5 Gallon Res

Hello all,

I am fairly new to the forums here bit have lurked for quite a while now while researching my watercooling setup.

Unfortunately for me I learned too late that the DangerDen Resivior's are not the greatest.

I learned this to the tune of one severely cracked top (Thankfully it stayed watertight).

Well I found a nice replacement for the bubble machine today and hooked it up after the needed modifications.

Namely a 5 gallon vegetable oil jug such as you may have seen if you ever worked a food service job.

I thoroughly washed and rinsed the inside to remove all traces of the oil and then modified the lid to accomodate two short lengths of copper tubing. To one of these I attached a length of vinyl tubing with another short length of copper at its opposite end to act as a weight to hold it near the bottom of the jug.

I then disconnected the old res and routed the tubing in through the top of my case where I had the cap for the DD res located and connected it to the two vertical tubes that were connected to the old res.

although it is too early to say, my current temps are 8 degrees C lowewr than the old setup. I will know more once the water temp throughout the system has had a chance to re-stabilize with the new water volume.

My old temps were as follows:

Idle 32C
Full Load (using RC-5 to 100% CPU usage) 40C

New temps:

Idle 26C
Full Load 32C

This is with a room temp of 26C and an average case internal temp around 30C

well someone is going to say it so i might as well start... the idle temps of the cpu can not actually be equal to room temps, so there is probably some problem with calibration of the thermal probe. Regardless, if you are getting it to read ambient, your temps are pretty good, so well done.

let us know the temps after folding for a about a week, you might see the temps crawl back up to near the 40c mark, i doubt it but you might, if you left your active cooling setup in there ie the rad and fan, it should still run just a little cooler mabey 4-6c. i know when i put on a big 5 gallon res to my system, it ran 15c cooler, but then again, i used an new steel gas can(jerry can) and it is in the garage on the cold cement floor, so some of the heat gets out that way.

Well I have mine sitting on a marble tile pad I made using 4 12" marble tiles. I usually run RC-5 except when I am gaming. even in the background.

I put the intake for the system all the way at the bottom of the jug to pull the coolest water first and the warm water going in falls right at the top.