[Finished] The silent cube: Pushing passive cooling to the limit with dual GTX 980 - [Update 21: Liquid Cristal Thermometer]

[FPS with a Wacom Tablet]

Haha this would justify gaming two hours in the morning before having breakfast

But 60°C is not enougth, even a fried egg requires a minim temperature of 82,5 °C. The cooling simply works to good....

Imagine recommending a certain overclock setting for frying eggs... The possibilities are endless.

[nmil]

Imagine a combination of ESL and Masterchef:

You have a team of 5 esports players playing and on those pcs you a team of chefs cooking on the same pcs

You gain points on how good the food is and how many rounds won in game

 

I would watch that

[Guest]

Imagine a combination of ESL and Masterchef:

You have a team of 5 esports players playing and on those pcs you a team of chefs cooking on the same pcs

You gain points on how good the food is and how many rounds won in game

 

I would watch that

That would be briliant. You may need something other than the PCs to get a high enough heat though, considering your a lot of cooking you need upwards of 150c and a pc should probably be under 90c depending on the chip.

[Hackentosher]

That would be briliant. You may need something other than the PCs to get a high enough heat though, considering your a lot of cooking you need upwards of 150c and a pc should probably be under 90c depending on the chip.

Just use a bunch of gtx 480's and overclock the shit out of them. Flash a custom bios that removes thermal throttling, and swap em out like f1 engines when they die

[ryanmmax]

Just need to add a few peltier's to the system and you'll be able to keep the CPU's around 65F and burn the crap out of anyone who touches a heat sink.... 

[Stefan1024]

Just need to add a few peltier's to the system and you'll be able to keep the CPU's around 65F and burn the crap out of anyone who touches a heat sink.... 

There will be some peltiers, but to recover energy rather than using more power.

And normal pelteries can only withstand <100°C, but there are some expenive ones for 150°C and more.

[Stefan1024]

I recently found a good deal for an other 16GB of RAM. The sticks arrived today and are allready running in the system.

 

The top cover is also finished and mounted. The back caver is also finished, but I will wait with the mounting for the test with the thermal imagee camera. So when it's finished, with a little bit of luck I don't have to open the box for the next 4 years or so!

[Stefan1024]

The operational acceptance test is running......

 

GPU VRM section:

 

Still waiting for the system to reach stable temps. But it looks good so far, no concerning hotspots. Prepare for more measurements soon.

[Stefan1024]

Update 14: Make the heat visible!

 

To make sure the cooling is rocksolid I checked for hotspots with the thermographic camera today. I fired up the 500 watt torture test again and made some picures with the borrowed 5000$ camera:

 

Backside:

 

 

 

Top:

 

 

 

CPU VRM:

 

 

GPU 1 VRM:

 

 

GPU 2 VRM:

 

 

These tests were all like expected and are fine.

The PSU however was a surprice. The Enermax controllsoftware showed a chilling 60°C. In fact the PSU was running at 95°C! Full 35°C difference!?!

The sensor placement is very poor and make the reading unuseable. Nevertheless 95°C is ok for the torture test. The wattage pulled in gaming is 100 watts less.

 

 

 

Also you need to be very careful not to trick yourself with the thermographic camera. Blank metall refelcts ifrared like a mirror. Thankfully most surfaces are black annodized or painted. However look at these two picures showing a copper block. Only the focus is changed between the two pics. The refelction of the PSU is extremly clear.

 

 

 

With the test passed, I can screw on the back cover and next week I will finish the build.

[TomvanWijnen]

Awesome!  It's amazing that this is possible. And it makes me want to have one of these cameras too

 

 

GPU 1 VRM:

That kind of looks like it's on fire

[elfensky]

Awesome!  It's amazing that this is possible. And it makes me want to have one of these cameras too

 

That kind of looks like it's on fire

 

[Stefan1024]

Awesome!  It's amazing that this is possible. And it makes me want to have one of these cameras too

 

 

That kind of looks like it's on fire

Yes, these IR images looks interesting. But I can assure you it's not on fire

[waggythegeek]

Is fracking amazing that you could pull this off. Obviously sir, the force is with you.

[Necrodead]

Is it also Ironic that this thread is 'hot' right now?

[waggythegeek]

Is it also Ironic that this thread is 'hot' right now?

Heatsinks intended to be hot, topic is hot, not ironic. Irony is when something is the opposite of intended. Funny and coincidental, not ironic.

[Stefan1024]

Update 15: Final assembly part 2

 

After all tests considering the cooling are done I can close the box and so I did.

Sadly the workload of my master study limits my time for working on the build.

 

 

 

Here you can see the power switch for the HDD.

 

 

 

 

The peltier elements are also prepared. I will get a soldering iron tomorrow to finsh.

 

[Stefan1024]

Update 16: Charging the smartphone for free while gaming

 

It works, I can charge my smartphone by using the heat produced by the GPUs! With seven peltier elements in series I get ~1V which is boosted to 5V by a step-up regulator. Because the voltage rises slowly while the heat sinks heats up, the boost converter has problems to start up. Therefor I use a 2,2 Farad (yes F, not mF or uF) and a switch as a kickstart. But once it runns it runns fine.

 

 

 

I still need a nice enclosure for the electronic.

 

[Stefan1024]

Update 17: Finished!

 

Today I finished my build and my new set-up. And I have to admit I'm pretty proud of what I built during >>100 hours including calculation, modeling, sourcing materials metall working and assembling.

 

Also I need to adress some aspects that have not been discused jet.

 

Coil whine

In my fist passive build I had a lot of problemes with coil whine and need special dampening material as well as machinical stabilizing the coils. This time I was more lucky. While the GTX 980s has some noticeable coil whine, it is very well dampened by the heat sinks. As the coils are sandwiched between the PCB and the heat sinks the sound can't escape easy. Only when the FPS goes over 100 I can hear a little bit of coil whine when I put my head next to the PC. But as I only have a 60Hz monitor there is no reason to go that high and at 60 FPS I can't hear anything.

 

Safety

For all of you worrying I'm burning my house down I can tell you it's save. Even with unrealistic torture test's the temperature stays in reasonable boundaries. And even if something happens, the whole case is made of metall and it has a low impadance coupling to earth. Ever short circuit to any spot of the case will immediately trigger the residual current operated circuit breaker (RCCB).

 

Cost

This project was stupidly expensive. The heat sinks alone where 650 CHF (1 CHF ~= 1 US dollar) including shipping. And I also needed the copper, stainless steel sheets, impedance matched PCI-e riser (200 CHF), custom bent heat pipes (150 CHF) and much more.

The electronic was also harmfull to my back account especially I upgraded / added some more parts during the project. After all I estimate the total cost of 3000 - 4000 CHF. I could calculate it exactly, but I'm a bit affraid to do so However as the cost was spread over several month it was not that bad. Also there is no need to upgrade for several years and as a upgrade will require a lot of work I won't do it to early.

 

Weight

...

Let's say it has a build-in theft protection.

 

But I know you like to soo some pictures of the finished build, so here you are:

 

Energy harvesting circuit:

 

 

And my set-up:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also you can compare the size to my first build, named "Slience! i kill you!". Dispite of the doubled TDP the Silent Cube is more compact than my fist build.

 

 

[iamdarkyoshi]

That looks friggin awesome! I must do this at some point, replacing my water cooling. Only problem is that my system is a single GPU system with a TDP of over 400w at stock clocks. I should do it in a ghetto fashon because I probably have around 50 pounds worth of computer heatsinks.

[Guest]

This is legitness.. but seriously the finished product looks amazing. The phone charger was extremely creative. Go far in life, man.

[Stefan1024]

That looks friggin awesome! I must do this at some point, replacing my water cooling. Only problem is that my system is a single GPU system with a TDP of over 400w at stock clocks. I should do it in a ghetto fashon because I probably have around 50 pounds worth of computer heatsinks.

 

Water cooling is actually also a geed way to achieve a fanless system. Sure It won't be totally passive because of the pump, but passive radiators are easy to make. You can buy a heat exchnger and standart extruded heat sinks or of-the-shelf passive radiators (but these are expensive).

When you use a pump that is cooled by the water you can pack into several layers of dampening until you can't the hear the bloody thing anymore. When I started this build I also thougth about water cooling, but I don't like the maintenance required.

 

 

This is legitness.. but seriously the finished product looks amazing. The phone charger was extremely creative. Go far in life, man.

 

Thank you!

[iamdarkyoshi]

Water cooling is actually also a geed way to achieve a fanless system. Sure It won't be totally passive because of the pump, but passive radiators are easy to make. You can buy a heat exchnger and standart extruded heat sinks or of-the-shelf passive radiators (but these are expensive).

When you use a pump that is cooled by the water you can pack into several layers of dampening until you can't the hear the bloody thing anymore. When I started this build I also thougth about water cooling, but I don't like the maintenance required.

 

 

 

Thank you!

My friggin pump is far louder than the HDD, and the HDD is louder than the fans. I have 10 fans on radiators alone, and they probably run at like 600RPM while gaming, and around 800-1000RPM folding (and it is still quieter than a reference 290x) and my folding temps at those speeds are less than 70 degrees with a 275W GPU and 130W CPU.

[Stefan1024]

My friggin pump is far louder than the HDD, and the HDD is louder than the fans. I have 10 fans on radiators alone, and they probably run at like 600RPM while gaming, and around 800-1000RPM folding (and it is still quieter than a reference 290x) and my folding temps at those speeds are less than 70 degrees with a 275W GPU and 130W CPU.

 

Ok than you can:

- get a new quieter pump. I'm new to WC but the gurus here told be it possible to make a pump inaudible with dampening.

- use SSDs for everyday use and a HDD for large files and backup. I also have a HDD, but I can turn it off with a hardware switch so it will never spinn up.

- use a NAS on an other room insted of the HDDs in your PC

 

Also the 290X reference cooler is simply bad and extremly loud. It's not that hard to build a quieter rig

[iamdarkyoshi]

Ok than you can:

- get a new quieter pump. I'm new to WC but the gurus here told be it possible to make a pump inaudible with dampening.

- use SSDs for everyday use and a HDD for large files and backup. I also have a HDD, but I can turn it off with a hardware switch so it will never spinn up.

- use a NAS on an other room insted of the HDDs in your PC

 

Also the 290X reference cooler is simply bad and extremly loud. It's not that hard to build a quieter rig

yah I know But I am very impressed with my PC, the HDD does turn off if it isnt being used, and I rarely use it, just as a backup. I have a Swiftech MCP355, and they have an insane flow rate, and also a fair bit of noise. But I cut the noise down by at least an order of magnitude by figuring out that my tubes had settled in a little bit (the pump hangs in free air to try to cut down on transmitted vibrations) and I noticed that the pump was touching the bottom fan. I just put a zip tie on one of the tubes to suspend it up a little bit, and the noise is hardly there. Also, have you thought about making an OIL COOLED passive PC? Perhaps by having the heatsinks on the sides, but sealing the bottom and putting everything in oil? It would make it even harder to move

[Darth-san]

Impressive to the end

 

I think some cases manufacturer should take exemple on the way you handled this "little" baby

 

Congratulations dear swiss neighbour