Antec P180 Case Project

Antec P180 Case Project

Date Log; April 4, 2007

There can be no doubt about the popularity of the Antec P180 case. From the segmented interior to the smooth uncluttered exterior this case has been designed from the bottom up to appeal to the most fastidious owner.

The raised rear scoop on the case top hides the 120 mm exhaust and introduces an almost racing feel to the top of the case. Internally the case has been divided into several zones. On the lower level there is a zone catering for the power supply and another as a hard drive caddy. Moving up the case is another hard drive caddy and of course the normal segments set aside for CD-DVD players and the like.

The rear shot of the case illustrates the low slung power supply placement and the rear mounted 120mm fan mounting point.

Antec supply three variable speed 120mm fans with this case one for the lower zone of the case, one for the rear of the case and one for the top mounted section just above the CPU area on the motherboard.

Okay so its a pretty case with lots of little "zones" but how does that apply to what we are going to be doing. The answer is not a lot. What we intend to do is take our trusty server and wrap it up in a fancy new case and then water cool it. I mean there is so much obvious latent potential for water cooling in this case. Look at the bottom zone where the hard drive caddy lives just ripe for a pump, reservoir and radiators you would think. Alas not so. Most radiators will not fit in the lower hard drive caddy.

It is understandable that after buying such an attractive case that trying to fit water cooling into it ends up for many as pure frustration. To resolve this frustration the commonest response we have seen is to settle for an external placement of parts such as mounting the radiator off the back of the case. The lack of a simple method for fitting water cooling to this case is the primary reason why we decided to "have a go" at putting it all together.

The Plan

What we intend to do with our server is to water cool the CPU.....of course. Then move on to the video card and chipset getting rid of, in our case, that annoying DFI chipset fan whine at the same time. Not satisfied with that its then onto cooling the hard drive before we call it quits. Sounds impressive in a small case I would think but very doable.

Alright, before we start I just want to reinforce a couple of rules we like to abide by. We do not like cutting great holes in cases and wherever possible we will only drill holes to mount parts where no holes exist. We will be taking out of the case some items like the hard drive caddy and some small structures that are no longer needed. These parts are very easy to re install if needed down the track should the case be re-sold. After removing the hard drive caddy there is a small structure to the right partially hidden under the floppy drive bay. We removed this to provide space for the fan and radiator to fit flush against the front of the case and adjacent to the air intake grill already provided by Antec.

When the structure has been removed the area looks like this.

Two fan holes are required to be drilled here to prepare the area for radiator and fan placement.

Next its on to placement of the two lower radiators as illustrated below.

The pump is now placed in situ so that testing of the various options for inlet and outlet tubing placement can be made.

The final decision here was to provide access to the modified D5 pump rear housing so flow rates could be easily adjusted. When completed the lower zone looks like this.

We now should fit up the various blocks and arrange how the tubing out will affect airflow. First the chipset is fitted. That way when we get to the video card we will have our spacing's available to measure clearances for tight fitting parts such as the chipset and video cards on the DFI board we are using.

Then the hard drive is fitted. To do this we tried the hard drive in two primary places in the case to check for tubing out issues and to simplify our task.

The single rom bay.

Finally we settled on one of the removable hard drive trays in the middle hard drive caddy.

The middle hard drive caddy.

Before we can fit the hard drive and cooler it is necessary to modify the tray shown below by removing the anti vibration grommets placed in the tray base.

The hard drive will be held in place with Velcro strips to stabilize and cushion the hard drive cooler and hard drive during moving or when traveling.

Tubing out

Then its on to tubing out and working out the direction of flow. It is best to look at the amount of turns the tubing will make keeping in mind that it is easy to get yourself into all sorts of difficulty if you give the least flow to parts which need the most. Having said that I like to make a rule for all but the most difficult case layouts to feed the best flow to the hottest parts first. In this case it will be the CPU then the GPU, chipset and finally the hard drive.

Particular attention needs to be given to the critical video to chipset tube layout as a tubing kink forming here could be mission critical for the other components such as the video card and CPU. Fortunately there would be some warning with modern CPU's but sadly this may not be the case with your GPU. With tubing out almost completed it is important to consider system filling either by reservoir or 'T' line the choice for this will be up to the individual. We chose to use and conceal a small reservoir developed specifically for this and similar projects.

Okay, so we should have a completed loop now of CPU,GPU,Chipset,Hard drive blocks connected to a 'T' line or reservoir and finally our pump. At this point we could fire her up and get back to our work.

But there's more

Not content with simply fitting two radiators we felt that it was important to future proof our little creation somewhat so we fitted two more radiators.

We created two loops as it were. One cools the CPU and then prior to the coolant reaching the GPU it is pre-cooled again. We did this primarily to accommodate changes in heat loads from future processors both CPU and GPU but mainly because we can run the four fans year round at 5-7 volts making the computer cool and quiet.

Conclusion

It is important to keep in mind isn't it that this is the same case we referred to earlier as a frustrating water cooling experience. Now we have a case which can expand to new CPU's and graphics cards as required. With all of the water cooling components retained inside the case the smooth lines and lack of clutter have been maintained.

This Antec P180 quad radiator equipped case is now ready for the quad core and beyond CPU revolution. Viva the revolution!!!