Aside from the obviously large amount of space being taken up...
Could a water cooler, (like the common free standing 4-5ft tall including
huge water jug) be used as a water cooler for a standard home computer ?
Yes, but simply having a lot of water is only half the
story- the water needs the heat removed which isn't quite
what a water jug is desiged to do- just the opposite, it's
designed to have (nearer) the least surface area possible to
contain the water. In other words, it'd be more of a
novelty than an average, let alone optimal, solution.
Better would be to simply replace the huge water jug with a
common smaller automobile radiator. That is, if you really
don't mind having that much space taken up. Then again,
moving the water further may require a stronger (potentially
more noisey) pump too, so gains from lower airflow needed to
cool the radiator may be offset by more pump noise.
Later considerations of saving space whether its set it in the my spare room
and run the tubes through the tv-cable face plate or use physically remove
non-essential parts ( the stand... smaller jug for water etc)
You're going to need a pretty beefy (abnormally so relative
to what's typically used in PCs) pump for that. All you
really need is to move that water far enough to get the heat
outside of the case. If you want to do this novelty, you
may well find that the water reservoir is completely
unnecessary (providing your pump(s) aren't an immersed
type), you can simply use copper tubing to radiate the heat.
Even so, using a radiator is the easier solution and works
well... but then only you know if you even need
water-cooling. It's not quieter, it's higher-maintenance,
more expensive, cumbersome. It's of most benefit to those
highly overclocking/overvolting "something".
Im aware that there is specifically made water coolers for computers but I
have a project interest in mind.
you might just come out with what that project is, we can't
very well tailor an answer to a question we aren't
considering.
Hence my question:
Can a water cooler reliably keep the water flow constant and be an
effective, silent cooling mechanism ?
A water cooler is a storage tank... unless you have
something specific in mind that does more than this. If
it's tapped into the main water line to get it's water,
that's fine for it, as it's a closed system, but to keep
water flowing you'd have to dump that water out of the
system, very wasteful and expensive in the long run.
It won't be nearly as effective as some alternate methods,
but the refridgeration can do the job given enough surface
area.
There is no noise reduction from water cooling!
Your plans to cool a part or two with water blocks do not
remove the need for other fans. You still need same flow
rate to cool the drives. The power supply could have
somewhat lower rate due to less heated air, but the
motherboard still needs the flow rate. If you put the
pump in the other room where it's (hopefully) sonically
isolated, at most you only reduce CPU noise- as video cards
are easily, inaudibly cooling with aftermarket heatsinks
costing less than a water-cooler implementation.
So you're left with the reduction of noise from the CPU
'sink. A good CPU 'sink can run very quietly, in fact it's
noise can easily be eclipsed by the fans on the case walls,
which release more noise into the room rather than being
kept in the case. Overall the time, expense, and risks are
a bit excessive unless you're trying to break some
overclocking records, but for that you'd be considering
compressor-based cooling, not merely chilled water.
Don't get me wrong, it could be a fun project and certainly
novel... just not useful except in very limited scenarios.
