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Power Water Cooling Kits
msolnik writes: "Toms Hardware has but together a head to head comparison of 4 different water cooling kits. Instead of buying each part seperately these kits come with everything needed. I would love to use water cooling but there is just something about having water inside of my case that makes me very uneasy. But for all you hardcore overclockers out there this may help you out a lot."
It's been tried. There are a couple of sites out there about doing this very thing to a motherboard, such as at the Mission Impossible site.
The problem appears that it is pretty hard to get from a sub zero level of -40C to the much cooler temperatures that liquid nitrogen provides without cracking something on the motherboard or CPU and killing the system completely.
I think one of the best water coolers I have ever seen was when these guys built a heat exchanger on the principle of heat loss through water evaporation. Very nice concept, and it approached the idea of cooling water down properly in the first place.
Many years ago I worked in a lab where shipboard sonar equipment was being built. Their cooling system for the high power units consisted of aluminum plates with embedded copper tubing carrying filtered sea water right through the rack of electronics. It carried away the heat quite well, but the whole thought of using sea water was antithetical to everything I would normally consider.
On the other hand, large high power vacuum tubes have been water cooled for many decades. The most impressive were the vapor-phase cooling units in which the cooling was done by boiling the water off of the external anode of the tube. The steam was then condensed back into water in an outdoor cooling tower.
Soli Deo Gloria
To me, it is more of sound issue then overclocking issue. If I can lower the sound of my PC, I'm in. No 120,000,000 RPM fan whirling away on the processor should help.
When I was a Sonar Technician in the US Navy, we used large display consoles with dual 21" display units in them. They ran on on 120v/400Hz power and the driving units got very hot. They were cooled with distilled water that ran through a fairly complex chilling operation (after all, it's a government operation, right?).
One of the cooling loops inside a console sprung a leak and sprayed water around. Now bear in mind that the voltages inside these display units are like those in a TV set, so they're substantially greater than a computer's, but the resulting fireworks INSIDE the sealed cabinet just about sent me crawling up the nearest bulkhead. Noise, sparks and a tremendous mess that ultimately cost about $50,000 to repair. And it wasn't uncommon...about once a year a cooling loop would let go on some piece of equipment.
Incidentally, the only reason that the loops used distilled water was so that there would be little or no mineral buildup inside the cooling loops. In some cases, the stainless tubing in use was quite small, perhaps a quarter inch in diameter. Believe me, once that water hit the equipment, even a bit of accumulated dust caused it to conduct quite well, thank you!
-h-
That way i dont have to worry about leakage from othar than my memory all the time. Residues inside the pipes may be able to fry your cpu over time aswell. Besides, with cpus running at 2.2 Mhz, isnt the biggest speedblock right now the pipe between the cpu and the periferals? No big gain to have a cpu that runs circles around the mem/hd/internet connection is it?
HTTP/1.1 400
Bzzzt, wrongo. Distributed.net's RC5 cracking program uses 100% of the CPU and I've had ALL of my overclocked computers working on that for YEARS now. Stable? Yup, rock solid. Granted those systems aren't pushed as far to the edge as my primary workstation but they're all overclocked and two are running dual overclocked CPUs as well. Heat load in the room is pretty bad unfortunatly as is noise.
:-)
:-) Cracked passwords in a noticably shorter time and dual CPUs makes it even better. Until I see a good distributed password cracker that actually works for the WIN32 platform faster CPU speeds is what I need. Heh, and yes this is for legit purposes so leave me alone about it.
As a result I tried using water as a coolant and using Peltiers in order to truly cool down my CPU in the primary workstation. I sourced a fountain pump, trans cooler, large bucket, and built a plastic cap from PVC placed over a standard heatsink. Below this I placed a surplus Peltier and away I went! Ran great too! I placed the trans cooler with a fan on it outside my room's window and noiced one BIG difference - NO NOISE! Talk about a relief, it was great.
Eventually I did run into a problem and it did kill some hardware. My system locked up for some unknown reason. The result was that I no longer had a heat load on the cooling device - a large block of ICE was the result. Was pretty weird to see that when I cam home too! As the outer edges of the ice melted it would drip onto my video card - doh! I ended up losing my video card and having to use a hairdryer on my CPU socket to remove the condensation that had melted. There are ways to prevent most of this but at the time they weren't well known and never thought that a lockup would have this result - I learned the hard way
Thus ended my particular attempt at water cooling. I DO think it's viable though and the newer systems coming out are MUCH more professional than what I had cobbled together several years ago. I'm tempted to try again but I'm starting to grow weary of the Distributed.net contest. My registered E-mail (one registered in the first few months) is no longer valid, I no longer compete with friends for position as they've moved on, and I seldom check my ranking anymore (shrug). I've also not played a graphics intensive game lately that would require such speed. I used to be able to nearly double the speed of a CPU by dropping it's temp into the basement, now with my 1.4Gig Athlon I'm not so sure that I'll get very much out of it. Okay, it is overclocked some but not much - it's a sickness I tell you!
Oh, and I DID see noticable framerate increases by overclocking my CPUs, especially on floating point dependant games of old. These days yes mostly th evideo card is the bottleneck but for programs like Distributed.net it's sure not a problem. CPU temp rises several degrees running such a program if you've got a marginal heatsink.
Do any rendering or compiling? Password cracking? Consider overclocking, done RIGHT with adequate cooling it IS worth it. You spend DAYS rendering something right? What if you could cut 1/3rd off of that? Worth it? I'd do it - at least until I can buy a 1.5gig X 2 AMD system cheaply
P.S. Yes, I hop-up up cars too. If you're afraid of monkeying with one of those then I'm not surprised you won't fiddle with a computer's guts either. BTW, what's a warranty? I've not had one on a computer in years as I build all of my own and save lot's of cash (shrug).
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
For anyone who's interested in watercooling a work/production machine, I had great results and gained a LOT of stabilty. Just be sure to install a GFCI on the outlet! The importance of this isn't mentioned in a lot of the commercial kits and could be a life-saving precaution.
The URL to the install, where I got it, how I managed to make it all fit inside a standard mid-tower case along with 4 hard drives and 2 cdroms, etc, can be found at: www.nyx.net/~smanley/watercool
Definately a great learning experience!
..don't panic