Turn an Old PC into an Aquarium

[joelm3103]

Turn an Old PC into an Aquarium

It's a sad fact of life: PCs get old, become obsolete, and you have to buy a new one. Instead of throwing your old one away, turn it into a snazzy aquarium fit for a geek with this guide from DIY web site Instructables.

Anyone up for the challenge? Got no bad pc around but next time I'll try haha.

 

[MindoverMaster]

He doesn't even do water cooling?

 

[S0ULphIRE]

If I had fish...

 

[Kharn]

This is like the old iMac fishtank.

 

[Muffin Man]

it looks clean, but he basically just put a fish tank inside a pc.

he shoulda done this instead
http://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php
and then put the fishies inside.

although i don't know if they would survive in mineral oil.

if you don't wanna read the article, here's their vid.

 

[philbar71]

I think it would be cool to turn a old case into a fishtank, just throw a mobo you dont care about in there and add a side panel window. Then just silicone up the rest and bam you got a fishtank!

 

[b0dge]

I'd much rather see a fishtank used as a PC case... Oh wait... Holy forum stretch, Batman!

 

[wafflehammer]

^^^^ eh it's a bad idea in general to do that.

There is no circulating in the tank so after awhile(sort while actually) the water will just heat up to the point it's doing more harm than good. It'll be cooling the GPU, CPU, north/south bridge, HDD, PSU, etc etc etc all by itself. Fans won't work because of too much drag. So the only cooling the water will get is basically the ambient temp outside of the case cooling the tank a bit and then that cooling the water a little bit....not much at all.

Plus it'd be such a hard process to use water for this. You'd have to make sure it's basically 100% water (no extra minerals n junk in it) and probably would have to clean everything else in a sterile environment (Like the motherboard, I'm sure there is some sort of metallic residue on it that's left over from the manufacturing process..so it'd have to be clean so it wouldn't mix with the water and short the board).

Cool idea while it's floating around your head but a lot harder to actually accomplish lol

 

[b0dge]

Oh right. Cool.

I won't do that then.

Whoosh...

 

[wafflehammer]

ahhh no man, i'm not trying to crush any hopes n dreams here lol. Just saying it's one of those things you have to know what you're getting into before you get into it. And that it's not going to be a super cooled machine o powerfulness lol

Would be cool to use it as an aquarium though. But would be kinda hard to actually use as a pc. You could always use some type of non-conductive oil instead of water. There is actually a custom pc website thing that does this. They use some kinda silicon based oil or something to "liquid cool" the whole pc. Has some kind of external fan thing on top or something to kinda move it around n everything. Dunno how well it works but the oil stuff is expensive (I want to say it's $100+/gallon but I can't remember). BUT there has been a thread about this subject before on this website with the website I mentioned brought up there too..so maybe you can search for it and find it if you really want to look into this.