Fishtank Watercooling

Heat the fish and cool the CPU? — Trubador

I had the idea for this project a few months back – it seemed every concevable idea regarding watercooling had allready been done and I love to do things differently ! I guess the thrill of being first or the thought of making something new is appealing and anyone who messes with watercooling will know exactly what I mean.

I was thinking of a suitable resevoir for my water supply when I was flicking through an Argos catalogue and stumbled across their fish tank section. I thought this would be ideal, but I didn’t want to make the reservoir out of plastic, so I went to a local aquatics centre and bought a 7 gallon glass tank.

I then took this to a local glass cutter to have 1″ holes drilled into the sides for bulkhead fittings.

I was told they could not do this as the unit was too big for the pillar drill BUT, they said if I was to dismantle one side of the tank, they could cut it and I could use Aquatic sealant to seal the sides for a watertight fit.

I did this and the tank was complete.

I then sorted out the fittings and pipes I was going to use. I have been using 10mm nylock tubing I have had modified previously, but I wanted something bigger. The company which makes them said they could have some 14mm units made and modified so that they too were water and vapour tight….

This was ideal so that was the tubing sorted.

Next was the decision for which radiator to use.

I decided on the Cube rad as this is ideal for my application due to great cooling potential as well as having threaded ends for the barbs to attatch too.

There was no real decision to be made about the pump – the only one that would do the trick was the Eheim 1250 pump.

All that was left to do was to fit all the pipes and system together

This was simple to do as the pictures show.

The rig consists of:

• XP2000 (unlocked)
• Epox 8k3A+
• 256mb Twinmoss DDR
• 32mb Ati grafix
• Soundblaster live platinum + livedrive
• 2 x 120gig Maxtor hard drives
• 16x DVD
• 24x CDRW
• Enermax 451 Power supply + Fan control
  v2 x 120mm fans

• Cube radiator
• 7 gallon fish tank + gimmics
• Eheim 1250 water pump
• Cambridge sound system.

Box 1:

• Epox 8K3A+, XP2000+ (Running at 1975 MHz with watercooling!)
• 256MB Twinmoss DDR
• 32Mb ATI Grafix
• 4 80G Hard drives
• Soundblaster Platinum + live drive
• 16x DVD
• 24x CDRW
• 17″ TFT
• Microsoft sound system

Box 2:

• MSIK7T266 Pro2-raid
• XP1500+ (Running 1780 MHz with watercooling)
• 512MB ram
• 480G Hard drives
• 16x DVD
• 24x CDRW
• Soundblaster Live
• 8mb Sparkle Grafix
• 17″ Samsung

If you need me for ANY reason, please email me, if i dont respond within 10 minutes just wait for my return, it will never be longer than 24 hours and I will ALWAYS get back to you !!!

I hope you like the conversion – it has been hard to complete but I am happy with the end results. All I am waiting for now is some spiral wrap to complete the wires and a general tidy up of the rig.

Trubador