Black Shiny Silence

My first post ever here

First off: I'm dutch, so please forgive me if my English seems awkward at times

Second: this mod is already underway, but not finished yet. There will be more updates to come. Also the first series of pictures were taken with a crappy creative webcam, so just pretend you're very drunk and it's very pretty when watching them .

Anyways.. Since I spend most my waking hours working on my PC i got bored with all the noise the thing makes; i am amazed that the neighbours never came to complain about it.

The parts responsible for all this noise:

Asus A7N8X Deluxe rev 2.0
AMD Athlon XP 2200+
2x256Mb whitelabel DDR SDRAM (=dual channel)
2xWD120JB 120Gb, 7200 RPM, 8MB Cache SATA IDE Harddisk
1xLG DVD writer (DVD R+/R-/Ram/Rw, CD-R/W)
AOPEN A600 (black) ATX case

The case unmodded. I have the version without a side window, and it'll stay that way. I want a silent PC with style, not a pimp-ass PC Pictures courtesy of Toms Hardware Guide, since I didn't make a picture of the case and am to lazy to do that right now



Inside:



All I can say about this case is that it's small, black and SHINY!. In the box you'll find a special cloth to clean it, and when you do it's like a black mirror!

My goal for this mod is to make a silent PC but leaving the exterior of the case the way it is as much as possible. So no rust, no 100 buttons for fans, no 1000 leds to illuminate my life. However I will be making a baybus wich includes fan speed regulating and a OLED LCD, but without any exterior buttons. For this purpose i will use Quantum chips (=touch sensors). However, that is yet to come, first I need to show you the state the case is in now, and how it got there.

To get the PC more quiet, I ordered the following watercooling stuff (some pics courtesy of freezing hardware)

* Hydor SeltzL20 waterpump


* Magnum CPU block


* Innovatek Graph-O-Matic rev 2.0 (two of them, one for northbridge, one for VGA)


* Innovatek Tank-O-Matic (bigass reservoir)


* Cooltek Liquidfreezer Single (12cm rad)


* Koolance HD Cooler (two of them, but mine are black anodized)


And some other stuff like hoze pillars for the L20, anti-bend-springs (?), hoze, additive for the water, memory blocks for VGA, etc.

To make it more quiet I got me a set of Be Quiet! (love the name) noise absorber kit:



I guess you can understand my signature now, I am desperatly in need of more gold after acquiring all this stuff

Well.. here goes with the home-made pics.. first of a shot of the right hand side of the case, where I installed the Hydor next to the 3.5" slots:



You can also see the wires for the front USB, audio and firewire ports, they will be adressed later on in this project. The pump itself rests on a thick piece of foam to make sure it doesnt pass any noise on to the case. Though some ppl complain these pumps can 'open' real easily, i haven't noticed this (so far). I didn't glue it together or stuff.

A close up of the pump installation (yes even in close up these pics are crappy, I know )


To install the reservoir on the inside of my case, i got me a small strip of aluminium and mounted the reservoir on this, so that it's in my case instead of exterior:


To keep my harddrives cool I used the koolance coolers. This is what was in the package (but mine are black):


Now if you cant stand seeing creepy stuff with hardware I'd advice you to close your eyes. Theze coolers use a heat-conducting kit to fill the space between the cooler and the PCB/Harddrive:


Here you can see it installed:


I removed the 12 CM outtake fan on the backside of the case, removed the leds from it (it's a computer, not a disco), dremeled a hole a bit lower so my rad would fit, and used small aluminium strips to mount the rad on the fan in the case (yes I will remove the dust someday



It's a close fit, my PSU has a 12 cm fan on the bottom side, I was happy to see that it still has enough breathing space after installing the rad:


A better overall view of the watercooling installation:


*more to come*

 

As you can see my PSU obviously has way to many unsleeved wires, so that needed correction. It was clogging up the place bigtime:


So i ordered a sleeving kit along with black molexes and a black ATX power connector:


These molexes are cool, you can put them right on the cable without soldering:


Here's the PSU with all it's original wires:


And here's what happened after I found out I had scissors:


I removed all unneeded wiring, and de-soldered them off the PCB:


Then I sleeved whatever what was left, and installed a 240V wire for the Hydor pump:


No more clogging, sleeving goodness:



This is where I am at now. The following things are on my todo list:

* sleeve all wiring, including front USB etc connectors

* install OLED LCD

* install custom made baybus

A tease-shot of the OLED:



And my design for the baybus.. it will be black and shiny offcourse:

Code:

+-------------------------------------------------------------+
|                        DVD-Tray                             |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

                                                   O     [open]

          +--------------------------------------+
          +                                      +
          +              PLED Display            +
          +                                      +
          +--------------------------------------+

                          Fan 1
  
               [UP]  O O O O O O O O O O [DN]

                          Fan 2

               [UP]  O O O O O O O O O O [DN]

                        
                      HDD activity

                     O O O O O O O O O O

The working area:



well that's it for now.. more to come!

 

haha, classic...

Wow the case looks sweet, never seen one of those HDD coolers before, but never been into water cooling really... how much did that set you back watercooling wise??? and wont having that much stuff on the circuit for the watercooling seriously impair flow and heat transfer??

- M@

 

That's a really nice case Grunt! Good to see another Dutch modder around here as well. I bet you can make this case look even better.

Question: I ordered some stuff at FreezingHardware as well last Saturday, but haven't had anything yet. How much time does it take for them to deliver, and who actually delivers their parcels? TNT, UPS, TPG?

Good luck on the project!

 

wow, i wish i had more PSU wires and this kid just snipped them off. hats off to you

 

I bought the stuff over a period of time, but I guess it cost me somewhere in the neighbourhood of EUR 250~300.. (or rougly 190 UK pound/340 US dollar)

The heat transfer doesnt really get influenced in any way, water has enough capacity to handle it. The water is like 50 degrees celcius at the warmest point, so no problem. The flow is offcourse not the 700Ltr/hour the pump can deliver, but flow isn't really important in a watercooled system (unless using an RBX waterblock, which i am not). The remaining flow is sufficient. I wasn't aiming for extreme cooling or overclocking, just sufficient, quiet cooling. With a room temp of about 27 degrees celcius (it's warm here right now) my CPU tops at 45 degrees celcius under full load. My HD's get 50 degrees celcius under those conditions, which is acceptable. I still keep the fan running at about 8 volt, i could turn that up to 10 or 12 to get better performance, but no need to so far.

I hope so.. all the modding on the outside is yet to be done..

I never order anything unless it's in stock.. webstores are a disaster if things are not in stock. FH delivered through TPG within 1 day after I placed the order, about as fast as humanly possible

I'm evil .. anyways, seems i have some wires to spare, want them?

If I ever need more connectors I can just put them on the cable that's already there (these T-molexes rock!) or solder in a few new wires. Though you'd need a soldering iron with enough power (big lumps of tin inside a PSU, 40Watt would be preferable) it's nothing really difficult..

 

Thnx for the reply. I don't want to dissapoint you, but I just had my gear. TPG dropped it off indeed

 

The plans look good

Let me know how well that Be Quiet stuff works, I might be getting some.

 

It's already in there, it's the grey stuff you see padding my case. Compare the empty case pictures with the ones I shot myself, you'll see It works great, though I must say that the koolance HD-coolers also reduced the noise a lot. I also padded the front from the inside, I'll shoot a picture of it when it's done, since the front will be the area where stuff happens in the near future.

If I switch on my computer now I can hardly hear it, all I hear is the airflow of the 12cm fan on the backside, wich normally runs at about 5~7 volts. Soundwise is comparable to a human breathing it doesnt make more noise than that.

now why would that dissapoint me?

 

I have been working on the electronics for the baybus. I'm using a Quantum QT-160D chip for the buttons. With this chip it is possible to create switches behing glass:

I will be connecting the outputs of this chip to 2 DS-1669, which are digital rheostats, which in turn I will use in the LM317 baybus schematic, and hooked up to a LM3514-N led bar.

The result will be that I will have a flat glass surface (or 'plexiglas', acrylic?) with touch buttons, 2 per fan, labeled 'up' and 'down', which I can use to control the RPM. I don't have a function for the remaining buttons yet, but still thinking about it.

Anyways, I made a little test-device to test the QT160 chip, and it works like a charm. I used a 'experiment-PCB' (dunno what they're called in english) for sensors, made circles on the backside and drew 'switches' on the front side:





and hooked that up to my test-setup:


This chip has two modes, a 'toggle' mode ('touch' once --> on, 'touch' again --> off) and a 'normal' mode ('touch' --> on, 'no touch' --> off)

Movie of the toggle mode:

divx, 528Kb

and the 'normal' mode:

divx, 282Kb

the schematic used for this:



this is not what i'll use in my case, but just for testing..

 

Fan control thing sounds awesome

 

Nice work, I was intending to do something like this myself, a nice quiet, subtle box....
but I got lured by the flashy blue LED's and fans, so now it's noisy and flashy, oh well, maybe next time.
Those HD coolers look interesting, how come the main block is attached to the bottom of the HD tho? I'd have put them on top personally, but then I've never tried anything like this so I don't know. Also, is that brown gunk removable or is the cooler stuck there?
Keep up the good work

 

Looking great!

But you know that you ain´t going to heaven after doing that to your hdd, right?

 

The brown gooy transforms into a rubberish like substance when left to dry.. so if my HD ever stops working (in which case IT wil not go to heaven) I can still remove that stuff and RMA it.

For the rest.. i just etched my first PCB ever (well the one I did when I was 13 doesnt count, didnt work anyways, am 30 now) and I'm relieved to say that it works. It isn't the definite print PCB, just one to test my etching skills and to see if it works. Well.. it does



It looks as if there are some breaks, but those are just pieces of the tissue I used to clean the PCB. To prove this, heres a picture of the print held into the light, you can see every 'lane' (?) came out fine:



I made this print by creating the schematic in eagle and then letting eagle autoroute a PCB. In order to get decent size solder pads I had to edit the component libraries. To get the print working without any "via's" (connecting wires on the topside) i spent like 3 hours arranging components and let Eagle auto-route them. Then I printed it onto a transparant sheet, which i put on top of a photo-resist-coated piece of PCB material.

Then I used a UVA-lightsource to light the PCB for about 1.5 minute, developed it in develop-fluid for like 30 seconds and etched it in ammonium-persulfate (?) for like 15 minutes. Then I cleaned the thing with nail-polish-remover and applied something called 'printlak' in dutch, dunno what the English word for it is. It prevents the copper from oxidating and makes soldering more easy.

After all this it was time to test the thing


The test setup (yeah lots of access PCBm will saw smaller pieces next time) :


and the result:

chip in toggle mode:
DivX, 396Kb

chip in normal mode:
DivX, 292 Kb

 

C L !!!

 

New update.. used the QT160 board in a PWM fan controller. To convert 2 buttons to 'up' and 'down' I used a DS1669, which I hooked up to a non-inverting amplifier (opamp, LM741), which in turn was hooked up to this schematic (it replaces the two 9k resistors and the rheostat):



I had to do a lot of fiddling with resistors, but eventually got it right.

To start of, here's an old acquintance (spelling ?), the QT160-D board:



Here's what I made today:



and here's the total setup:



The result is that I can regulate the fan between almost full (like 99%) to almost out (like 1%). In real life you can just about read the logo on the fan center when it's at slowes.

A movie of this contraption (with sound so you can hear the fan):

DivX, 620Kb

Must be the world record of using the most electronic components to regulate one fan, and I haven't even hooked up the LM3914-N yet. Yes I know this would be easier to do with a PIC, but I wanted to learn about electronics, not about programming..

 

Very nice, i'm loving the touch sensors, actually i'd planned on using the excat same chips for doing something slightly simlar in the future - Still in the pipleline.

 

Nice work Grunt, just one more thing I just have to say. It's not 240V, it's 230. Unless Essent got you connected to a broken power transformer as well. That's what happened about a week ago somewhere here in the Netherlands, leaving about 10.000 households with a 270V power....

 

that's some excelent PCB you've made, looks really neat

 

Ok.. time for an update.. i made the fancontroller-PCB today..

This is the schematic we'll be producing a PCB for today:



I designed the schematic in Eagle, and let Eagle autoroute a PCB for me.. I printed this on a sheet:



Here's the stuff needed to turn this sheet into a PCB:



To the left 2 plastic dishes wich wil be used to develop and etch in, on the right the UVA-light source, bottom-left: photo-sensetive PCB, bottom-right: picture frame, middle: chemicals (developer and ammoniumpersulfate). The chemicals used in this process are agressive, so these are mandatory:



First I took the protective cover of the photosensetive PCB, put the sheet on it, put it into the picture frame and then lighted it for like 1 minute and 30 seconds:



Then I developed the print in the developing fluid (about 30 secods):



After rinsing it with water, I put it into the etching fluid:



After like 10 minutes of stirring, this is what you get:



And after like 15 minutes, this is the etched PCB:



Then I cleaned it with acetone (to remove photo-resist) and applied 'printlak' to it, a protective seal wich also makes the soldering easier.

Putting component on a plate with no holes is hard, so I needed to drill holes.. the materials used:
(from here on photos are taken with my mobile phone, since the batteries of the digicam had to be recharged)



Dremel (what's a dremel?), drill, tape to make the small drill fit into my dremel, a stack of paper to keep me from drilling holes in my desk, and offcourse the drill itself. I used a 0.8mm drill and a 1mm drill. To the left the spraycan with 'printlak'.

The drilled print:



And, finally, the finished product:



If you look closely you can see i used 2 1K resistors to create a 2K resistor twice, since I didn't have any 2K resistors lying around

I spent like 8 hours developing the schematic, like 15 hours on making the PCB (auto-route, ripup, auto-route, and so on), 20 minutes on making the PCB and like 20 minutes to solder all the components on there.

This is not the complete unit. There will be another PCB to drive 2x20 leds for the fan-speed indication, and a PCB containing the leds and the sensors to drive this PCB.