about the coolness factor, but are they safe? Also, acrylic is so brittle! Gah...
And it scratches so easily. My question: what is the cheapest way to *quietly* make a system cool? Since you mentioned cheap, then water-cooling is out. After that you are stuck with some form of air cooling. If you want it quite, then go with big fans. Also mount your hard drives and or cddrives on rubber isolators. Couple of weeks ago I build a Athlon XP 3000 in an Antec Sonata Case (http://www.antec-inc.com/pro_details_enclosure.php?ProdID=15138). Instead of having 4 or 5 80mm fans this case has 2 120mm Fans and then 1 80m min the power supply. The hard drives also mount on rubber grommets so the vibration of the hard drive is not transmitted into the case. I replaced the stock 120mm fan (that was much quieter than 2 80mm fans) with 2 Antec SmartFans. These fans have thermisters in them (a type of temperature dependent resistor) that causes the fan to move more air as the case gets warmer (so when it is not working really hard it is very, very quiet). The system was so quiet that the only way you could tell it was on, when it was under the desk, was to see if the light was on. Not only was it quiet but it was very efficient. Once you quite the case down, then you can start to focus the CPU heatsink. There are a number of good quality heatsinks that are fairly quiet. The Thermalright SLK-900u is supposed to be very efficient and very quiet, but a bit expensive. It uses a larger fan (92mm) to help reduce the noise and a good heatsink design to make it efficeint.(http://www.thermalright.com/slk900.html). Zalman also makes a number of very quiet heatsinks but they require a bit more tinkering to get them to work right. (http://www.zalmanusa.com/) I good place to start looking at quieting a PC would be Silent PC Review (http://www.silentpcreview.com/). The do decent reviews of quiet pc related products. I'd love to [eventually] get a nice watercooler, in fact I've been thinking that one nice watercooling system might be adapted to cool a handful of systems or even a small cluster? Is this safe? I suppose for multiple systems, a failover would be appropriate. The biggest problem with water cooling is failure. If you loose the pump, your system is toast. If you have a leak, your system is toast. And on this note, does anyone know exactly how harmful *not* using a case at all might be? The case is there to protect the computer from you, to provide some EMI shielding, and to provide proper cooling. You need air moving across your system to keep the components cool. If the metal box is indeed as important as I think (for protecting both ourselves and our computers) then said water-cooled minicluster might be housed inside an old washing machine or something. Maybe I should just plan on building it inside a used, working fridge? = ) Can I put the storage array in the freezer? Sheesh, maybe the whole thing should be built in a box-freezer... One word: Condensation. Wet electronics are bad. That is also the biggest problem with using peltier devices. They tend to cool the processor so much that you end up with condensation. _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
