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Hardware

Transparent Water Cooling Case 295

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-thats-lust-worthy dept.
thefalconer writes "Over at the Via Hardware website one of the users there recently posted a very unique case mod that combines all of my favorites into a very cool design. Not only is the case totally transparent, but so are the covers on the hard drives, and it sports a water cooled Dual Athlon XP 2100+ processors. The case and all of the internal mods are entirerly hand made and it looks awesome."
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Transparent Water Cooling Case More

Transparent Water Cooling Case

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  • Looks like a still. That boy making Moonshine?
  • It can always be sold as a piece of modern art when the machine is retired. :-)

  • A Step toward the IMac (Score:5, Funny)

    by Apocalypse111 ( 597674 ) on Friday August 02, 2002 @11:37AM (#3999064) Journal
    If the watercooling system leaks, all you need to do is add some fish and you've got an aquarium.
    Aw, isn't that cute, he's swimming around my CPU...

    • Re:A Step toward the IMac (Score:4, Funny)

      by EvanED ( 569694 ) <evaned@NOspAM.gmail.com> on Friday August 02, 2002 @11:52AM (#3999192)
      Rememebr this [nobispro.com]?
      • Not bad but I after reading the article I was daydreaming of building a watercooled PC inside a fishtank, with real tropical fish. Before anyone thinks I mean immersing electrical components I mean having a double skinned case, with the PC in the middle and fish swimming round it.Hmm, an U shape with the opening at the back for all the cables and an external DVD/CDRW should do it nicely, alternatively have a drawer that slides out the back that holds the PC, then the fish can swim over the nice hot bits too. So long as we have an angelfish called Wanda and a little treasure chest with the key to the PC hidden in it.
        When is someone going to use leaded glass (like out TV picture tubes) instead of plastic to keep the interference down?

        Oh, I only daydream about case mods as life's too short - I'd rather be cutting code, mountain biking or being a family man, and not necessarily in that order (biking comes last).

  • w00t! Now I can *watch* my Athlon XP catch on fire after I try to overclock it to 400*13!

  • Transparent Hard drive Case? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The guy broke the seal on his hard drive? I'm venturing that he didn't have a clean room (and I may be wrong on this).

    Why would you even THINK of doing this to a hard drive that you actually want to store data on? Don't you have any idea just how big a pollen of dust is to a hard drive?

    • Re:Transparent Hard drive Case? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Satanboy ( 253169 ) on Friday August 02, 2002 @12:10PM (#3999300)
      actually to break the seal on your hard drive, there is a special way . . .

      you need a few things

      1) saran wrap

      2) latex gloves

      3) a good box fan

      4) a hair net (or hat) and a dust mask (just to keep the drive safe from you)

      5) a screw driver to open the drive

      go to your bathroom and turn on the shower for about 10 minutes on hot, so there is lots of steam in there

      then, take the box fan and blow the steam out of the bathroom, this will catch all the particles of dust that hang in the air and blow them with the steam outside of the bathroom, you then take the top of the drive off and IMMEDIATELY wrap it in the saran wrap.

      you can then mod the drives top and then put it back together in the "clean room"

      it is not guaranteed to work , but I have seen it done with no issues, you just need to wear the right clothes and be super careful.

      • Been there, done that. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by SaDan ( 81097 )
        Except a friend and I did repair work on a hard drive in a dorm room. We did some stuff we figured would help filter the air, cleaned all of the tools we were going to use, and fixed a frozen bearing in a hard drive.

        Ran fine after that, no bad sectors.

        Of course, this doesn't mean that one will be this lucky every time you break the seal on a hard drive!
      • You're serious? More power to you for being brave enough to do that. The problem with this is not only junk getting onto the surface, but said junk hitting the read heat at 5400 (or 7200) RPM, causing an actual disk crash. Not a computer crash, but flying read head actually crashing into the disk, and kicking up even more junk to corrupt other parts of the drive.

        I wish I could find a picture, but someone I know at Seagate has a poster on his wall showing the gap between the disk head and the platter. Next to it's a scale drawing of a (relatively small) particle of dust that's huge compared to that gap.

        Like I said, more power to you.

        Wow.

      • Re:Transparent Hard drive Case? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Sneftel ( 15416 ) on Friday August 02, 2002 @12:32PM (#3999451)
        This is idiocy. When you blow the steam out of the bathroom using the box fan, do you have a vacuum left in the bathroom? Temporarily, yes! And the air to fill it has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is (gasp) outside the bathroom. So while you've steamed up the bathroom air but good, you immediately discard it, and replace it with nice, dusty room air? Duh.

        If you want to use the water vapor trick, you have to wait for the vapor to subside. And you still have a problem with high humidity, which can be hell on hard drives. Even if you don't notice anything for the first couple of weeks, there's still water particles banging around in your drive, just waiting to corrode things.

        Bottom line? Don't do this. If you absolutely MUST mod your hard drive, construct a mini clean room from a plastic aquarium, latex gloves, a fan, and a HEPA and an ULPA filter working in concert (the HEPA filter first, then the ULPA). It's cheap, and your hard drive won't, you know, DIE.
        • So while you've steamed up the bathroom air but good, you immediately discard it, and replace it with nice, dusty room air?

          But do it for long enough and you steam all the air worldwide!
        • Regarding constructing a mini-clean room, I wonder if you could use the air vented off a HEPA filtered vacuum (as in carpet/upright vacuum). You'd probably want to empty the dust-bin/bag first, but the vacuum combined with a (clean) dryer hose might provide a decent air handling system for mini-clean room.
        • Aquariam + glass cutter + rubber gloves + aircompressor + plumbers goop + a couple of good rubber gaskets = Excellent clean room for small things. You get a perfect vacuum, nice and airtight.The hardest part is making the lid, I recommend getting a glass panel the same size as the aquarium top (of course) and to use the plumbers goop and some rubberized piping to make a nice airtight lid for it. Works really well for a lot of experiments, when my HS chem/physics teacher couldn't get the school to buy him a vacuum chamber for something he wanted to do, he brought all this stuff in and our class for 2 weeks was him teaching us how to build one.

          Kintanon
      • then, take the box fan and blow the steam out of the bathroom, this will catch all the particles of dust that hang in the air and blow them with the steam outside of the bathroom,...

        But, what about the incoming air? This is significant, unless you plan on maintaining a vacuum while you work. Perhaps blocking all of the doorway leaving openings for the fan and a HEPA filter might be less risky.

        Also, some latex gloves are manufactured with a powder in them, which could ruin all other preparations for cleanliness.

        This drive mod recipe sounds more like those plans to prevent pregnacy by doing jumping-jacks after sex; it just leaves out too many variables.
  • Wish I could see this damn case...site is slashdotted. :/

    Guess I'll try again after lunch.

  • Really Nice Design... but... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The inside looks so cluttered...

    Maybe he could handle the piping a bit different or clean up the wiring, then it would be a really really nice mod.

    As well, a friend of mine modded his computer so the water for the cooling would do a little waterfall in a waterproof tank that you could see(Through a piece of acrylic on the side of the case), perhaps that would be a neat addition to this mod.

    Just thinking.

    • Re:Really Nice Design... but... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Skyshadow ( 508 ) on Friday August 02, 2002 @11:51AM (#3999185) Homepage
      As well, a friend of mine modded his computer so the water for the cooling would do a little waterfall in a waterproof tank that you could see(Through a piece of acrylic on the side of the case),

      Idea borrowed, no doubt, from the Cray waterfalls, available on several machines and cooling towers, including the Cray 2 [uiuc.edu].

      • Re:Really Nice Design... but... (Score:5, Funny)

        by pmz ( 462998 ) on Friday August 02, 2002 @12:56PM (#3999615) Homepage
        I wonder if there really never was any such thing as a super computer.

        Conspiracy theory: These Cray folk were really high-end furniture dealers posing as computer salesmen. The machine rooms housing Crays had rows of workstations under the tiles to do the work, while the sysadmins were enjoying their waterfalls, cool-looking couches, and lots of blinking LEDs. The tall black cabinets housed expensive beer, snack mix, and big TVs. Other cabinents had small humming devices and hiding places for party-goers, so passing managers thought the money spent was totally worth it.

        Sounds like "win-win" as far as I can tell.

  • EMI (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LBU.Zorro ( 585180 ) on Friday August 02, 2002 @11:38AM (#3999078)
    The main problem with acrylic / perspex cases is the lack of radiation shielding..

    Macroman from Bit-Tech.net suggested that the foil he uses on one of his cases (reflective unless internally lit) might block the radiation plus give a great effect.

    If you place acrylic cases next to your TV or radio, then you can see the interferrence..

    Also I remember reading that an open case / case window was screwing around with a remote garage opener..

    Just a thought if anyone is planning to use it as a tv top box since it looks so nice :)

    Z.

    • Re:EMI (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That's why we need transparent aluminum. I'll call scottie and have some delivered.

    • Re:EMI (Score:2, Interesting)

      by izto ( 56957 )
      Well.. remember that Faraday guy they talked to you about in high school?

      A nice addition to the transparent cases mods would be a thin, grounded chicken wire layer. It wouldn't be very visible and it would certainly reduce EMI to nearly zero if done right. Just like they do with microwave oven's doors.

      I think it would add to the mod's looks, too! :-)

      • Re:EMI (Score:2, Interesting)

        by ikeleib ( 125180 )
        There are plastic vendors that have aluminized acrylic for sale. It's acrylic with a very thin layer of aluminum on it. It's still mostly transparent, but forms an effective EMI shield. A similar process is used for military airplane canopies, but the material is not acrylic.
      • remember that Faraday guy they talked to you about in high school?

        At my age ... "remember"? Maybe. "high school"? Definitely not.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:EMI (Score:2)

      by sdo1 ( 213835 )
      No true geek/modder ever has the cover on their PC anyway, so EMI problems are somewhat irrelevant.

      -S
      • When a modder finishes the case, sure the thing gets closed up. Once its been dyed black, leds replaced with blue ones, holes cut for windows, lights inside placed, holes for fans cut and fans installed, CPU water cooled, hard drive window cut, drive faces dyed black. Close it up and show it off.

  • Well.... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Osiris Ani ( 230116 )
    It's plainly obvious that everyone needs one; "everyone," of course, referring specifically to me, and "needs," in this case, meaning "lusts after."
  • A case is just a case. I'd rather double the CPU speed/RAM and house a PC in a shoebox than have a P100 in a five hundred pound case :p
    • A case is just a case. I'd rather double the CPU speed/RAM and house a PC in a shoebox than have a P100 in a five hundred pound case :p

      Well then, double the CPU speed/RAM in your own system so that it might occupy the time you would otherwise spend bitching about what other, more clever people are doing with their own time. By the way, as the article states, this particular case will house an Iwill MPX2 board with dual 2100+ MPs, which is hardly a P100.

      --
      "Beware: history speaks of goals never intended." - Andrew Boyd

    • You must be the guy that drivres that 500 hp Eclipse with the brown door and stock wheels.
  • Note that while the system looks dang cool, it's not actually finished yet (2 weeks to completion according to the site) and he's looking for feedback. Perhaps the /. mod crew can weigh in.
    • I'm a l337 master modder. Here's my input:

      Just slap some racing stripes on it and call it a day. Racing stripes are proven to make everything more aerodynamic. This translates to fuel savings. You can use the saved cash to replace the processor when the cooling system springs a leak.

      Hope this helps.

  • Ummmm... (Score:2, Funny)

    by DaytonCIM ( 100144 )
    Wow!!! I do agree with some of the other board's posters... "where's the tap?"

  • Water Jacket for Head. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Rhombus ( 104176 )
    Recently I thought it might be neat to construct a water-cooled hat...something with fins and a fan to dissipate the excess heat.

    (Note: I work in a building without AC...it was 97 degrees in here yesterday when I came up with this brainstorm. :P )

  • I haven't been able to load that page yet, but... The coolest thing to me sounds like the transparent hard drive covers.

    I'm guessing you'd have to rent/aquire access to a clean room to pull this one off.

    P.S. - I thought XP's wouldn't do SMP with 2000+ and above? Maybe its just a bridge mod?
    • Contry to common beleif - Hard drive's arent THAT sensitive to dust, within reason. Aslong as you take reasonable precautions, you can dismantel and reconstruct a harddrive in normal conditions. If you do this, though, always badblock it completely before you put anything on it you dont want to loose.
    • "P.S. - I thought XP's wouldn't do SMP with 2000+ and above? Maybe its just a bridge mod?"

      I wouldn't be surprised. There are kits [bigfootcomputers.com] in existence that are designed to help people do such mods.

  • to their webserver, it seems to need some serious help right about now.

    The running score in the battle between Slashdotting and Webservers might look something like this:

    Slashdot 4^12/Webservers 4

  • Plumbers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Skyshadow ( 508 ) on Friday August 02, 2002 @11:42AM (#3999107) Homepage
    According to office lore while I was interning at Cray in Chippewa Falls, Seymour Cray used to tell people he was a plumber. If you look at any of the liquid-cooled Cray machines, you could see why he said that -- the most obviously complicated aspect of them was their plumbing.

    Looks like we're coming full-circle here.

    Another piece of office lore, incidently, said that if the florinert used to cool the machines ever boiled (so, if there was an electrical fault that flash-boiled the coolant), it would have the same effect on you as mustard gas. Not sure how true that is, but it made working in a computer room sound a lot more sexy.

  • Is the built-in bong in the middle of the case!
  • What'd be cool would be to have an array of blue LEDs on one side of the case, rigged up to respond like a spectrum analyser to the soundcard output. With that clear case it'd look funky as hell.
  • http://www.extrememhz.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=12 [extrememhz.com]. Note that right now it's got the /. effect (you've got it watercooled. now let's overclock already!! :), but it was fine a few minutes ago..

    --pi
  • It looks like the Mimbari species changing machine from B5. The case will slowly be assembled over this season.

    When the machine is turned on and rebooted, then the author of the page will go into a chrysalis and emerge three weeks later as a chartered accountant.
  • Absolutely amazing. We can now hook indoor plumbing up to our computers to cool them instead of using electricity. Now we can start working on embedded devices for toilets and super soakers.

  • Transparent Water, eh? (Score:3, Funny)

    by senine ( 513587 ) on Friday August 02, 2002 @11:46AM (#3999146)

    I thought this was NEWS for nerds... water's been transparent for YEARS. Sheesh.
  • The site just started refusing connections.

  • Shroedinger's case mod (Score:5, Funny)

    by JUSTONEMORELATTE ( 584508 ) on Friday August 02, 2002 @11:47AM (#3999158) Homepage
    It might look cool, but after you put it into the farraday cage to contain the EMR, you can't see it anymore.
    • Actually all he needs to do is cover it in a copper or aluminum mesh that he can see through. The mesh then acts as a perfectly good Faraday cage.

      Won't work? Have you ever wondered what frequency microwave ovens work at? Hint: 2.45 Ghz. Only 10% shorter wavelength than a 2.1 Ghz processor.

      Microwave ovens come with doors you can see through that don't leak radiowaves, why not do the same thing here?

      He'd need to pay attention to the joins down the edges- he must make sure there are no slots longer than 1 cm or so to avoid radio waves leaking. But it's not difficult.

      • I was thinking that when I read the orig. post, but I wasn't 100% sure what would constitute a Farraday cage, so kept my mouth shut.

        But I think that done right, having an acrylic case inside a cage could enhance the appearance. I'd want to check the appearence of the material after it had a change to age/corrode before I could decide which material to use, but I think that tarnished silver would look good (assuming you could use silver to make a cage).

        Not that it really matters, since I don't want to take my PC down long enough to mod the case :)

  • Images Mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by instinctdesign ( 534196 ) on Friday August 02, 2002 @11:48AM (#3999165) Homepage
    Well, looks like its been slashdotted into oblivion. I was able to take a look at a few of the images before it went, here are four of them: (host says unmetered bandwidth... we're about to find out! ;) )
    He had another site with more details but that was gone pretty fast so I never saw it. Also, the text from the forum thread:
    I wanted to share with you the latest project I am working on. The case is a custom acrylic design and will house an Iwill MPX2 board with dual 2100+ MPs. I am about 2 weeks from completion...any feedback and suggestions are welcome.
  • What we need now is a Beer-MOD. Have the thing primarily be air-cooled, but put a watercooling block on your CPU as well. Run the hoses to a keg and put a tap in the 5.25 bay. Need some extra cooling? Have a cold one!

    Besides, if it doesn't work, you're gonna need all the beer you can get anyways...

  • /. insurance? (Score:4, Funny)

    by rmarll ( 161697 ) on Friday August 02, 2002 @11:53AM (#3999195) Journal


    With as often as viahardware gets hammered by /., you would think that CmdrTaco would offer /. insurance for these guys.

    Isn't this the third time in the last 60 days they've had their server obliterated by us?

  • Ahhhh... (Score:3, Funny)

    by davidsansome ( 563576 ) on Friday August 02, 2002 @11:58AM (#3999220)
    The transparent case is so you can see everything catch fire as it's slashdotted :-)
  • dosent it look as if the plumbing will get in the way of adding pci cards and grafx cards? unless the case is like ultra wide.

    otherwise cool, even though im not a mod fan at all, you have to admire the effort and craft.

  • This is by far the most impressive mod I've seen:well implemented and professional. But I can't help thinking:

    What's this costing? Custom case, components, etc, etc? Not just $$$ but time as well. Looking nice is one thing, but wouldn't you rather just run a Walmart Mandrake box for a fraction of the cost?

    • Hobbies are fun. They are time an money consumers which occupy one's mind. In a world where everyone is worried about something... it's good to forget about it all and "constructively break something".
  • VERY UNIQUE, so it's extremely the only one of its kind, as opposed to being only slight the only one of its kind?
  • Isn't it time for a new "Casemods" category that I could add to my exclusions along with Katz?
  • Anyone notice that? What could you POSSIBLY need so many CD/DVD Drives for?

  • Instead of water use corn mash! Operate a little distillery from your PC!

    Use Seti@Home to crank out some extra cycles for big batches!

    "I was running Distiller, and it wasn't Adobe".
  • I just know someone is going to complain about the phrase "very unique", and say that unique means one-of-a-kind, and can't be qualified with "very".

    So, this is a preemptive strike. It is perfectly logical to qualify unique. In some sense, everything is unique. E.g., the UniBall Micro pen sitting on my desk is unique...it's the only one in the world that is sitting on my desk, afterall. However, that uniqueness is not significant. If the pen falls off my desk, it loses it. If someone puts another pen on the desk, and takes the first one, the uniqness is transferred. Etc.. So, it would make perfect sense to say that while my pen is unique, it is not very unique.

    Qualifying unique serves to indicate the significance of the uniqueness, or how long it will last.

  • If this guy wanted to be really cool he'd a a dye to the water cooler that changed color in response to temperature. Should be a good gradient to work with: 22 degrees C room temp and what, 90-100 degrees C right next to the chip?
  • Hello everyone, I am the person that posted the project at via hardware that you have been commenting on. First let me say that I have read all the posts here and I have had great fun reading your comments and have had some great laughs along the way. Thank you! Being that I have some extra time on my hands now that my site was down (slashdotted), I thought I would answer some questions that have come up today. 1. The hard drive mod is one that is totally useless in terms of funtionality, but there have been requests from our site members to show it. In response to the requests, we performed our version of that mod. 2. No, the modded HDD is not the primary drive. I have several seagate cheetah X15 SCSI drives that comprise the backbone of my storage subsystem. The modded drive is one that is used for file storage. If it were to fail..no big deal. 3. This project was done to appeal to our site's constituants who comprise the overclocking and modded case community. We have dubbed this the extrememhz.com "flagship case" 4. The project is far from finished there is quite a bit of work to do still. We should be finished in approximately 2 weeks. I hope interested people visit www.extrememhz.com and check out the final result and share your thoughts with us. As for me, I run the site as a hobby, as I have always been tinkering around with diffrent technologies. I am an engineer by profession and geek by happenstance... :) I also have aquariums, so if the case doesn't work out...well you know! BTW the site is operational...the IP addresses have been reset by our hosting company, so if you reboot your system and try to log in you,will be able to. Visit us at www.extreme.mhz.com The project is in the forums under worklogs. Thanks...any questions just holler. I am a big fan of slashdot. Cheers!
  • that combines all of my favorites into a very cool design.

    You mean like disrupting radio communications of fire, police, medical equipment, and amateur radio operators in your vicinity?

    Unshielded computer cases show that the person building it either has no clue about electronics or doesn't give a damn about the people around him.

  • Take a really nice (and expensive) 15Krpm SCSI hard drive, and do this [extrememhz.com] to it.

    Fucking morons.

    Charles Darwin would be proud to see his theory working well! Uncle Ben would be proud, too, to see how technologically advanced rice [riceboypage.com] has become.

    *sigh*...

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