In this article I’ll outline my quest for PC silence. I’m not 100% there yet but many people are requesting details now so I quickly put this "report" together. I’ll try to keep it interesting & informative as I can so expect many pictures because I’m not really a writer. A way to have PC silence has been floating around in my head for many years mainly since I caught the overclocking bug.
Fans really do get on my nerves so I wanted a way to get rid of the fans, or at least the noisy ones, to start with. I considered watercooling with an aircooled radiator, but this just swaps the noisy heatsink fans to almost equally noisy radiator fans, not really helping the noise situation much. I figured that a CPU gives out a relatively small amount of heat in the scheme of things so surely if you have a very large amount of water and remove the rad & fans, it will not be able to affect the temp of it to any great degree. I really wanted cooling that was consistent, lower and unaffected by the ambient air temperature changes. My goal also changed into having Zero fans in the complete system. This is when it occurred to me underground water temps are around 8°C to 10°C where I live all year round. Below ground about 6 to 8 foot down the temp remains pretty stable at the yearly average temp.
To set something up quickly I placed a stainless 120-litre tank under the mobile home, (I’m building a house), coolant to be circulated by an Eheim 1250 pump. This is of course still subject to the ambient temp but it did prove the CPU couldn’t heat up a large volume of water to any noticeable degree. Using this tank I watercooled the CPU with an OverClockers Hideout copper water block and hold down device. This is a very well Cnc’d solid copper block with a copper lid that is attached with screws and sealed with some hard black “stuff”.
Fig. 1 Copper Waterblock
After taking it apart, (something I can never resist), I found in measuring with digital callipers the base part was 4.6mm thick. Not happy with this much copper separating the CPU from the coolant I had the base machined down carefully so it was just under 1mm thin. It then required some minor lapping due to it denting in the middle a bit during the machining. This fairly simple mod has given around a 6°C lower max CPU temp over all.
