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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."
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.
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-