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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."
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?"
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
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.
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."
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.
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?"
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
look a bit lower on the page for the non-pro free version. it took me a sec too, but found it.
I can think of several "new" car companies to burst onto the scene in the last decade. A couple of them have managed to avoid bankruptcy too...
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
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/
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.
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.
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
I found that odd myself. Here is a whole article claiming that the computer system is "nearly silent", and that the movie is available in "three languages".
It turns out that you never get a chance to "hear" the silence of the computer, and the only words are written descriptions of what the components are. IMNSHO the video is a complete waste of bandwidth for anyone who has put together their own computer. I was hoping for something along the lines of a documentary, or (dare I say it?) an infomercial at the worst. What I got was a waste of my time. Bleh.
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?
Contrast it against large heat sinks with huge blower fans.. very noisy.
COmpared to your average PC, this is no quieter.. even a bit louder.
In the overclocking world, it'll be relatively quiet.
There is a version without _any_ spyware.. at least, there was last time I bothered to check.
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 |
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=-
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.
Really? Then you wouldn't be afraid when I dip a hairdryer into your bathtub?
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...
The off-the-shelf system that Tom's Hardware demoed is looks great... too bad I can't afford it! :P
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 |
You wouldn't need a vacuum - all you do is make it air-tight with a vent at the top - fill it with CO2 and the heavier-than-air CO2 will displace all the air out of the box. Seal the vent, and you're done.
We used to do a similar thing with nitrogen when welding on truck fuel tanks, but we kept a constant flow of gas going in. You made damn sure that the tank was full of inert gas before striking an arc on the tank, that's for certain.
Oh , you might want to put some silica gel in the bottom of the case to adsorb any residual moisture....
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype 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.
The best method I have found is to blow air on the heat sink from outside the box while sucking that same air out of the box as quickly as possible. That requires a tight seal on the box(and fans) and some quiet fans doing the blowing and sucking. Hmmm...Sounds more like a brothel than a PC case.
CPU fans tend to be the loudest but experimenting with cones over the fans can quiet them somewhat. But you have to keep air moving around in the box. If you have it done right, you can thump the box and dust will blow out of the outtake fan.
Remember, tight seals. Control the flow.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
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
Yes i did read the red line page. But i dot not think this product has any real advantages for water cooling in a PC.
-The temperatures are much higher in a combustion engine.
-Glycol is added for anti freeze to engines, not for cooling. wetter water is presented as glycol replacement.
For racing this wetter water probably is better than glycol. For ordinary cars or PC's this stuf is overkill.