Learning about watercooling

Hat · **Joined:** Tue Jan 19, 2010 6:35 pm **Posts:** 14

Well, all the stuff came out of the Dell case yesterday, but I hit a few snags, so I thought I'd post what I learned so far. This isn't really trying to teach you experts anything you don't already know, but some of it came as a bit of a surprise to me. I've built several computers in the past, but never tried to re-used OEM parts before, which is where I hit the snag. Some or all of this information may be available elsewhere, but I didn't find it (then again, I can't even find a search tool on this forum!).

So, what I've learned:

1) You have to remove the heatsink on the processor to remove the motherboard.

This is because the stock cooler uses a backplate which is screwed in to the motherboard tray.

2) The backplate for the CPU cooler is plastic, a bit flimsy, and designed to be screwed into the motherboard tray.

This made it absolutely no use to me as the motherboard tray in the HAF932 has a hole behind the CPU, and I have no intention of screwing anything to the sidepanel in the new case. You can probably go with another backplate / mounting if you want to use the original stock cooler, but I just got a new cooler (it will be replaced later by water cooling anyway, but I want to get it up and running now to test the mobo).

3) The Dell PSU is tall, and non-standard.

This was actually my biggest surprise. It's significantly taller than the space available in the HAF932 - I could make it fit, but not in a position I was happy with. Given the HAF932 can take a very long power supply, that's the direction I thought the Dell would expand in, but it's the non-standard height that I had problems with. I checked two other cases, and the Dell PSU won't fit in those either. In retrospect I could've saved myself a lot of trouble if I'd known this in advance, as removing the PSU cabling was a pain.

4) ***EDIT*** This doesn't seem to be a consistent issue - most people seem to be able to remove the optical drive just by using the plastic bracket - my machine just appears to have had an extra screw put in by accident.

If you want to remove the optical drive, you need to take off the left side of the case.

This one's pretty obvious, although I gave Dell too much credit and assumed there'd be some kind of bracket. Fortunately there's a guide on this site to removing the left panel, so it didn't delay me too much.

5) You need a spare USB header if you want to re-use the internal card reader.

Pretty obvious again as I think all internal card readers use this way of hooking up, but it's worth bearing in mind how many headers you have available.

That's about it so far. PSU and cooler have delayed the startup of the new mobo until later today when I should be able to pick up replacements. I did think about jury rigging something, but I wasn't confident about hooking up the CPU cooler properly without the backplate being affixed to the case, so for a 1 day delay it just wasn't worth it.

The HAF 932 is great to work with by the way - so much space in there compared to the Dell case and pretty good cable management for lazy people like me.

Incidentally on the last post, a lot of searching later the general consensus appears to be that the repair trick no longer works, so I'll be reinstalling Windows 7, and no doubt placing a call to MS to re-activate given that I've switched out a major component. Fun!

Hat.

My630i.com

Learning about watercooling

Learning about watercooling

Learning about watercooling

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