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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'll stick to good ol' liquid nitrogen
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That's kind of a stretch on their part. Try 2 kits, each with 2 differently sized heat transfer blocks. To save you some time, they like the one from Innovatech, and despise the other one. Want a big surprise? They like BOTH "kits" from Innovatech and hate BOTH "kits" from the other guys
But the Water Still's least expensive cooler runs around $169. That model doesn't even have 'hot and cold' options. It'd be cheaper just to keep my bottled water in the refrigerator.
Seriously, I've often considered water cooling in my Athlon system, but every time I decide to go ahead and order it, the night before I place the order, I have a horrible nightmare about sparks and electrical fire leaping up out of my computer from where the water-line broke.
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But in terms of voiding warranties, possibly destroying hardware, and overheating delicate computer systems, I never really had the urge to do it. I just can't understand the reasoning behind overclocking a processor just to squeeze a couple of extra megahertz out of it, when it's nearly impossible to tell the difference between MHz these days.
Any overclockers care to enlighten me regarding the reasoning behind overclocking?
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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.
Actually, I should have posted above this too...
Ars Technica Ars OpenForum 2.0a Case and Cooling Fetish
...gives you a chance to talk to real people about this topic, rather than reading reviews and articles.
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And nothing will earn more respect and admiration from the hardware fan as a water cooler.
That's funny, I would have thought the fan would be jealous of the water cooler.
"And like that
If you use destilled water it doesn't conduct and you should be fine, even IF it leaks.
True, but the problem remains that if that water leaks, it is most likely going to pick up deposits off of the motherboard and become conductive. Think of all of the dust and grime that collects inside of a case as time goes by due to the power supply fans and whichever other fans happen to be in there.
I do know of one case where someone tried to submerge their entire motherboard, power supply, and daughter cards, but they used mineral oil instead of water. This would be over at Dr. Ffreeze's website.
I don't care what kind of cooling my system uses I just wish they will one day come up with something QUIET!
I mean, listening to all them fans is irritating enough, I don't need an addition of gurgling and refrigerator noises, however appropriate those may be in some games.
I, for one, would be really happy if they started making AMD athlon XP 2000 processors, clocked down to the equivalent of an athlon 1Ghz. Fast enough for most purposes and maybe that'll allow me to ditch the fan and the accompanying noise.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
What about SMP systems?
Do I have to buy 2 seperate systems for my processors or can I just pipe in a second waterblock? also has anyone done any examples of how this provides a significant improvement over a giant block of aluminum and a couple of good fans?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
<VOICE STYLE="Yoda">Two sides of the same coin, we are</VOICE>
The car analogy is another good one; I personally don't care about tweaking my car, but I have friends here at work who talk about racing their cars, exhaust systems, distributor caps, etc. I just sit back and nod, not having the first clue what they're talking about. I guess that's just a type of personality, and I don't have it. Thanks, cavemanf16.
In the days of the Celeron 300a this made sense⦠but now? I mean how much difference, REALLY, do you notice between 100 and 120 fps? Or how much better is your life going to get if your kernel compile is 1.2 seconds faster?
Donâ(TM)t get me wrong⦠faster is always good⦠but the costs⦠some people spend more money on overclocking gear for there machine then it would cost to just buy the faster processor in the first place. There is also the noise that all this stuff generates. I would much rather spend the extra money to make my computer more quieter.
Just my 2 cents CDN (about 0.3 cents USD)
--- tracer.ca
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
The problem of course is the quantity of dust in the average computer. Any leaks are going to automatically create impure water as soon as it hits a dusty chip. This may not be good.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I think people are forgetting that there are easier (and reasonably cheap) ways to speed up your computer.
First, get as much RAM as you can afford. Get at least 128 MB RAM; however, with the price of SDRAM DIMM's being so dirt-cheap nowadays you might as well get 256 MB or even 512 MB. With that much RAM, you can open way more programs concurrently and also because you use the hard drive way less for virtual memory, programs in general can run as much as 60% or more faster.
Second, get the fastest hard drive you can afford. If you system supports ATA-33/66/100/133 IDE interface connections, make sure the drive runs at 7200 rpm and make sure the drive has a generous buffer memory size (2 MB minimum).
I don't find overclocking such a great idea, especially now with the price of CPU's dropping like stone in water even for the faster CPU's.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
I don't feel that the conclusions reached by Tom's Hardware are quite fair. Yes, the Innovatek coolers cooled better than the Swiftech models, but not by all that much. It may very well be that the Innovatek has better quality hardware as well. However, I found one key element missing from their tests. They posted no accoustic measurments, even though they posted a picture of their "sound level meter". If the Swiftech kit can cool better than the premier aircooled device, but do so without a fan, that sounds like a good deal to me. I would also like to see the prices of the various systems.
Innovatek is a popular name, but this seems to be the web site for the manufacturer referenced in the article. The English version isn't ready yet, so be German or be Babelfish.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
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-
For $200, just get a Koolance PC2-C case. Cools perfectly, huge capacity, pre-assembled solution. I got one a month ago, and it is wonderful. Plus, it comes in a very nice-looking case, with a space for the tank, radiator, fans, etc very nicely planned out. Plus, they offer hard drive and video chipset coolers as add-ons that you can simply put in-line.
You can also use a nifty chemical marketed under the name "Florinert" I believe... completely non-conductive. I remember seeing an overclocking test where they submerged the MB in this stuff and started pouring in liquid nitrogen too... very cool!
I'd feel much more comfortable filling a "water" cooling system with that stuff, just in case.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
USD200 for a cooling "solution" that does worse than a good old fashioned heat sink and fan? Check out this link over at Lost Circuits. I could /.'ed any of the many roundups out there but randomly chose this one. The best performing heatsink kept their test chip (a 1900+ overclocked to what should be around a 2000+) at 46C at full load, and that cooler runs for about USD72. Heck, for a top of the line (for the moment) Athlon XP 1900+ you're putting out about $250 and going a step down saves you USD60.
If we were still in the days when major steps up in CPU speed were measured in the hundreds of dollars then these coolers would be a good idea, but we're not anymore. Buy a decent heatsink and a couple quiet case fans with filters and you're far better off in the long run.
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?
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Amonia heat pipe coolers are closed-loop systems that require no pump and are very reliable. We used them on satellites (to even out the "in the sun" side and the "in the darkness of space" side). These are more common in laptops (my inspiron 7000 uses one, and so does the titanium powerbook). If you want to play with one, the (now discontinued and cheap) dreamcast systems have two of them (pictures here), but the heatsink on the end of them probably isn't big enough for a standard desktop cpu.
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eg: Many metals have a specific heat in the low hundreds. Water is in the mid-thousands. So, a one degree celcius temperature change in the water is in excess of a 10 degree change in the metal.
(This is why water-cooling is popular. Not because water is magic, but because finding a liquid with a lower freezing point and a comparable specific heat is a royal pain.)
Typically, what someone would do is add something to the water, to lower the freezing point. This almost invariably lowers the specific heat, too, but it's a decent compromise, usually. The water is then piped over the relevent components, dragging the heat with it. The water is then cooled by a second cooling system, often freon-based refrigeration. This takes the heat from the water, and (hopefully) gets rid of it fast enough.
The science of heat transfer is not impossibly complex, but it's not trivial, either. The heat and the specific heat are what are important. The temperature is merely a function of these.
(This is why liquid nitrogen sounds good, but isn't really used much. The specific heat is too low, so the temperature rises comparitively quickly. Useless for cooling, unless you have a LOT of liquid nitrogen and are piping it at a decent pace. That makes the pump more expensive, for a start, and would make it essential to use large reservoirs, which you'd need to keep refilling.)
Talking of cooling, there's a pelzier device over on one site linked to from extremecooling.org, which has a delta T of 140 degrees celcius. It's cheap, too. Dragging that kind of temperature off a chip could make cooling -seriously- fun. Again, you'd only need water cooling, to transport the heat, but you'd end up with a chip temperature about that of liquid nitrogen, without the expense, hastle or complications.
Oh, one other thing. Condensation is a killer, when supercooling. Usually, overclockers seem to just waterproof the relevent chip, but heat doesn't stay put. It dissipates. This means that heat will flow from hotter points to colder points. Which means that any water vapor in the air is not guaranteed to stay in the air.
Three possible solutions to this: First, strap on some kind of air conditioner for drying the air, so that there is no moisture in the case to condense. Might work, provided the case was otherwise air-tight. The second option is to not have any air in the case, in the first place. Again, make it air-tight, then set up a partial vaccuum inside. If there's no air, then there's nothing to hold the water. The third option has already been given a Slashdot article, and that's to flood the case with a non-conducting medium that does not mix with water, such as mineral oil. This will keep the water away from anything vital, and might actually help with the cooling effort, across the entire motherboard.
When dissipating the heat, however you build the case, don't forget to have a reflective surface between your dissipation system and the computer. Otherwise, half the heat goes right back into the case, and you're just baking the other chips.
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)
I'm not too sure I'd use the fan speed monitor that comes with the Innovatek... it looks like it could do some damage to a motherboard!
This image on page 3 of the article shows a 4-headed cable. Two connectors form a short disk drive power supply extension cord, with the two outer pins (+5v and +12v) tapped off to supply power to the fans. This trick allows the fan to run off of 12-5 = 7 volts (uh, they messed up the math, calling this 8 volts). These red and black wires go to what looks like a male connector to go to the fan. Then, a yellow wire comes from the fan and seems to go to a motherboard fan connector. That's the problem.
First, a little background. As I understand it, the speed feedback is essentially a switch that connects the yellow wire to ground two times per revolution. The motherboard must supply a little bit of power (in the form of a pull-up resistor) to actually get a signal out. This works well because, since the motherboard is supplying the power, it can make sure it doesn't supply too much voltage. If the chipset is 5 volts (impossibly rare nowdays), it'll supply 5 volts. If it's 3.3, it'll supply 3.3. This way, a fan can be used with any voltage chipset.
Ok, the problem is that the ground pin of the fan is connected to the 5 volt power supply. This is the trick used to get 7 volts. The fan will spin and connect the speed feedback wire to the 5 volt "ground". If you've got a chipset that uses 3.3 volts (most likely), you'll be feeding 5 volts into your 3.3 chip - a big no no that could burn out the speed input or the chip (which probably handles lots of other functions you wouldn't want to lose). The voltage on this pin will oscillate between 5 volts and 3.3 volts - not the 0 to 3.3 it expects. If you have a 5 volt chipset, then this pin will oscillate between 5v (shorted to "ground") and, uh, 5 volts (pulled up by the chipset)... so, while not doing any damage in that case, wouldn't work.
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now I just need to hook one end up to a water supply and the other to a coffee filter with an IV tube for that extra shot of high adrelanine computing :)
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).
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With "IT'S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME" as a qualifier anything is possible (It's only a matter of time before you fond yourself spontaneously transported to the surface of the moon). Also remember that automotive cooling systems are pressurized, run at 150+ degrees F, have to deal with constant vibration, and still go years without leaking. I'd say that your computer is almost certain to be landfill before it leaks with a really well engineered water cooling system.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Its really spendy stuff. Like $500usd/gal...
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
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