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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."
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.