Cooling Down the Cases

In the mid 2000's I build custom and machines and sold them locally. All of my hardware, optics, fans, etc..that were left over IMO can be used to build something out of all these cases I have left laying around.

Most of my cases except for about 4 are non tower, nothing extreme cases. I have 4 5.6 bays and then of course I have the 2 smaller bays that were used for the floppys, etc.


Here is my question. I am pimpin' these machines out and I want to do a very beginners, small water cooling setup in them. Not a ton of room in the case to work with, but there is some on top and behind the bays.

Any suggestions??? Any would help set me in the right direction I would think!

thanks so much
steve

The best advice anybody could give at this point is to start with the stickies at the top of this forum. They cover the basics of watercooling and would help give you an idea of what you'd need.


It largely depends on what you want to cool and if you want to overclock, as that would determine the heat load that you'll need to dissipate. Then you'd need to figure out how much radiator surface area and which fans you'd need to achieve the deltaT that you're after.


Without a basic understanding of these principles, it's possible you may build a loop that has inadequate radiator surface area to effectively cool that loop.

Non-tower cases with 4x 5.25" bays plus 2x 3.5" bays? You SURE they're non-tower? Sounds like at least a mid-tower setup to me. You just don't see that sort of bay space in desktop cases.

Skorpien's right though. We'll be happy to help, but we won't do the work for you. Once you get your working knowledge up a bit, post a picture of the case you're working with and a proposed plan. You'll probably get a few divergent ideas from this lot, your job will be to sort through what works best for you. There are a whole lot of different ways to approach this.

If the cases are all metal, for instance, the possibilities for case modding fun are there and you could probably strap a 120x2 or 120x3 right to the front like I did.

after the stickies... stack (& bolt) the cases... one to hold the hardware, one (underneath) to hold rads & pump... you can build a very good system that way