Water cooled HTPC

OK, this isn't "completely custom" but it's more hacking than I've done in a long, long time.

I set up an HTPC recently with some old Socket 754 hardware. We then updated the Sempron 3100+ to a real Athlon 3000+. While there, my friend had an old self-contained water cooling kit on hand. Figuring we could get a good bump in clock speed as well as an improved chip, we decided to go for it.

The problem is that the motherboard is ATX and everything is very cramped in an HTPC case. There was no room near the CPU for the radiator, but there was another vent across the case and the tubing reached easily. The problem is that the radiator is pretty big, and also requires a nice 120mm fan in front of it. But the big ATX mobo reaches nearly to the edge of the case.

What to do? What to do? Indeed. Those extra PCI slots just had to go....

https://www.sharkyforums.com/images/...008/02/191.jpg

Popped off the plastic guides easily, then it was just snip, snip, snip to get rid of all those little feet. So we put everything back together, and the story gets long. To line up screws to the side vent, we removed the risers under the board, and bent the mobo down slightly. Everything fit great, but wouldn't post :( After much debugging and testing okay in a test rig, we unbent the mobo and it posted. So no screws in the vent, but some self-adhesive velcro does the trick fine.

About 4 hours of work and testing and rigging, and then end product looks kind of ugly, but works well. We had to dremmel out some of the fan's bottom end to clear a couple resistors, too.

https://www.sharkyforums.com/images/...008/02/192.jpg

Right off, we clocked the FSB at 230MHz, so the 3000+ is running at 2.3GHz instead of 2.0GHz. The memory clock had to drop to 166 in the BIOS for an actual speed of 192MHz. I know this chip could run quite a bit faster being water cooled, but the crappy ATi motherboard doesn't help much, but everything is rock stable right now.

Just a stupid experiment with old hardware - if a tube breaks and floods everything, I'll just rebuild it with the next set of available old stuff. (As long as the HD2600 Pro isn't hurt!)

I should have taken a fully finished picture too with the video card in and the blue LED 90mm fan next to the CPU area -- with the front blue LEDs, this thing looks pretty sweet from the outside. Too bad the radiator side faces the TV so you can't see it peeking through :)

can the HD 2600 decode 1080p on-chip? i don't think a single core K8 could do it.

It does 1080i and 720p sources without a hitch. It stutters on most 1080p sources I've tried in this setup with 100% CPU load. I think with a better CPU or dual core it could handle that, but my TV only does 1080i max anyway. And most of my HD stuff is 720p anyway.

umm .. where is the power supply?

Update on 1080p - talking to the guy who gave me the water cooler, he's got a very similar setup that runs 1080p just fine. He's got an extra .1 GHz of CPU, but only a 256MB HD2600, where mine is 512MB.

The difference is that he's got an all digital setup going from the DVI out to his HDMI TV. I'm using the component out dongle for output, which means everything has to go through an extra digital-to-analog conversion. So I change my above answer slightly to say that there's enough power in the HD2600 for 1080p if you're using digital out. Not so for component output.


Power supply: this is a Spec 01007 case where the power supply sits up front next to the 5 1/4" drive bays. It's a nice setup because there's a vent right above that location, so I got a black Rosewill ps with a fan on top that works well and isn't obvious even looking right into the case.