I’m a little excited and apprehensive because my boss (who is me, incidentally) today decided to roll out a new silent-computer initiative throughout our corporate offices (i.e. my little back room). To whit, I have today ordered a water-cooing kit for the Dual Xeon 2.8GHz machine on which I perform my daily feats of technical investigation.
The machine is currently exceedingly noisy, because it’s a server, designed for pure grunt and intended for use in a separate room – it boasts three fans to it’s rear, each of which are pumping out air at an alarming rate, also, within the machine, both CPU’s and the graphics card also have fans directly onto them. From what I can tell so far, the kit will enable me to replace all the internal fans and one of the external ones. it should also allow me to slow down the remaining two so that they make less noise.
Incidentally, the kit in question is an Asetek WaterChill KT03X2-L20.
So this is stage one of the initiative. Stage two will be to install a quieter, perhaps even a silent power supply unit (PSU), but I’m getting ahead of myself. Currently I’ve received confirmation from the supplier that the order has been shipped – if it arrives over the bank holiday weekend it’ll be a miracle.
I shall further discuss my experience of this project, as it progresses.
I have the same problem: Dual Xeon 3.6Ghz (produces a lot of heat). With fan cooling
is never below 50º/122F. The fans noise is unacceptable.
So I want to go for a water sollution also. Any recommendation from your experience?
Hi Carlos, my kit is still functioning flawlessly, and the machine is far quieter than it was before. A few hints that I can offer in addition to the other notes on this site:
1. Use distilled water (i.e. pure H20) or a special coolant. Tap water can have all kinds of things in it that can help algae or promote furring, so it’s worth the extra few credits to ensure your machine is pristine.
If you can, take the opportunity to invest in a fanless PSU – this is difficult with some motherboard/xeon combinations so you may have to look around, but once you silence your cpu, your chipset and your GPU, the 2 thinsg left to be noisy are your PSU and your disks, and the PSU will no doubt make up 90% of that noise.
Hey there, always enjoy seeing people taking their first steps to “getting wet”, excuse the pun.
One piece of advise I can give with regard to the coolant you use is, in my experience, if your arent going for all out brute force performance such as heavy overclocking , etc… Then you really only need two things in your water cooling loop.
De-Ionised water (same stuff youd use to top up your car battery), and a smidgin of anti freeze to kill anything in the water and stop different metal loops eating away at each other.
Hope your loop stays runnin, anyone moving to getting wet is a good thing. lol