Aspire HTPC Project - Part One

Project Log Date; January 22, 2008

There seems to be a time honored role for old cases to become HTPC cases. You know the ones I am talking about. The favorite case that becomes a "saver" simply because you like its looks or the internal design. We have a few favorite cases here that have served checkered lives. First as a top of the line gaming machine then as a file server and finally as is the case in this project "a behind the scenes role" as a Home Theatre PC. The case for our HTPC machine is the Aspire X-Qpack case.

Of course we are not able to settle for a simple role change without adding water cooling so for Part One of the project we intend to water cool our Aspire HTPC case. With such a large SFF case you would think that this would be fairly straight forward but not so. Looking at the interior of the case there is practically zero useable internal space available to mount a large core radiator. The only place readily available is the rear 120 mm fan mounting but this is to small to fit a single 120 radiator internally. There is space between the hard drive caddy mount and the rear fan housing on the side of the case but this would involve case modification to fit a dual radiator there.

The solution we will be adopting with the Aspire case is to fit a single radiator mounted using the 120 mm fan mount on the outside rear wall of the case. To test how functional a single radiator would be we carried out some preliminary testing using a rather hot engineering sample E6400 CPU with good results. We have no doubt it will cope with our choice of a modern low powered, cooler running, CPU like the Intel E8400.

Initially this system is only going to be used for home theatre use. Later on though we want to grow the system a bit. We intend to increase the CPU speed by overclocking and of course add a larger more powerful video card to the case. The reason for this is to expand the role of the HTPC to big screen gaming. More of this in Part Two of the project later on. So lets look at the specifications.

The water cooling system will be based on;

Radiical SRX water block
Radiical Slimline 120 radiator
Laing DDC 3.2 pump fitted with the Radiical Turbo head Series 3 top
Radiical Primer Port adaptor with Danger den filler port reservoir
Antec Tri-Cool fan
Radiical 3/8" tubing.

The components will be;

The Asus P5KPL-VM motherboard with the latest bios loaded.
Intel E8400 CPU.
2 Gigs Team Extreme ram
Samsung 160 Gig Sata drive
DVD player
TV Tuner Card

The build

As previously mentioned we have settled for a single radiator at the rear of the case. To save time in the next part of the project we have set the radiator out the back using stand offs.

Rear Mounting

Rear Mounting Two

With the primary radiator placement out of the way we have setup our water block loosely in place to establish the tubing layout.

SRX in Place

The next problem is the pump placement. We are using a Laing DDC 3.2 pump in this build modified with our Radiical Turbo Head Series 3 top and a Radiical Primer Port Adaptor©. With very little space available to select a pump position we have opted for the spare space next to the CD rom bays. As can be seen in the picture below the pump and reservoir fits with very little tolerance adjacent to the CD rom bay frames.

Pump Filler point

With the pump placement set tubing out the system is now a simple matter of connecting the dots to produce the cooling loop.

Completed loop

To tidy the tubing the hard drive caddy has been modified with a couple of holes to permit two cable ties to be used to lift the tubing away from the motherboard and to secure it up out of the way.

Cable ties fitted

Tubing retainers fitted

Cable ties retaining tubing

Before final assembly and leak testing we decided to loose fit the Slimline dual radiator in place for a trial run of the triple core system.This radiator will be installed in Part Two of the Project.

Triple radiator configuration

The next step is to leak test before the other components are fitted and we lose the ability to see any potential leakage problems. At this point of course if you have triple checked your fittings and tubing clamps the chances of leakage are very minimal. All the same better to be pedantic.

With the loop filled its on to leak testing our new creation.

We prefer to use a second PSU to carry out leak testing and bleeding while we get on with wiring up the mother board and fitting the other bits. We find that moving the tubing slightly when fitting the power supply and other wiring to the motherboard can often show up any minor leaks at tubing clamps and so on.

With the wiring and DVD drive in place it gets very cramped inside the case as space becomes limited.

Finished internals

This top down shot gives some idea of why the decision to mount the single radiator outside the case was made.

Okay so with everything completed for Part One of the project its on to firing it up and getting some temperature data.

Part Two.........The changeling