Expansive Consolidation: Saga 3
As discussed previously, I’m in the midst of a rather involved and highly-delicate “case mod” involving expensive wooden furniture and nearly 350degrees of thermal load, in my copious free time.
The first diagram below (left) shows the near-final design diagram, and I’ve confirmed that everything fits. Everything except the rear exhaust fan block. There will have to be a wee bit of … “furniture modification” as the slot for cable ingress is too small. A liquid cooling system was added mainly to keep the sound level down. The pump is quieter than most fans, and the large CPU heatsink and exhaust fan pictured were able to be replaced with a small copper block and some tubes.
The second diagram below (right) outlines the machining specification for the replacement front door panel. Originally it was high-end non-thermal glass (to allow remote control IR to pass through), but had to be replaced with something I could cut. After a bunch of trial and error, I settled on 1/8″ acrylic. I’m still working on this piece- I’ve gone through a bunch of scrap trying to get the cuts and breaks right, and that is holding up the final tweaking (and pictures!), mostly.
The liquid cooling system (pump and exhaust fans) has a total noise of 11dB, all of which are in the rear of the cabinet. The 120MM intake fan is almost completely silent ~5dB, but inward-facing so it doesn’t expel much noise at all (<1db immediately outside the cabinet). The noise measure from The Comfiest Couch in the world with the entire system runnng is 5 dB – quiet enough to hear the harddrives prattling about, and substantially quieter (5-6 times) than the air-cooled equivalent.
