Tank and Water Pumps

Koolance used submerged water pumps. It means they don’t have connecting pipes, but are completely underwater. The hermetically closed water tank is installed at the bottom of the PC chassis:

Tank volume is about half a liter. There are two sequentially connected pumps in it: one is taking water out of the system into the tank and the other is pumping the water from the tank into the system. It’s hard to say why Koolance engineers preferred to use two pumps instead of one more powerful pump. Maybe they got attracted by the noiseless operation of these two pumps, which work absolutely quietly, you only feel a slight vibration. Moreover, the dual-pump variant is more reliable. If one of them goes down, the other would still go on pumping and saving the CPU from overheating. There is a label on the tank with a scale to control water amount. The tank has a hole at the bottom for water refill and unloading:

The system is absolutely hermetic, so you can transport it in any position. Although you’d better set the system vertically when working :).

Heatsink and Fans

There are no surprises here: an ordinary air heatsink is used in Koolance system to cool the water:

The heatsink, fans, control panel and system PSU are all placed in a compartment that occupies the entire upper part of the chassis. One 5-inch CD-ROM drive bay was even sacrificed for it:

This compartment has no communication with the rest of the chassis, but goes out at the top of the system case:

Four standard 80mm fans are blowing air through this heatsink. Two of them are sucking the air in – they are both placed at the upper panel of the system case. The other two are blowing the air outside – one is at the upper panel and the other is placed at the PSU. We should note that all these blowing things produce quite a perceptible noise even in the “silent” mode. We might have been unlucky to have a chassis with poor fans, but still it was a sad thing to mention. After we replaced the default fans with the 80mm fans from Thermaltake, the noise was practically eliminated.