I did have more fluctuation than I expected, but I'm not sure if it was out of character or not. The main thing that made me wonder if something was off was that I wasn't expecting much of a delta at all. The reason being was that I was under the impression that the water temperature should pretty much equalize with only slight variances after leaving a block. Also, the water coming into the reservoir has just gone through the 3x120 radiator, so it should be at its coolest point.
I think part of what's helping me is moving my PC to the floor. In this current room setup, my desk is actually right over top of the HVAC vent, which also causes it to push some of that cold air directly toward my case. It isn't uncommon for me to be at say... 28C, and by the time the AC shuts off, I will be at around 23-25C.
That made me wonder... how crazy would it be to put parts from an AC system into a PC? Now, to be clear, I don't mean anything like what I have right now where I happen to get chilled air blown onto my PC, but rather, using a compressor + condenser with a PC as a coolant instead of water. I think the only negative aspect would be dealing with the coolant and the noise from the compressor.
Alright, alright! I picked one up.
I've been tempted to build a case before. I actually had this interesting idea to essentially build a full-blown water cooling case. My thought was that cases are just a ton of wasted metal, so why not build the radiators into the case? That's really not much different than what my
Streacom case does. However, that isn't really good enough as a custom job for me. I think it would be interesting if the entire frame of the case was built out of metal tubing that essentially served as a medium to pass the water to the built-in radiators. The only thing I think that would be necessary would be to build a system to make it so you can close off parts of tubing that aren't necessary. I don't know... this is just something that popped into this crazy thing I call a brain.
I know what you mean about motherboard trays! Selling a bunch of old junk is helping me make this water cooling stuff not painful on my wallet, and one of the things I'm considering getting rid of are old cases. I have an old Cooler Master ATCS 840 case that has a motherboard tray, and I really want to get rid of the case as it's taking up room, but motherboard trays are so nice for doing any quick tests!
I tried looking around to see if it was possible to just buy a motherboard tray somewhere so I could get rid of the case, but still have a motherboard tray. I didn't really find anything good (i.e. not expensive), but this link had some decent trays:
http://www.mountainmods.com/motherboard-parts-c-21_34_66.html