Case for watercooled 2 CPU system

I'm looking for a case which can replace my current, heavily modded Chiftec full-tower which houses my water cooled dual-CPU opteron system. I built this system in 2003(!) and have been happy with it ever since. I've been totally out of the casemoddin'/watercoolin' world for a long time. But I am now thinking about upgrading the system and the case is where I want to start.

Back when I built the system, I was unable to buy a case which was laid out the way I wanted. This meant I had to whip out my Dad's angle grinder and chop the case up to rearrange things. Looking at cases on the market now (wow, soooo many to choose from!) there are many which seem to be much closer to what I want.

The major thing I want is to have the radiator in the top of the case. I.e. The radiator is in the top, then a 2-3 cm duct and then 2-3 slow-speed, ultra quiet 120mm fans. So the fans suck air from the inside of the case and blow it onto the underside of the radiator and up through it and out the top of the case. Back when I first built the system, I did a lot of experiments and determined this arrangement provided the most efficient cooling for any given fan rpm. There was much debate about why on BigForums (now TekForums again it seems). I think this consensus was because the air leaving the fans is very turbulent which helps cooling efficiency as the air passes up through the rad. Also, by having the radiator in the top of the case and the fans blowing up through it, the fans are blowing in the same direction of the natural convection current. In fact, I am sometimes able to switch the fans off completely.

Anyway, the radiator/duct/fan assembly is ~100mm thick, and this meant I had to move the power supply from the top of the case to the bottom. All the other re-arranging I had to do was basically a consequence of this decision. Sadly, because I had to cut so much of the case, it isn't very structurally sound and flexes easily. This is the main reason why I want to replace it - I don't want to stick a brand new system in a case which flexes!

So, looking around, it seems quite common to have the power supply in the bottom of the case these days. However, the motherboard seems to be moved up too, so I'm worried about the rad/duct/fan assembly getting in the way of the motherboard. Has anyone had any experience putting a deep (~10cm) radiator assembly in the top of a modern case? Can anyone recommend a case which has enough room? I also like that quite a lot of cases now have quite open meshes which I would imagine help natural convection cooling. As you can probably tell, my motivation for water cooling is to reduce peek-load noise. So I'll be watercooling the CPUs, GPU and HDD (though I think I'll probably replace my current 15k rpm SCSI drive with an SSD).

Cheers,

Tom

PS: I used to go by the nick of "Hagra" if there's any old-timers still about.

Looks like the following Mountain Mods cases would fit what you need, however is it on the large side

http://www.mountainmods.com/u2ufo-black-wrinkle-powder-coat-original-top-p-431.html

The easy answer is the silverstone tj07 with the radiator in the base. If you're up for cutting up the new case too, then perhaps one of the large lian li cases.

Whether push or pull is better depends on your particular radiator, fan, and rpm you run the fan at. There's not normally very much in it, as I daresay you noticed during testing.

The 800D would also be another option plenty of space, and will take a 120.3 rad in the top

Thanks for the suggestions... What exactly is a 800D? :-/

Also, as far as the push~pull experiments went, I found that push did actually make quite a big improvement over pull, which is what I was initially using. I'll try to dig up the old figures, if I still have them.

I had also investigated mounting the radiator in the bottom. However, I measured the exhaust temperature of the rad to be 10-15 C over ambient at low fan speeds. It feels like the wrong thing to then pump that high temperature air into the case. One problem I had with a previous watercooled setup was that the other motherboard components overheated easily as they were designed to have a CPU fan moving the air around.

I should also mention that I'd like to stick to a small full-tower or a large mid-tower. I.e. Nothing too big. Though I suspect I'll have to have something fairly large in order to fulfil my requirements.

I was refering to the corsair 800D here

The most obvious cases will be the Corsair 800D and Silverstone TJ07 but these are very big cases a outside bet would be the Coolermaster HAF932 which can take a 360 RAD but not optimatly but does have lots of room above the motherboard but again this a very large case, i can't think of a smaller tower that would work.

I presume you need an E-ATX case?

Thanks guys, some of those cases look pretty cool! I've also just noticed the forum gallery sticky thread which seems to have loads of ideas.

As for the E-ATX, if you mean the motherboard form factor, I think a standard ATX will do the job. My current motherboard is standard ATX and the dual-socket Xeon boards I'm looking at are also only standard ATX size.