cooling my xeons quietly... advice needed.
 

Hi all,

I've been successfully editing on my beautiful super computer for ages now.

And with a move of house coming, I'm thinking of moving the editing suite to the living room.

The machine is:

Two X5450 3.0GHz Xeon Processors
A boiling hot 9800GX2 GPU
A luke-warm 7800GTX GPU
A Supermicro X7DWA-7 MB
A Coolermaster Cosmos Case (with 4 fans)
8 sticks of RAM
6 HDDs

Anyway, the machine does sound like a 747 taking off and moving it to the living room is going to annoy everybody.

Are there options for water cooling the thing?

I have seen these heatsinks for the Xeons, but are they a good idea? Is it safe to replace the cooling method of a computer that has so many super-hot components?

The case has in and out holes for water hoses and I'm happy to spend a couple hundred dollars on a water cooling system.

But even then, I suspect that water cooling or those heatsinks would only replace the CPU fans, right? The HDDs will still spin fast and the 4 case fans will still whiz around...

So I'm looking for advice from others who can point me in the right direction.

Final thing I wanted to ask was what is a reasonable temperature for the Xeons to be running at at 100% usage?

Thanks for your help,

-- John.

John,

I don't know what PSU you use, but the Supermicro PSU's are very loud, like an airliner ready for take-off. You are using a CoolerMaster case, so you probably lack the air shroud that helps cooling in a SuperMicro case.

With a reasonably filled system I would consider putting the system in your study, instead of the living room. Cooling is so important for longevity of components, that you just don't want the noise in your living room. I also do not know enough about water cooling for the 54xx CPU's to advise you on that, but even if you can find a good CPU watercooling system, you also need to include the GPU and in some way the disks.

All may require quite some modding.

As a general rule, I would say that under full load with a properly cooled sytem, you are looking at these max temps:

1. CPU < 60 degrees C
2. GPU < 65 degrees C
3. disks < 35 degrees C
4. mobo < 45 degrees C

but preferably deduct 10 degrees from all figures above.