Introduction
If you remember a short time back we reviewed the Evercool WC-201 watercooling kit. After using the kit in its stock form and learning about the overall design of the unit we began to get ideas to make it work better. We are presenting these ideas today for pure interest and for those who wish to do similar modding of their own. Some might argue that it’s really not worth the time and money to mod a cheap watercooling kit and that it would be better just to create our own setup from individual parts. The purpose of this is not that we want to create a kicking watercooling setup out of the WC-201, because let’s face it, it’s not meant for that purpose. Our purpose is simply to show that some mods can be done for relatively little money and increase the performance a fair amount. Let’s get started…

Mod 1:
As you recall, the WC-201 unit mounts fully into the case of the computer in a 5 ¼” drive bay. One of the key inefficiencies we found was that it uses case air to cool the water in the radiators. So as the case temps went up so did the water temperature. We began to wonder if we could somehow pipe outside air directly to the unit to cool it better. The idea came to me that I could use the outside metal casing of an old (and broken) cdrom drive.

Two important considerations that led me to this idea were 1) the front end is wide open and 2) it can be mounted in a 5 ¼” bay directly above the WC-201. A little more modding needed to be done yet to make this what it would become. I had the plan to cut the back end of the casing so that it slanted down to move any air coming in down onto the WC-201. The other idea was to cut a hold in the bottom plate at the fan for the WC-201 but I scrapped that idea in favor of simply removing the bottom plate altogether.

The final part of the mod (which may or may not really be necessary) was to add a $9 hard drive cooler unit (simply 3 fans blowing in). This part of the mod may have actually restricted air flow or may have helped it, we do not know at this point. But it did make things look a little better on the front of the case and ensured that cool air was being piped into the case to the WC-201.

So there you have it, a simple mod that took us probably about an hour of work to setup. Now let’s see if the watercooler actually benefited from this mod or not.

The results are promising and they show that this unit does have some potential. We saw a 5C temperature drop with a simple mod. The only real downfall is that the use will lose a 5 ¼” bay to this mod, along with the one that is being occupied by the WC-201. With a lot of mid tower cases today 4 drive bays is all you have to work with and losing two is not a wonderful prospect. So based on these results I began to cook up a new idea. An idea that would solve the drive bay problem completely.

Next Page - Mod 2 and Conclusion

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