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Tom's Guide to Water Cooling
Aaron Cherrington writes "Tom's Hardware Guide has a pretty impressive rundown on how to setup a fairly sophisticated water-cooling system for your ever-growing heat problem in your proc/foundry. The guide even includes a movie! Funny how computers are beginning to develop like the early automobile industry."
Much like my mech did in Mechwarrior, my computer has heat sinks to cool it. It even has a laser (in the CD rom drive). It has a plastic armor casing...
I've always been nervous about the idea of mixing water and electricity...
I understand the need to be on the cutting edge of technology, and to puch your hardware right to the edge of the envelope... But isn't a water cooling system in a PC going just a *little* overboard for that extra 5% performance boost? Especially today when 2ghz processors are the norm. How fast does it really need to be?
But hey, to each his own. Or her own, I suppose.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
If you're going to go with liquid cooling, you have to go with liquid nitrogen. Don't settle for anything less.
.sig, what's that?
There's no sig like SIGSEG
That's why it's preferable to use distilled water, a very poor conductor.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Um, dude, in case you haven't noticed, computers have been around since the mid-1940s.
- A.P. (liquid-cooled computing has been around for decades, too.)
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Much like automobiles, computers are a fad and will soon fade away. They will be replaced by something else a good American invents.
Let me guess: one frame per page?
sulli
RTFJ.
Heres a site where you can purchase some pretty nice water cooled cases.U SA also has some.. atleast the ones here do.
http://www.overclockershideout.com/
Comp
What was your username again? -BOFH
And as usual, his banner ad's craps out when hit by the slashdot crowd. :) Get a new banner server dude.
for the time and effort spent on this -- get some flourinert and just full-submerge your PC. a gallon is ~500 bux, cheaper if you buy more. Or hook up with somebody with access to some and buy used liquid for cheap ;-) -- it's used in all sorts of high precision equipment(s)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Now if only, I could link my dual Athlon to the aquarium housing my tropical fish collection...
IANAL, but imagine a beowulf cluster of in Soviet Russia all your belong are base to us welcoming the new SCO overlords.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
This post is certified by me, Anonymous Coward, and is a 100% authentic beowulf cluster troll post. The reader is hereby authorized by me, Anonymous Coward, to imagine a beowulf cluster of the items, in whole, or in part, or in any combination thereof at the sole discretion of the reader, in the related news story to which this post pertains.
Since someone is going to say something about running water through your system and how you don't trust it, etc. etc. etc.. There are alternatives out there such as flourinert that have similar thermal properties but don't carry charges well. More expensive then water + wetting solution, but gives MUCH more peace of mind if you happen to be a paranoid person. Here's a link to an OC forum with a story or two on how the product behaves as well. A better article on watercooling (to the insane extreme) can be found here.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
When you can boil fresh eggs for free?
Gator (Gain) is not running on my system...f that..
Is there a FREE codec out there?
Didn't some software genuis say, that if we made cars like we make software, they would cost $20 and go 1000 miles to the gallon?
I believe the response was that if we made cars like we make software; we'd expect the car to crash twice a day, and to troubleshoot we'd ask the owner to remove and re-install the engine.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
No, that's why we need to bring back unregulated Chlorofluorocarbons! Bathe your box in "inert" high heat-capacity liquid!
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Let's take watercooling as an example. Heating water breaks the molecules apart. This is OK (up to a point) for pure water, but nobody actually uses pure water. Instead we use tap water, full of lead, acidophilus and other harmful toxins. When the heat from the overclocked PC causes those toxins to be released into the air--whoa nellie, we have ourselves an EPA Superfund site in a bottle.
Of course, anybody who's even slightly concerned about the environment knows all the above already. The trouble is self-centered morons like this guy who think the rules don't apply to him or that "just one more overclocked PC won't hurt anything". So please, Slashdot, quit glorifying this destructive pasttime and instead advocate the right solution: a new PC every six months.
With a decent pump a water cooling system is practically silent.
Great. I guess we'll all be anxiously awaiting the arrival of Ralph Nader's new book, Uncoolable at Any Clock Speed.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Why do people even submit the stories? The Slashdot editors will probably post them anyways. Not to critize TH; it just seems that whenever they post a new article, it shows up a few hours later on the Slashdot front page. Maybe Slashdot needs a special "Tom's Hardware" topic or even it's own section (th.slashdot.org).
good guide on hardware for watercooling, but the video has the most atrocious trance as the background music that's been heard since 1999!
Photos.
flourinert can build up static charges running through the tubing; and whet the charges get high enough, ZAP and there is a hole in your tube. (yes i speak from experience)
now, if you say "oh well at least it does not conduct electricity / short out my board" -- well, there is two problems with that: 1) thermally, your CPU will die, fast. 2) flourinert is damn expensive (~500 US / gal last i checked) -- having it leaking out of a hole onto the floor is not a good idea; 3) it is environmentally hazardous -- not that you might care -- but i'd figue i would mention it instead of having people wonder why there are locallized holes in the ozone layer above their neighborhood.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Another solution is to blow cool air over the hot parts, cooling them naturally and safely. No, you don't need to use the computer in a wind tunnel, just several fans / cold air guns / natives waving bannana leaves.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Seems to offset the actual value / use of having a system that runs 50 mhz faster.
After the tubing has been installed and the cooling circuit has been closed, turn the pump on, then pour the distilled water into the header tank until the entire system is filled with water. In order to break the surface tension of the water and prevent air bubbles from forming, add a drop of dishwashing liquid.
original page
I can think of something better to use than dishwashing liquid. Red Line Oil makes something called Water Wetter which does the same thing; Its primary function is to lessen water's surface tension in cooling systems in cars. From Red Line's webpage on the product (with advantages relating only to vehicles removed):
BENEFIT SUMMARY
You can get a bottle of this, put a little bit in with your tiny computer cooling system, the rest in your car's, and you'll have better cooling all around. And this stuff prevents foaming, rather than promoting it like dishwasher liquid.
Do you think you could record this to MP3 and
post it along with the next troll? This is
truely inspired!
I have a water-cooled dual Athlon (water-cooler by Swiftech) and am very happy with it. For me, it's not about overclocking, it's about noise control. Because the water pump is practically silent. The only noise I get from my system is the power supply fan and the case fan, and these are both pretty quiet (courtesy of Enermax, which makes the quietest power supply I've ever heard). I was so tired of listening to the whine of high-RPM CPU cooling fans, so I decided to build a nice, quiet system. Water-cooling has turned out to be quite satisfactory for me.
Sometimes you gotta be careful with this cooling business. Had a friend who hooked up a peltier to his computer, but got it *too cold*, and ended up condensating on his board and corroded all his little sensistive surface mount components! I keep asking him why he does it, I think it's an addiction or something. He never did anything past seeing how many thousands of frames per second he could get in Quake.
manufacturers should take a different path and bid adieu to the game of Gigahertz and Megabyte numbers.
Last time I checked they were using Gigabytes?
It depends on how you define, "out of control." Today's machines throw off tons of heat, and conventional coolers use a fight fire with fire method, expending power in the case to move fan blades ever faster to remove heat. A PC these days usually has 4 fans in it, more if you cool your hard drives, or want to double up. Water Cooling is an order of magnitude better at heat removal for the power consumed, and doing it quietly. And while about 6 months to a year ago it was a crude, voodoo art, companies are producing high end products that make it viable. It is a meer matter of time before the products start trickling down into cheaper less effective price ranges for those who want to just cool their processor, graphics card, etc, with a water based system. There are many sites that will allow you to do it on the cheap, and if youre building a system, and opt to use water instead of the conventional fans, you wont be spending much more money and youll have a quieter system. So, as you see, this isnt a matter of necessary, this is a matter of a better way to cool. I think in a few years, this stuff could be used in OEM PC's.
-K
It's rather ironic that IBM and other large systems makers have spent millions of $$ to get rid of water cooling in their systems. The good old water-cooled TCM (Thermal Conduction Module) of IBM's 1990 mainframes was a very impressive piece of mechanical and thermal engineering. If you worry about the heat generated by a single CPU, imaging what it was like to cool one of these babies.
TCMs included spring-loaded copper pistons to maintain good thermal contacts on the chips. The thing was a plumber's nightmare. I remember an IBM field engineer who had to improvise a pipe soldering the night before a computer show because 1) there was no water cooling at the stands (geez, what an oversight), 2) IBM had to require a fire permit to let the plumber light a soldering torch, 3) by the time the fire permit came in, the unionized plumber was home while the on-salary, no-family-life engineer was getting ready for a looong night. Those were the days, when computers were freakin' huge and had to be watered like thirsty dinosaurs.
As a side note, the need for TCM was considered a nuisance. Customers released a collective sigh of relief when IBM dropped their fast but power-hungry bipolar technology in favor of cheaper, easier to cool CMOS chips. It's a shame that Intel's sloppy designs force an entire industry to go back to watering the dinos.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
By that time, the water would have leaked out and the flow meter would stop, alerting your BIOS.
I can see it coming. Every 30,000 teraflops I'll have to haul the computer to Bendover's Quick-lube and have the coolant flushed or the warranty will be void.
Definitely loss of points at the end there. He "tipped his hand" in the lingo. Granted, there are many slashbots who think nothing of buying a new PC every 6 months and wouldn't even notice this, but most people would recognize this as "hyperbole"--a sure sign of a troll.
On the other hand, the results speak for themselves.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Koolance has been building this type of system for quite a while now. The parts are almost identical except Koolance incorporates the radiator at the top of the case with with 'blowhole' fans moving the air and a digital temperature readout. Their more recent designs are modified Antec/Chieftec/Alienware tower cases (you can even get them with a window... geez...). The original cases were somewhat more impressive as they incorporated a liquid-cooled power supply as well. One amusing 'coming soon' product on their website is a liquid-cooled 1U case. I keep imagining a whole rack of these units and one word springs to mind: waterfall.
Maybe I missed something, but this picture suggeste the heat of the processor is used to warm up the harddisk (or the other way around). Either way I think this is not what you want.
Still, it looks VERY cool.
Privacy is terrorism.
I wonder how feasible it would be to use a compressed gas for cooling instead. They make those air duster things, which is just air compressed into a liquid. You could use cans of that to fill the system up. Once it's all filled, it should bew just like moving any other liquid around. If you get a leak, nothing gets wet and nothing blows up.
What do you think?
And hunting rabbits.
At which point your Athlon will have incinerated your entire system.
Its not Intel's "sloppy designs" which have caused water cooling to come back into style. Actually a big reason most people do it, such as myself, is because we get sick of the noise, which is not entirely the processor's fault. Its beautiful to have a PC that's like any other applience, you don't notice it unless you need to use it.
On the engineering front, every modern good performing processor needs cooling. The number of transisters per cubic cm is enormous and increasing, so we're getting bigger chips using more energy and thus producing more heat. This is where a new technology must come and replace it, just like CMOS did with bipolar. Circuit engineers only pay attention to heat during the design phase if its a criteria (which isn't so much on processors) and is mostly left to those in the fabrication stage to optimize and fix. Only in the last few years has any decent energy saving technology started to become popular and important to designers, but in essence until heat is a limitting factor designs will focus on higher performance through novel techniques and providing developers with better tools (instruction sets).
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
Actually you want distilled deionized water with some Water Wetter or something like that. Although it might be worth the added risk to be able to say you need to pick up some Evion for your computer.
If you are worried about water, then get some actual deionized H2O.
Won't carry charges even if you submerge the computer in it, as long as you don't dump salt or any other material that will ionize.
-- Tino Didriksen / Project JJ
They even have cup holders. And I thought that was a CD tray - doh!
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The watercooling looked pretty neat. However, I didn't see any benchmarks for how much faster you could overclock your CPU if you went the water route. Anyone have any links for overclocked P4s & AMDs comparing and contrasting water cooling vs tradional fan coolage?
WTF is up with all the redundant mods in this thread? Is this the velvet-glove bitchslap, Taco?
I read a lot of claims about it being a silent cooling solution, and yet the parts consist of a pump and a large fan attached to the radiator. Not to mention the already existing HD and power supply fan. These things aren't exactly quiet in my experience.
Then again, I'm guessing that because of the watercooling, airflow isn't of as much importance so it can be stored away in a closed compartment, with perhaps only the radiator sitting outside your window or something. It would be nice to see a hack which cooled the power supply too, though perhaps its not real wise to have water running through such a high voltage component.
I.O.U One Sig.
I prefer the Lesser B.C.T.P. Version 2 (or any later version, at my discretion).
Does anyone really need a guide for water cooling??? Are there that many people out there who don't know how to cool water???
(Hint: use ice)
Maybe I missed it, but it would be nice if the article had some objective data on the resultant noise levels.
S.
bah. use properly distilled water. as long as you don't contaminate it too much, it won't be conductive either. it's the dissolved ions that usually cause conduction in water.
:)
(since you're covered in salt, don't expect distilled water to save you in the bath if you drop a hairdryer in it)
you'll find it's a good deal cheaper than a bucketload of mineral turpentine. you'll also find out that they use distilled water to clean computing components after the fabrication process is done. any excess will be great for cleaning dust off components.
doesn't kill toddlers when they drink it either.
ashridah
The "Worst Case Scenario" would be having one that rusts. Gives a whole new reason for Lexan cases.
One simple problem with this: dust. All sorts of stuff flies around in the air, and as anyone who's left a system running for three months and opened it knows, it collects in the system. And any skin oils or other deposits left in the system might compromise the non-conductivity of the water.
why is it that in all these liquid coolant systems, everybody uses water, a conductive liquid. do any of you chem eng's out there have suggestions for non-conductive liquids with appropriate thermal qualities?
. . .since this uses a radiator to transfer the systems heat to the air, much like your car does. However, this is not a great solution IMHO, as (a) there will be substantial fluctuations in air temp and (b) the cooling fins on that radiator will probably become clogged with dust very quickly. I doubt if that radiator was designed to run continuously without cleaning, like you would expect in a PC. If you are going to go through the trouble to do this, you might as well pick up a used laboratory circulating water bath (this would mean you do not have buy the pump). These baths contain both heating and cooling elements and will very accurately maintain a setpoint over a wide range of temperatures. Depending on the climate where you live, you would set the temperature with enough of a safety margin so that you do not fall below the dew point and condense water vapor from the atmosphere on your MB. Where I live right now (in Virginia) I think that would be about 1/2 degree below the ambient temperature. It is like a damn steam room here.
Why do you guys keep supporting this plagiarist by linking to his site?
Has anyone out there overclocked and/or water-cooled a Mac? This article has got me interested to try it, but I'm pretty afraid I'll screw it up, especially since all the articles on it seem to be PC oriented. I was mostly interested in getting rid of the fan, so it'd be quieter, but the article mentioned successfully overclocking a pentium 4 to 3000 mhz (apparently 3100 is the limit), and that got me drooling. I wonder how much a g4 can be overclocked?
c-hack.com |
And when are those DivX people gonna get with real MPEG-4 instead of their own proprietary sort-of-MPEG-4 thing?
Does anybody take Physics anymore?
Alcohol is much better than water for cooling and has other nice properties (ie no bacteria or algae).
Yeah. Back in the day, my dad (true story) cooled his Model A hot rod with alcohol.
-=>Funk Master=-
Thanks for the good sport attitude!
Actually going back and back, the original cars were cooled with simply water, which then moved onto alcohol(not that type) :), but moving farther along we get into the ethylene glycol(still alcohol) with older cars(green stuff), and a newer type of antifreeze(orange stuff), is NOT the same as the old green stuff, chemicaly it is diffrent and mixing the two gets you something along the lines of a paste consistancy, that is if it doesn't cause your plastic rad to be eaten alive or disolve your aluminum engine block.
In anycase, the only draw back I can see using the green stuff is it might eat the tubes and pump, the orange stuff might work better since it's designed for aluminum and plastic(modern cars), and isopropyl alcohol will most definatly eat the plastic/rubberish tubes and micro pump your using.
And remeber the golden rule of auto-body and engine building. Do Not Mix STEEL and ALUMINUM together even with a fluid. The aluminum will break down into a powder called aluminum sulfate. And the steel will start to grow aluminum sulfate crystals. So watch the connectors, and watch what the cooling block is made from. And what is used inside the pump for parts.
Om, nomnomnom...
A Person Paper on Purity in Language
Is to find a surplus Liebert chiller. And a raised floor to hide the pipes. And under floor smoke detectors. And a Halon system. And some hardware to make a man trap for the basement stairs. And 2 or 3 CE's standing around drinking coffee....
I miss those 1980's data centers
True, it's not just Intel's fault.
I am fully aware of the constant progression of power density within processors. It's a problem in PowerPC and graphical chipsets, too.
But Intel is in a unique position to tackle the PC cooling problem from a system-wide point of view. Consider this: Intel is one of the largest motherboard suppliers in the world. They sell chipsets, mobos and assemblies. And they never started designing a system-wide cooling solution, in spite of owning many of the critical parts (CPU, bridges, minority stake in DRAM makers). No other actor is in such a position to set standards. Not Dell, not Compaq, not AMD.
That's why I believe Intel's relunctance to tackle this problem is plaguing the whole industry.
Thanks for your answer,
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
I know, nobody actually grounds themselves with a static strap when putting together a PC. But in this movie they handle the CPU with about as much care as your car keys. Either they are lucky or did the video with a dead CPU. I try to use a little more care to prevent frying a new CPU and losing a few hundred bucks.
Anybody want a peanut?
Nice try, but no cigar. When the manufacturer specifies the amount of flow for a given "pressure head", they are telling you how much flow you will get when pushing the water a certain distance uphill. While it is true that your water goes in a circle, and thus not really uphill, the resistance from those skinny hoses, pipes, elbows, and other fittings will have (for a given flow rate) the same effect as some amount of pressure head.
If you could choose, you would choose piping that would have as little resistance to flow as possible. Less resistance to flow lets you use a smaller pump. A smaller pump generates less heat. And that would be that much less heat to remove from the case and dump in your room.
And if we learned anything from Volkswagen,
its that air cooled engines rock when
compared to h2o.
zack
'72 Westfalia
'58 Beetle
'78 Thing
You pull the water through the pipes not push it. If their is a small leak, you just get bubbles.
You all must be the biggest losers on the planet.
Ok, I just watched the video. It was pretty interesting, although the Euro-trash music kinda gave me a headache...
Anyhoo, I noticed that some of the tubes were connected to the nipples with plastic zip-ties. Zip-ties!!! Are you guys INSANE?
Let's see: I spent ~$800 for the parts, hours of planning, and hours of time assembling the parts, but I'm gonna use 10-cent plastic zip-ties??!
What's wrong with these people??
2 words: HOSE CLAMPS. They're metal, and they are a hell of a lot more reliable than those little pieces of plastic you're using.
Sigh...
It's like putting a $15k turbo+intercooler in your car for those extra bhp, when you could've got a more powerful model for $15k
Alas if you don't overclock and your system has too much heat because of all the components, then you should've bought a larger/alluminium case for better heat conduction and install extra fans. There should be adequate airflow around the case, and the room should be well air-conditioned.
Duh, go back to school.
BOOM!
Much, much less.
In general, any RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing device, such as those in Mac and Sun boxen) CPU has fewer stages of logic between registers than a CISC (Complex ISC) CPU (such as x86's). Fewer stages of logic means a higher ratio of wire (metal) to logic gates (silicon) in any given path. Signal propagation delay time in modern semiconductor processes are dominated by wire delays -- silicon gate delays are almost negligible. Also, signal propagation delay time varies with temperature strongly in silicon, but weakly in metal. So temperature effects make a bigger difference to max clock rate on a CISC vs. a RISC. Said differently: there's a smaller window of min/max conditions (PVT = manufacturing Process, Voltage, and Temperature) under which the a RISC CPU will work as intended vs. a CISC CPU.
Note to zealots: this should not be construed as (or used for) taking sides in the inane Mac vs. PC vs. whatever thing. It's about CPU design philosophy and implementation.
The reason Intel (or AMD) sells a CPU as a '1.7GHz' model instead of as a more profitable '2.0GHz' model is that some path of logic between registers in the chip won't work at 2.0GHz under the warranted PVT conditions (for commercial products usually: published MIN-MAX process, +/- 5%, and 0-100 degrees C transistor junction temperature - with a case and built-in cooling that usually allow for -10 to 50 deg C ambient temperature). Cooling (or increasing the volatage -- you can't control the process after the chip is made), is more likely to improve a CISC path than a RISC path (because of the wire to silicon ratio).
So the manufacturer can more easily certify the RISC device for operation at higher clock rates. But that also leaves the user with less room to tinker around, should s/he/it be so inclined.
Sorry for the long post (I've been thinking about this sort of thing in a roundabout and thinly related way for quite some time). Your question fell right in front of my hypno-train.
everything in moderation
I get my Pure H2O as the waste from my fuel cells. These cells run the computer.
The off-the-shelf system that Tom's Hardware demoed is looks great... too bad I can't afford it! :P
No, that's why we need to bring back unregulated Chlorofluorocarbons! Bathe your box in "inert" high heat-capacity liquid!
CFCs were never popular for their heat capacities. They were popular because their boiling points were in the right range and because of their vaporization enthalpies.
--a few times I have detected firewall hits by my hard drive making a "chirping" sound. Kinda neat.
Ya, I know it should be NOT making sounds, it's the one I got....
--if I had a way -mm, theoretically speaking now... to PASSIVELY cool cpus much better than anything on the market, what's the odds it would be used, ie, I could make some bux? Would the geek factor of no moving parts and no electricity required be so low as to make it ignored?
Near as I can figure in production it might run 20 or 30$. Hardly no geek factor to it though, pretty plain jane looking
Thanks for the long post. It was really helpful, if only to fund my inactivity (or keep my funds inactive--a good thing, to be sure!).
c-hack.com |
Using a refrigerant cooling system for a PC, like a modified air conditioner, tends to work pretty well.
The coolant is at a much lower temperature, so it takes longer for it to warm up to the point where your PC fries if the compressor fails.
Secondly, it can be used to lower the temperature even more.
Unfortunately, there is a very serious problem with it. The temperatures are below the dew point, and cause condensation. This will eventually short out/damage the boards.
I've though of one way around that problem though, what if you basically freeze dried the computer? You build a case that is airtight, and won't crush under a vacuum. Then pump out most of the air/moisture with a vacuum pump. Lastly, you fill the case with CO2 or something. You get rid of the moisture, and with it the condensation problem. Its also a whole lot cheaper than Flourinert. The only problems I can see are during the vacuum stage. I'm not sure if there would be any problems with the chips exploding or components leaking in a vacuum?
I might try that sometime and see if it would work. I think the biggest problem would be making the airtight case.
I thought posters were just trolling when they posted about the EE flaws in some of Tom's previous analyses but I see now that his understanding of chemistry and physics is bad too.
Won't carry charges even if you submerge the computer in it, as long as you don't dump salt or any other material that will ionize.
Galvanic cell.
Here.
first google the link.
Lets see, what more advantages are there.
-Makes your car go faster.
-Makes your pc go faster.
-Is a perfect Glycol replacement....
-Prevents your pc from freezing.
Wait.. yes this is a replacement for glycol anti-freeze. I would not just add it to the water, no way to tell what this will do to your waterpump.
I think you watch too much tv at 4AM. Or you just made one small troll.
If it helps, I run ALL the big fans (cpu + 3 case) @ 7v instead of 12v in my PC tower which makes it quite a lot quieter - with no overheating problems. Not sure how hard this is with a MAC, if the fans are powered off molex connectors very easy. see http://www.procooling.com/articles/html/quiet_fans _-_power_control_met.shtml for details. (I'm in no way affiliated with the website). Bear in mind though that I live in England which is a cold country! If your machine room/office/whatever gets hot, I wouldn't bother.
Water Wetter is powerful stuff!
Once, I was talking to another engineer who told me about his discovery of this product. Apparently, a couple of german engineers were paying him a visit, and one had a bottle of this stuff.
There was a small pond (about 60 foot in diameter) beside his company's office that had a few ducks calmly swimming on the water. The german engineer poured half of the bottle in to the edge of the pond, and the surface tension broke across the entire surface. The ducks sunk into the pond and drowned before they had a chance to try to fly away!
I know this is hearsay, but I don't doubt this guy.
-- Len
Aside from being one overworked ad for Innovatek (not the best kit, but Tom sure thinks so), Tom has no idea what he's talking about.
Distilled water isn't used because if it leaks it isn't gonna cause a short...cause it could. There's all kinds of conductive things on your motherboard and the like that like to dissolve in water. Distilled water is used so that you minimize the battery effect between the radiator and waterblock (assuming one is of AL and the other is CU) and to prevent corrosion as much as possible (tap water and the like has all kinds of things that will work away at the waterblock, radiator, and tubes). Most people using a closed loop watercooling system have pinkish water cause they put Watter Wetter in it, which reduces the surface tension.
The location of the radiator DOES NOT MATTER. It's much more important to have the radiator getting it's air from outside the case and ideally blows it back outside the case (with duction or something similar). Radiators are frequently put at the top of cases because it's the most convenient place to put them...they aren't in the way of anything when they're sitting above the PSU.
With regards to his putting the block on the CPU:
"You should not use silver paste because the copper contact plate is very flat. "
That has to be one of the most inane comments I've ever heard. You WANT to use the silver compound because it will actually TRANSFER HEAT. The Silicone stuff is ok if you're not planning on doing great cooling, but silver is much better. The flatness of the block doesn't matter AT ALL in the choice of thermal compound. Silver is still better at being a TIM than silicone even if the core has better contact with the block for the simple reason that there are still gaps, and the micronized silver in Arctic Silver easily fits in them (as it's designed to do)...and will provide better heat transfer than the white goop.
You don't put the tubes on AFTER you've put installed all the parts...you do it FIRST. Putting the tubes on AFTER you put your blocks on is a VERY good way to destroy your computer parts as you're putting uneven pressure on them, and sometimes a goodly amount of that.
You also put them on first so that you can BLEED THE SYSTEM OF AIR. If Tom thinks that dyes can reduce the amount of thermal capacity of water, what do you think AIR does. There's a reason we're using water here...it's tons better than air at transfering heat, heck, air is used as an insulator in windows. So putting AIR in your system is going to GREATLY reduce the cooling capacity of your system.
Then there's the price. You get to pay 200 USD for a minimal cooling solution "kit" that you could get with separate parts for 150...or cheaper. With a better waterblock, too. AND with HOSE CLAMPS! God, zip ties are such a bad idea.
You sir are an idiot.
And that's about all this post warrants. Except maybe a question of who the hell modded you up???
Sheesh! "heating water breaks up the molecules". What sort of "physics genious" doesn't even understand how BOILING works?
Sorry... either he's lying, or the ducks died from something else randomly. Ducks don't rely on surface tension, they have natural bouyancy which is far greater in force than surface tension. In fact, removing surface tension would make it easier for them to swim, as since they break the surface of the water when swimming surface tension slows them down...
You obviously didn't read (or understand) the link you yourself provided to Red Line's webpage. No, this is not a replacement for glycol anti-freeze. Yes, you should just add it to the water. Pure water conducts heat a *lot* better than water+antifreeze. The best hot-day racing coolant is pure water and a bottle of this stuff. So long as your system is running well, you can't possibly overheat. First-hand experience talking, here.
Instead of water use corn mash! Operate a little distillery from your PC!
Use Seti@Home to crank out some extra cycles!
"I was running Distiller, and it wasn't Adobe".
JC
But I just can't let myself have running water that close to my components. I'll take obnoxiously loud fans any day (i.e. my dual 120mm Deltas) over the thought of running water being millimeters away from my beautiful hardware.
All it would take is a small leak somewhere.... Heh.. if its in a well lit room, all you may see is your case starting to brown and melt.