I built this project in 2004.

While I was studying I lived in a small one-room apartment. That was ok and especially cheap.. But if you are a geek you need a computer running 24/7 for.. well, for.. stuff.

Computers in 2004 were loud because of the cooling. So the challenge was to build a computer that would not emit any noise. To get the heat off the components without noise the best is to put the whole machine into a lot of well heat-conducting liquid. The easiest is to take a liquid which is not electrically conducting – but those liquids in general are expensive and toxic (like hydraulic oil). Because of that and because the first type of container for big amounts of liquids I could think of was a fish-tank the project involved living animals at the end..

It turned out that the best material for sealing the components was polyester-resin. It’s relatively easy to get at boat repair shops – unfortunately the transparent type is very expensive – so for this proof-of-concept I took the cheaper white version.
One word about casting the polyester-resin: If you ever try this at home make sure to NEVER cast layers thicker than about 1cm. The hardening of the resin is an exothermal reaction – if the material is too thick it will start boiling!
I didn’t spend too much effort on making it look nice and made the casting-molds with cardboard-boxes, sand and plastic bags – the result was.. well, as expected.

What you can also see on the picture is that I added big heatsinks to all components (power supply, disk, cpu, north-bridge, RAM) – they stick out of the polyester resin for obvious reasons. What you can not see is that I glued an empty box of matches over the small membrane-covered hole in the hard disk case – this is used for pressure balance and should not be completely covered. Actually I called IBM and was able to speak to an engineer from hard disk development and it was his advice to do so (THIS is impressive support!).

At the end the temperature in the aquarium was stable at around 24°C – perfect for many fish-species. Unfortunately I have no picture of the final setup :( But it looked quite nice at the end with lots of plants and many colourful fishes.

The computer ran 24/7 for over 2 years without a fault – and also the fishes seemed to do fine.