Puget Aquarium Cracked after less than a month.

[dxkj]

Has anyone else had this issue? 70-73 F ambient room temperature, 98 F oil temperature, non overclocked I5 2500 sitting at ~ 40C.

I purchased the kit a few months back, and finally got everything together (sourcing mineral oil locally can be a pita). Assembled, tested, and I was off and rolling.

Three weeks after assembly I come back after lunch and find 12 gallons of mineral oil all over the floor and wall.

So I am out $180 for the mineral oil, out the damage to my floor/etc, and additionally since the entire kit only has a 30 day warranty (thats news to me) i have to purchase a new tank from them (that I have no reason to assume will work any better than the last).

Appreciate any advice, as talking to support hasnt gotten me anywhere beyond (its 30 day warranty from date of purchase), if I had really known that I might as well have sourced my own parts at a lower price.

[Mezinov]

37 C seems high for an idle temperature on the oil. Depending on the days temperature, my systems oil is usually between 30 and 32 C when I am just browsing and such; and that is running only 5 of 9 fans at 50%. I only ever turn the remaining 4 fans on when running the system at a decent load - under practical use I have yet to turn all 9 fans to 100%.

On several occasions when I have had my A/C running for this room, I've forgone running the fans at all and still maintain sub 35 C temperatures on the oil itself.

If you leave your 9 fans running, I would imagine the failure point is likely materials quality in the acrylic tank. While most companies maintain strict quality control procedures, we are using the tanks outside their intended purpose. At the plant, a 1-2 degree difference in manufacturing temperature can lead to wildly different material tolerances. These differences are likely well within their parameters, as the tanks are meant to hold water and fish, but could be insufficient for the consistent high-temperature use of a submerged computer.

It is beyond Puget or the original tank manufacturer to check for such impurities. Short of signing an exclusive contract with the manufacturer, and buying up their best stock, there is no way for Puget to reasonably guarantee the tank came from a +2C batch, a -1C batch, or a perfect batch. Above this, besides leak testing the tank, there is very little for us on the consumer end to verify material quality.

I can certainly understand your frustration. Before I submerged my system, I was running a much more traditional liquid cooling setup that failed rather quickly itself. Obviously, the very act of liquid cooling voided most my components warranty to begin with, and I didn't bother pursuing a warranty claim with the cooling system components manufacturer. Like as not, it was something I had miscalculated with my configuration; I had a pvc hose burst. It just as easily could have been a fault in the manufacturing of the PVC that lead it to fail at my systems temperatures and pressures.

If I were to source my own parts, I would likely go with a much larger fish tank (contrary to my logic in getting the Puget solution; I wanted a system that took up LESS space than my previous setup, but more oil is better right?), mount silent (low RPM) fans on either side of the tanks top housing (to push-pull fresh air to the HDDs, and extract the hot air rising off the oil), and likely hook up the Puget radiator in tandem to my old radiator (a Koolance ERM-2k3u; because I am a fan-whore).

That obviously makes things more difficult for myself, however, as I would have to make my own motherboard tray and the likes. The Puget solution was a nice combination of compact size and pre-manufactured parts; and provided adequate cooling.

For comparisons sake, my submerged system is the following;
ASUS Rampage III Formula Motherboard (LGA 1366)
24GB Patriot Gamer Series DDR3 1600 RAN (6x 4GB)
Intel I7-980x Extreme Edition LGA 1366 Six-Core Processor (3.33 GhZ stock clock)
Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5970 GPU (2x, Crossfire)
CoolerMaster Silent Pro Gold 1200w Power Supply
Thermaltake Spin-Q Processor Heatsink

[PCC-Richard]

Hi dxkj,

While we do list the 30 day warranty on the aquarium parts page (http://www.pugetsystems.com/store/it...6&com=d41d8cd9), it does look like there's a way you could add it to your cart directly from the kit info page, and you'd never see the warranty information without clicking on the part for details. I'll try and have some clarifying text added to the aquarium page.

I'm sorry to hear that you've had such a catastrophic failure. I'll send you an email right now, via your support ticket, to see if we can't help you out.

Thanks,
Richard

[dao2]

I've had a v4 kit running since the beginning of the year without issues. It creaks and groans every once in a bit like everything else (but it's a lot more scary coming from that :P) but the only real scare has been a "scratch" on the back side. I think it's a scratch as I can't see it in the middle of the plastic (or really anything beyond the surface) and it's a hell of a weird shape for a crack and way too smooth. Just in case I markered off the ends to see if it would grow any bigger and so far it hasn't in 2 months, I just don't know how the hell it got scratched....

I don't think my oils ever gotten to 37c, it's sitting at about 29c right now which is high idle, but still I think it's supposed to last longer. What mez said could of course be correct but one other thing that the puget guys warned about was temperature changes, apparently often (and *sudden*) temp changes can be rough on the acrylic so you want to be careful of that.

Also I would probably keep the weight off the top too.