Aquacase
An aquacase originally is a personal computer-case with ready-to-use water-cooling-system. The word aquacase is composed of the Latin aqua (water) and English case (here PC-case). At least the following components must be contained in the case to make it an aquacase: pump, cooling-medium, pipes, cooling-body (for CPU, GPU, northbridge or southbridge), radiator. An aquacase does not contain any parts of a personal computer (this means, motherboard, CPU, dedicated graphics card, RAM, etc.) at the time it is bought. The sizes of aquacases cover the whole variety of PC-cases. In general the manufacturers focus on midi-tower and big-tower cases.
Components
An aquacase must at least contain a pump, cooling-medium, pipes, a cooling-body and a radiator. These component-names originate in the early water-systems. The usage of more components (such as flow-control, etc.) or the multiple usage of the basic components (such as two cooling-bodies - one for the CPU and one for the GPU) is very common. In today's wider class of aquacases one might define these components as follows:
component |
definition |
|---|---|
pump |
device used to move the cooling-medium through the system |
cooling-medium |
the liquid used to transport the heat from the PCs components to the radiator (the medium May Be composed of different materials, like water and corrosion-protection) |
pipes |
devices used to transport the medium through the system |
cooling-body |
device used to derive a PC-component's heat into the cooling-system (the body often is a copper-block) |
radiator |
device used to cool down the cooling-medium (this can be an array of pipes with a large, slowly rotating fan, a Peltier-element, etc.) |
Cases used
All aquacases share their ready-to-use delivering. The cases used to build-up an aquacase are not models from the manufacturer's standard-palette, which means one can not buy them without cooling-system. A case which can be bought with or without cooling-system is referred to as bild-in-water-cooling-case (or similar).
History
Aquacases are a result of the late 1990s modding-trend of cooling a personal-computer with water instead of conventional air-cooling-systems. A noise-reduction of the cooling-system is correlated with the usage of water instead of air, since an air-stream through the PC-case causes more noise than the air-stream through the water-cooling-system's radiator.
The original idea of building a water-cooled PC-system required knowledge of hydrodynamics and mechanics. To make water-cooling available for more than just modders, manufacturers of PC-cases introduced cases with build-in cooling-systems.
In recent times the class of aquacases not only includes watercases (as defined above), but also a kind of ready-to-use cooling-system which does not use air as primary cooling-medium. These can be heatpipe-systems, cryosis-systems and similar.
Examples
The Titan Robela Water Case is a watercase in the original meaning.
Dell's XPS 700 is not an auqacase. The XPS 700 is a complete PC-system and one can not call it an aquacase. The case contains a ready-to-use heatpipe-cooling-system, but it can not be purchased alone.
Sidenotes
The Latin word aqua (water) is misused in the current class of aquacases. A more likely to be used word would be liquida (liquid) since modern aquacases not necessarily use water, but still a liquid. Nevertheless the word liquidacase (or similar) was never able to rule out aquacase.
Many manufacturers do not advertise their aquacases.
Aquacases often use non-standard-components, therefore an end-user normally can not modify or upgrade the system without breaking it.
Easy-to-upgrade-systems are often referred to as modder's choice aquacases.