5.25" bay cooling solutions

[twelveoclockglock]

Hello all,

I'm toying with the idea of building a rack-mount PC in a 2u chassis, to be used primarily for gaming and music production. My rack is right next to my desk, so I'd like to keep noise to a minimum. Since quiet cooling is obviously going to be a bit of an issue in this form factor, I did a bit of research on ways to use 5.25" bays for cooling, as I most likely won't be using them for drives. The idea is to water cool the CPU and either use a blower-style graphics card or water cool that as well if I can concoct a loop that will handle it. My googling turned up a few interesting options, including pump/res combos for dual bays and the Thermaltake Bigwater series of coolers. The Bigwater in particular was very intriguing to me, as it would not be out of the question to fit two of them into a 2u chassis with four 5.25" bays. Unfortunately, it seems to be discontinued. Another option is to use a pump/res combo on one side and try to cram a radiator on the other side. Does anyone have any experience with these types of cooling solutions, or know of an alternative to the Bigwater? Or am I better off forgetting this insanity and just going with air cooling?

V/R, thanks for your input.

 

[GOTSpectrum]

This video may help you out, I'm not sure at all the best way to go about this at all but water cooling would help the most for quietness. 

[W-L]

18 minutes ago, twelveoclockglock said:

-SNIP-

A 2U would be pretty limited in what it could house for liquid cooling in terms of radiators, that bigwater unit probably would be on similar if not the same par as a standard 120mm AIO.

[GOTSpectrum]

1 minute ago, W-L said:

A 2U would be pretty limited in what it could house for liquid cooling in terms of radiators, that bigwater unit probably would be on similar if not the same par as a standard 120mm AIO.

an externally mounted rad could work...