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Water Cooling Flow Indicators
A reader writes:"There's an interesting HOW-TO about how to construct a a flow indicator for your water-cooling rig for your overclocked machine." I dunno what I'd do with the extra cycles from overclocking and watercooling - maybe run more rc5 packets though the box - crazy idea though.
Ooooh. I'd never thought of it terms of getting bigger, slower fans. Very cool.
Thanks! Your post has been the *ONE* truly useful post I've read in about a year!
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Er, no. Hacking at its finest was back when one had to weild a soldering iron. And not just replacing the quartz oscillator, either.
My greatest hack was doubling my computer's memory by soldering new memory directly over the old memory, leaving one leg bent up to be wired to a page-flip lead on the CPU. Goes low: original RAM is R/W; goes high, new RAM is R/W.
Second-greatest was hacking the serial port. Ran wires from the legs of a serial I/O chip (I forget the part number) directly to the motherboard; and other wires from the chip to a port connector. Stuffed the whole thing under the integrated keyboard, melted a hole in the case to dangle the port outta...
*That* was hacking. Have gun, will solder. Whoo-hoo!
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I don't really care if it's water cooling, magic pink smoke, immersing in an oil bath, or whatever it takes to accomplish the task...
:-(
...what I want, more than overclocking, is for the freakin' roar of three fans to be silenced! My god, this box is noisy.
While I love the speed of my new computer, I kinda long for the days of my AMD K2-200, which didn't have any fans at all. Not on the CPU, not for the case, and not in the power supply. Just hung the latter outside the box for convection cooling and, oh!, was it a quiet machine...
This machine would start glowing if the fans were stopped...
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Most of these people say that it would be cheaper to buy a new processor, but in actuallity you can build a good water cooling system for less than $100USD, factor in a new processor and fan, and thats quite cheap. Hell, why not buy a new processor and add a water cooling system.
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I would love nothing more than to get a 1ghz+ machine that I will actually allow me to sleep when I leave it on, never mind that annoying incessant buzz. Does anyone have any links to some known high quality OEMs or whatever that assemble this stuff for you at reasonable cost? Like I would be willing to pay a significant premium, but despite my technical abilities, I simply don't have the time to spend hours running around looking for parts and/or assembling a zillion different things.
On a slightly seperate note, I think someone needs to make high-end PCs, sorta like how Mercedes or BMW is to cars, combination between a case and/or a full PC (as in assembly). Not necessarily always the fastest or most advanced technologically, but rather a framework which those things can be adapted to in a pleasant manner. i.e., nice looking, really easy to open/access, as quiet as possible, flexible, etc.
Do you know of any manufacturers that make cases and fans to accomodate this? Have any links?
Most of these people say that it would be cheaper to buy a new processor, but in actuallity...
Not only is it cheaper to do a water-cooled rig as you suggest, but in addition the water cooling rig can be reused for all of your CPU purchases. A friend of mine has been using the same rig since the original Pentium days. Whenever he gets a new CPU, he just has to change the CPU cooling block (pretty cheap) and presto, he's back in business. So it's great, because he always gets more speed out of every CPU he buys. That's more than I can say for my CPU fan purchases - seems like every time I upgrade, I shell out $40 for the top-of-the-line platinum-coated super-groovy Orb, but it goes out the door with the old CPU every time, and it's not reusable.
Plus, if you build a shell for the hard drive or other components, those are usually completely reusable. He's been using the same 3.5" water cool shell since he started, and the same video card chip cooler. These things have lasted beyond several upgrades. Pretty slick.
What's your damage, Heather?
Overclocking is an end in itself. There's not much to be gained that can't be gained through a few bucks well spent, particularly if you factor in the overhead that is involved when setting up that water cooling rig. Extra parts, setup time, hardware failure when screwups happen(not to mention shortened hardware lifespan and bye bye warranty). The same can be said for monitoring the cooling system designed for this purpose. Trollish as it may sound, overclocking doesn't get you anywhere and is a waste of time.
...who once said that 640k of memory should be enough for anybody. But really, what the hell do we need these extra 10-20% speed boosts for at this point besides Q3 benchmarks to impress your l337 friends? I don't know what amazes me more: that the Powerbook I carry around is 10 times more powerful than the Cray supercomputers of 20 years ago, or that I still watch it struggle to resize a window under OSX.
Hrm. All right, maybe we do need to overclock our machines still. But something is terribly wrong.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
On second thought, maybe I'll just stick with old-fashioned air.
While the cost/performance boost ratio for watercooling is questionable, I've got a Duron750@1000 running here with a $30 HSF. The processor cost me $50. Voided my warranty, sure, but it's _$50_ :D
The main reason behind setting up watercooling systems is for the "cool!" factor; if your nerd friends come over and see the tubes and radiators snaking their way around your machine they'll say "whoa." These are the same kinds of people who spraypaint their cases and run hardware websites obsessing about components that come on blue toned PCB.
It's sort of like how I've got a million gamepads kicking around here, but I just had to solder up a set each of SNESpads, PSX pads, and NES pads.
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I think it seems to be missing some sort of indicator to my computer so that my computer knows what the flow rate it and can shut itself off (or adjust the clock speed) after it's gone for a certain amount of time at dangerously low flows. Otherwise it's just a visual indicator to me, but if I'm not by my computer it doesn't do me much good.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
Almost two years ago I spent around $450 on building a dual celeron 333 box and overclocked it to 500mhz. Running winbench its equal in speed to a 1ghz Athlon. Tell me that wasn't worth the price. Given how fast technology is growing, a 5 year warranty on the cpu is worthless. In 5 years your box probably won't even be around.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
What next? Will punched cards come back in vogue?
Come on, there are always people with enough time to do these sorts of things.
.com shakeout effects everyone, and is constantly adding to the ranks of people who have time to pursue projects like this. The latest group of geeks who will have time to pursue this are those from cyberRebate.com
I wish I had enough time to do these sorts of things. That wouild mean (hopefully) that I had enough money to free up my time. The
Best of luck to them.
--CTH
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You need to use larger fans. If you use small cpu fans, small case fans, and spin them as fast as a fucking hard drive, you will get a loud as fuck case.
I have a single 120mm fan running in the front of my case, an 80mm CPU fan, and a 120mm fan blowing out of my case. This all required a case mod, but it was worth it. I get 2x more airflow through my case than the same case with louder [read: faster] 80mm case fans. To top it off, my ambient case temperature is 10c cooler than it was with high speed 80mm fans, and my cpu temperature is 15c cooler with the big heatsink, and big, slower 80mm fan (big compared to standard 50 and 60mm cpu fans).
As a nice side affect, bigger fans can spin slower and push the same or more air, this means less power. with the same case, when i switched to 120mm case and 80mm cpu fans, it use 5% less power[than old cooling setup] when the machine is at full load. This is a very good setup. I have the quietest computer on the block, and my fans costed me like $2 more than standard fans.
some other tips on keeping your case quiet:
Screw down your hard drives using ALL the screws, and do it firmly. I use rubber washers in between my HDD and case. thin cardboard cutouts also do this job quite well.(this decreases the heat that can come off the hdd, so be carefull if you have high speed hdd's such as 10k and 15k RPM models) This decreases the amount of vibration your hard drive sends to your case, and can REALLY quiet things up.
Make sure your CDROM drive is screwed down firmly! this drastically reduces noise when a 50x cdrom is spinning off its bearings!
Replace your fans when they get noisy. Ball bearing fans last longer, and only cost 1 or 2 dollars more than sleave bearing fans.
I really wish ATX cases came standard with 120mm fan spaces. there is PLENTY of space on the case to cut a bigger hole, but they do not and expect people to settle with 80mm. You all wonder why the Mac G4 desktop is so quiet? Simple, insted of using multiple fans (60mm cpu fan, 80mm PSU fan, 80mm case fan like dell, gateway) they use a SINGLE 120mm heat sensitive fan mounted on the case directly over their oversized heatsink. the fan exausts air out of the case, and pulls it from the hot cpu. there is no need for 50 fans in a case if you use proper air direction, and hardware placement.
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.