What are the rubber circles for on the back of my pc case? Should I just leave them like that if don’t have a need for them? Or are they likely to let I’m dust into the motherboard?

Edit: thanks for all the replies, so just for water cooling I have no need for.

  • Godnroc@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1671·
    4 months ago

    They are external ports for water cooling. They allow you to run the pipes to an exterior location, and I have never seen anyone use them ever. I would leave the rubber grommet as it generally looks nicer than the hole.

    • fhqwgads@possumpat.io
      311·
      4 months ago

      This is the correct answer - I know because I was there 10000 years ago and had to decide between this and buying a special case from koolance. Amusingly they still sell one for the outside.

      They can also be handy if you have to do anything weird like route display cables from the GPU to the motherboard like for a thunderbolt display.

        • DarkSirrush@lemmy.ca
          151·
          4 months ago

          Air cooling and closed loop coolers have gotten better, and honestly no one can afford to spend $3000 to get 3° lower temps any more.

        • Sheldan@mander.xyz
          71·
          4 months ago

          I built a PC recently, and when researching it still seemed a large chunk went with water cooling still. AIO in particular.

        • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
          51·
          4 months ago

          Only sort of, it still exists but it’s a lot more compact now. And not super common as far as I know, like the other poster said here air cooling has come a long way. I’ve got a water cooled GTX 1080 Ti in my rig right now, but it’s basically just a couple rubber tubes coming off the GPU leading to a little square radiator that I have a fan bolted to. It all sits inside the case (or, well, it’s intended to… My case isn’t quite large enough for everything I’ve got in it so I’ve got the radiator and fan a little bit jury-rigged to the front of my case right now. No biggie.)

      • Bye@lemmy.world
        196·
        4 months ago

        Radiators? Nah, open loop. One end to the faucet, other end to the drain. If you’re on well water it goes right back down to where it came from.

    • Mac@federation.redEnglish
      101·
      4 months ago

      Built a computer for a guy years ago. Dual titan X, 3 radiators in a little fucking HAF tower. He bought two exterior radiator mounts

      • Confused_Emus@lemmy.world
        41·
        4 months ago

        Was about to ask what one does with dual Titan Xs, but the obvious answer is whatever the hell one wants.

        • Mac@federation.redEnglish
          61·
          4 months ago

          Yeah SLI was still a thing at the time. From what I gathered he was trying for XOC records on liquid. He only came to us because he didn’t want to spend the time building it

    • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
      6·
      4 months ago

      Years ago, I saw someone run a copper loop through this newly poured basement foundation just to use to cool his pc silently.

      • CptEnder@lemmy.world
        3·
        4 months ago

        Yeah I remember that post on Reddit. Holy shit my mans literally ran like 1000ft of copper through his ceiling into his house’s plumbing lmao. He also had a WILD monitor setup, was more like a pit than a desk.

      • Bakkoda@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        4 months ago

        If i could show you the amount of awful 5 gallon bucket, recycled tygon and aquarium equipment “water cooling” loops i used to use for shit, you’d probably piss your pants laughing.

        • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
          4·
          4 months ago

          Found it.

          Speaking off cooling and piss, I once saw a streamer experiment with cooling a pc with his piss. Well, I’m saying it was his piss. For ToS reasons, he made it clear he couldn’t say it was his piss. It was ill-conceived and he couldn’t get far enough to actually do a benchmark test.

    • wheeldawg@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      31·
      4 months ago

      The rubber didn’t agree well on my old case. I poked it a couple years ago trying to figure it what it might be and the little triangles has gotten stiff and snapped off on one side, so I stopped poking it.

      I was today years old when I learned what they were for though. I knew it was some kind of tube or pipe or hose, but I’ve spent about 0.3 seconds actually thinking about it so I never figured it out.

    • BigDaddySlim@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      4 months ago

      I knew someone who had the MO-RA3 through those ports and had it on the other side of the room. He sold it to another person in the discord server we were in and he actually installed it in his basement directly below the computer on the floor above. Wild

    • Nikls94@lemmy.world
      1·
      4 months ago

      I used them on my old Build! Pretty neat if it got some light up the back, but I went back to air cooling, so I’ve got then holes of glory again.

  • bonn2@lemm.ee
    1021·
    4 months ago

    It is probably an old case design. In the early water cooling days, there would be separate watercooling units that sat outside the case. The grommets were so you could pass your tubing through.

    I wouldn’t really worry about the dust tbh, you will wind up having to clean it regardless.

      • jalkasieni@sopuli.xyz
        102·
        4 months ago

        Specifically, these are for being able to pass in the tubing when your computer overheats playing Counter-Strike 1.5 so you pull apart your 50cc moped so you can bolt the moped radiator to the side of the case since it doesn’t fit inside. At least that’s the only use I’ve actually seen in practice.

      • Reddfugee42@lemmy.world
        10·
        4 months ago

        Such as?

        Edit: I mean you can contrive something if you’re MacGyver but there’s no remotely standard use case for that.

        • DerisionConsulting@lemmy.caEnglish
          61·
          4 months ago

          There were some old PCI cards that were very badly designed, and they required things plugged into them from inside the case, or they needed to plug into things on the motherboard. I had card that controlled Cold cathode tube lighting that could also connect to audio to sync to the music that worked that way

          But, the actual answer is that the grommets are for old-school water-cooling.

        • AnIndefiniteArticle@sh.itjust.works
          4·
          4 months ago

          Such as sata cables for quickly hot plugging hard drives you are testing/inspecting/cataloguing and don’t want to open the whole case between each drive, or leave the case open.

        • const_void@lemmy.ml
          3·
          4 months ago

          Anything that doesn’t have an external connector or some way to mount one. One example would be if you were using a USB Wi-Fi radio and wanted to connect it to the internal USB connectors but you’d need to pass the antenna to the outside of the case.

        • BCsven@lemmy.ca
          2·
          4 months ago

          Mine has an 3 position exrernal fan switch for manual control, cable comes out those holes. Also useful for direct header usb that you run an extender cable out to another device.

            • BCsven@lemmy.ca
              2·
              4 months ago

              While that is an option for anyone, its not something I wanted. Mine is cube with 200mm fan. The lowest setting is fine for the thermals, but if I’m video processing I will toggle to high, but for voice over or a phone call comes in I drop it down low. The random up and down of the fan if left to its own device creates a noise I don’t want to deal with.

  • sanpo@sopuli.xyz
    251·
    4 months ago

    Just leave them be. I think their point was to route tubing for custom water cooling loops.

  • Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world
    142·
    4 months ago

    Well, you got the answers you were looking for, here is a different answer. To your other implied question, how to not worry about dust getting in other holes.

    Main thing is to develop positive air pressure. You want more powered intake than powered exhaust.

    Use fans for all your filtered air intakes, ignore powered air exhaust, run it at lower fan speeds if you can. Air will get out fine. If you force the air in where you want it to go in, dust will only go into the easily removable filters, it won’t be on your components. Any extra hole in the case will just be exhausting the already filtered air. Then just remember to actually check and clean your filters. That’s the hard part. But if you clean them when they need to be cleaned, you will never have to actually clean the inside or the fans or components or anything else, just the filters.

  • DontTakeMySky@lemmy.world
    121·
    4 months ago

    Dust will get in pretty much no matter what you do. I wouldn’t worry about it. If you live in an already really dusty environment then get some sections of filter and attach them inside of these holes but honestly I wouldn’t worry.

    It’s for water cooling loops if you want to mount the rad or pump or something outside of the case. I think it was more common in the early days of water cooling when things were less standardized.

    • OsaErisXero@kbin.run
      61·
      4 months ago

      Not less standardized so much as when the only cooling loops were custom ones and not AIO

  • Wahots@pawb.social
    91·
    4 months ago

    Watercooling holes. That said, I’ve never seen anyone use them. Mounting external rads is a bitch. They take up space. Most people just buy a watercooling compatible case.