|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
THE LIQUID COMPUTER
Every day we accept more naturally that computers make noise with their fans, and they tend to need a stronger cooling. It's quite long ago that it got me nervous having to stand these fans, so I decided to deal with the problem. The solution adopted was to cool the components that give away more heat with water and keep fans at slow rotating speeds for these components that need cooling but don't heat up much. That's how I made my silent computer.
The starting situation was the following: the computer consisted of an ASUS P4G8X motherbard, a Celeron processor at 2 GHz, a 3Dfx Voodo Banshee 16 Mb video card (PCI bus). The CPU had the fan provided by Intel, the Power Supply Unit had the ordinary 80 mm fan quite noisy and the video board had a 12 V 40 mm fan that I powered 7 V because otherwise made a very loud noise.
To correct this machine I decided: to cool with water the CPU, the video chip and the transistors and diodes of the PSU. There still remained the FSB (that initially was cooled by the air that left the processor) and the rest of the PSU electronics. I decide to cool these last elements with fans connected at 5 V that almost make no noise.
A normal computer box (ATX tower) has no room for such a complete water circuit, so I decided to make from the computer box a small cabinet. Here you can see it:
 |
It can be seen it's made of 4 levels: the upper level houses the computer, in the second one (top to bottom) there's a shelf that can go out, it's thought to hold a scanner, the next level is a drawer to hold CDs and the last one is the water radiator housing. This cabinet has wheels so it can be moved, and the upper surface can be used to put a printer on.
The radiator fan control circuit
All content of this site is free for the Community and it can used by whoever may want it, no need for permission to reproduce it. I would only ask to mention the source.
Done by Alberto Morcego