Project : Little Stealth - Page 2

It's not too loud at 12v, I had hoped to run it at 7v, but the system just doesn't stay cool with the fan running that slow. And that about covers the radiator. I have no complaints with it, and if you want a small durable  radiator, I recommend it.

Now on to the pump. This pump is the "Supreme Mag Drive Model 2" from Petsmart.com . Don't bother  trying to buy one in a local Petsmart store, they don't stock it. I paid $33 for this pump, it's an inline 250GPH pump. I'd have rather had a 150gph pump, but I  was unable to locate a suitable inline model. The first thing I had to do was  put nozzles on it. It came with no hose connections, just a male threaded section on the output, and a female threaded section on the input. So I bought a gender changer adapt for the male threaded part, and 2 hose connectors. I used Teflon thread tape, don't be a fool, use Teflon tape on all threads when  watercooling your computer.

Sorry about the blur, my camera wasn't designed to take pictures that close. See where the arrow is pointing? It's pointed at a 1/2" gap between the clip, and the lug on the socket. Now if you notice the nice curve of that clip on the left, if I turn it 180 degrees to get it closer to the lug, it's pressed up  against the waterblock. After bending the clip around for about half an hour, I  worked out an arrangement where it kinda worked. So I turned my machine on, and  guess what.. It wouldn't even post! I freaked and ripped the block back off to  check out my CPU core. Nope, no cracks, chips, or anything. So I reassembled it,  and tried again, still no post. I set the CPU back down to 650MHz, boom, it  posted, and I sat in BIOS and watched my CPU temp climb past 65c! At which point  I turned off the computer. Obviously the block was not sitting on the core, or  just barely. So I did some more clip bending and some foul language, I managed  to get the system to post and boot at 900. The temperature was insane, at 900MHz, it was the same temp I was getting air-cooled at 1000MHz.. So I emailed  2CoolComputer and asked them if they had a better clip I could try. I got no reply. About 2 days later, I reached into the case to try adjusting the tension of the block while the computer was on, one twist and the lug sheared off the  socket. so while my computer was running, my waterblock fell off the CPU. Luckily I'm fast and I've got an actual switch on my ATX supply, so the computer  was off instantly.

Now came the fun part, digging through my boxes of junk trying to figure out what to make a new clip out of. I couldn't use those 4 nice holes in the motherboard because the nozzles on the block covered two over them. and if I rotated the block so that they didn't, they'd hit the capacitors on the  motherboard. Here's what I came up with.

Ok, that covers the waterblock. Now for the general watersetup info. As you  may have noticed, this is a closed loop system. Closed loop systems don't need a reservoir to hold the water. The water just flows in a continuous circle, into  the pump, out of the pump into the radiator, out of the radiator into the block,  out of the block and directly back into the pump. Filling a closed loop system  requires a lot more work than filling a system with a reservoir. With a reservoir  based system, you fill the reservoir and the enclosed pump is instantly primed.  (Yes, you could have an inline pump with a reservoir, I'm not even going to deal with that one). With my inline system, I had hoped that I could half-fill the system, and then turn the pump on and it would flush the last of the air  out. But alas, that idea flopped. The pump found an air pocket, and stopped pumping. So I ended up having to suck the water through the system, one mouthful  at a time until most of the air was out. What I had done was made the hose from  the pump output to the radiator longer than needed, and then cut it, the  radiator end went into a pitcher of water, and the pump end was where I was sucking. Once I got most of the air out, I stuck both ends into the pitcher, and turned on the pump.