Im worried about the pump here. How do you want the system to react to temperatures?
Was thinking of having it respond to water temp - the cpu temp is going to be erratic whenever an application puts stress on it so I'd rather not have the pump slowing and spinning as erratically, whereas the water temp is going to be much slower, especially as my loop holds just shy of 2 litres and has 25kg of copper to soak up sudden increases in heat production. Doing it by water temps is going to make it a lot smoother and avoid the juddering you get when the pump suddenly ramps up.
Fans keeping water temp within a certain range is fairly simple. However deciding whether a temp increase is best dealt with by spinning up fans or the pump is less obvious.
I was planning on setting the controller to only power up the fans at very high water temps, and to undervolt the pump at low water temps.
Tbh I don't really know how much I could undervolt the pump and how sensitive my set-up is to flowrate, but the cpu idles at around 30-35C running the ddc at 10w , and the loop doesn't have a sealing top plug atm so flowrate is probably very low atm.
I have the silence bug - the fans would be off almost all the time I expect. Still unsure whether to even bother with some - cpu doesn't get above about 55c when gaming.
May i suggest isolating the two? Connect the pump to a flow meter and the fans to a normal controller. Its hard to see how water temp could usefully relate to pump rpm. Have i got the wrong end of the stick here?
There's an alternative for the fans. I couldnt find a controller i liked, parts of the controller getting hotter as fans slow down bother me. Instead, im switching voltage between the readily available 0, 7 and 12v. Quite literally with a toggle switch, so its os independent and can handle high wattage fans. Automating it is probably more hassle than its worth though.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, does sound like a bit of hassle, but hopefully will just be a case of setting it up and leaving it. The absence of fans makes me notice the pump noise now, even with the 10w ddc I'm using atm, and it'd be nice to have it undervolt when just using the web etc. I don't want the bother of having to flick a switch or turn a knob all the time.
Hmmm, wondering whether I could just use the mcubed miniNG. Says it's only rated to 25w total (2 channel - 1st channel up to 20w and total load 25w) seems to have a bigger heatsink on it than the aquaero. It's totally manual - you adjust two rheostats; one for lower temp and one for high temp and it scales the voltage linearly between them I think - but then it looks like it'd be unable to do the fans and pump separately.
