SlashNOT

Matthew writes: Well, it had to happen sportsfans. Yours truly built my first watercooled PC today. O’course, it’s got all the trick metal you’d expect, like a 2.8 liter Pentium 4 HT, 2 gigs of dual overhead RAM spinning at 800MHz, and independent front and rear RAID 1 SATA disks (250GB, o’course).

But what you didn’t expect (’cept I told you) was the water cooling. That’s right, this baby is liquid filled, with a radiator right out front and center and three fans pulling a big 0.5 cubic feet of atmosphere per second past its gleaming aluminum fins. Watercooling might not be here now, but it’s the future baby, and here’s why: This stuff is just getting hotter all the time, and we’re driving past the mile marker in the road where aircooling gives out like a thirty year old Volkswagen in Mexico City, whatever that means.

It must o’ took Earl n’ me about sixteen hours to get this baby spinning, which is pretty long considering I can field strip a Pentium III in about 20 minutes. It was awful hard to frost those brand new 250GB disks with the heat conducting foam—went against nature, if you ask me–but that was child’s play compared to getting the hoses for the processor, chipsets, and both drives hooked up in serial to the radiator. We thought we had her, but when we filled the reservoir and fired that puppy up, something sprung a leak. Turns out antifreeze is conductive, and motherboards don’t like it. So, after a new motherboard, a few more hose clamps, and some bondo, we were ready to try again. This time, she spun up nice and dry.

The front panel indicator shows all systems cool at a low five degrees above ambient. And besides that fact that we had to take E.J. (Earl Junior) to the hospital for ingesting antifreeze that he thought was Mountain Dew, everything went well. But I hope nothing ever breaks, ’cause I have no idea how to drain this thing to disconnect parts without watering down the motherboard again. But hey, when do PCs ever break, right?

So that’s the future folks. Hope you like it!