I was talking to my dad the other day about fan noise issues in my Almost silent file server and he asked the same question I've been asking myself for a while. Why not use the whole case as a radiator? Most cases have as much or more surface area as even the largest CPU coolers, and many are made of aluminum which makes an excellent radiator of heat. Whereas most CPU coolers transfer the heat to the air inside the case, if the case itself were the radiator then at least half, if not more, of the heat would be dissipated to the outside. This would lower the ambient temperature inside the case which would lower the temps throughout the system. Getting the heat to the case could be an issue, but with heat pipes and water cooled systems it seems possible to move heat from here to there. This isn't an entirely new idea, either. A lot of mobile devices (portable radios being the example I'm most familiar with) use a heavy cast metal case to dissipate the heat generated by their operation. I have a Yeasu 50w mobile 2 meter transceiver that is about the size of an optical drive and uses it's thick, finned case to keep it cool, even under heavy usage. So tell me why this wouldn't work. Has anyone tried it?
I know that I have seen some high end mini-ITX cases and HTPC cases that actually use heatpipes to the case for this exact cooling scenario. How well they actually work I don't know. Let me look. john
There are some silent cases. Your problem is getting the heat of the components to the case itself, without resorting to botch-job heatpipes. You've also got to contend with the fact that PC hardware kicks out a large amount of heat (we have 140W processors and 280W graphics cards at the top of the range). You'll also struggle really badly with a PSU - I'd doubt you'd be able to get a decent fanless one, and attach it to the case in such a way that the heat was taken away from it quickly and effectively (Corsair's HX series PSUs are rated to 50 degrees C before output power drops, and they're one of the best). I'm sure one of the old Custom PC Dream PCs used a silent case, but it was tricky, and had insane problems, as well as gimped hardware. Unfortunately, in a box, moving air works better. Now, if you want silent, you could set up pump-less water-cooling loops with 120.2 radiators attached to the roof, and have one or 2 silent fans attached to them, gently blowing up. Having the rads on the roof would ensure warm liquid rose into them, and the fans would just nudge airflow in the right direction. Then again, I don't know if it'd be great. I'm sure someone will try it, now it's been suggested!
There was that hideously expensive Zalman case from a few years back the used numerous heat-pipes to link everything to the finned chassis.
I recall to have seen a DIY passively cooled computer on metkumods. let me see if i can find it edit: can't seem to find it
dont forget in any future planning that when using the heatpipe method that the vapour has to rise and the liquid run back down so try not to make any pipes run horizontally, even though u r gonna have to have some pipes run horizontally try to have a small angle on it at least so they will work properly.
There was a Russian dude who built a passive rig out of ~50kg of aluminum. (That Metku mod we can't find...) In the end he still had to add a small fan because of odd places on the mobo getting hot and crashing. That was mostly because he built a sealed box, though. You can buy the heatpipes.
You can't really do this without an open air rig. With a case-heatsink, the two problems are removing the heat from the CPU (wouldn't transfer too fast) and removing the heat from the case. Read up on Silent PC Review....
