooling unit with coolant
10. start PC & keep reservoir full as the pump filled the lines with coolant

The picture shows the final installation, with the cooler sitting underneath the computer shelf and the control panel in one of the drive bays. This gives me the flexibility to move the cooling unit somewhere else, such as (possibly) to the other side of the desk.

I've had the system running with the new coolant unit for over 24 hours now, and so far I'm very impressed. I have no idea how hot the CPU got prior to the installation of this system, so I have to be a bit subjective about the results. Since I left the original fans inside the case, and I did not do anything with the sensors on the motherboard, I figured one way to determine the effectiveness of the cooling system was to listen to the speed of the fans within the case. If they went to full speed (and sounded like an idling jet airplane), then I would know the cooler was allowing the CPU to get just as hot as with the air cooled heat sink. If not, then I would know the cooler is more effective at removing the heat than the stock cooling system. I tried to work it extra hard today, by running the CPU constantly using a Grid project (which crunches out calculations whenever the CPU has nothing else to do) and keeping it running during the hot part of the day. I was amazed that the case fans never got switched to their top speed; the CPU temperature obviously never got high enough to trigger the maximum speed setting for the fans.

I'm fairly pleased with how well the cooling system works; I seem to have solved the noise problem handily. Unfortunately, the heat that is generated under the desk is still a problem for which I need to work out a solution... for a future project, I will have to figure out an elegant way to extract the heat out from under the desk...