Watercooling Made Easy

Ronny writes: "'Overclockers are always looking for a better way to keep their processors cooler. If you've found the best heatsink and best fan, but that still isn't cooling your processor enough, you may want to look in to water cooling.' You can build your own water cooling system out of scrap parts such as a radiator from an ATV and a water block made out of a 4" PVC cap. However, if your like myself and have no creative skills whatsoever, then you may be interested in this new water cooling kit that is available on the Internet. The kit includes everything you need to start water cooling your CPU, at a very reasonable price. Full review of the water-cooling kit found at OverclockersClub"

Comments

Water-cooled webserver

[GLX]

I hereby claim prior art on a Water Cooled webserver to overcome the slashdot effect!

Article was posted less than 5 minutes ago, and it's already /.'ed... Think watercooling will be able to put out the fire that's started at the datacenter where that site's hosted? :)

Disclaimer must be a lulu

[serutan]

This looks like a lot of fun. I bet the "not responsible for damage to your equipment" part of their documentation is humongous, but they could probably sum it up with: "Duh!!"

Important question...

[rjw57]

More importantly can you use the hot water when it comes off the chip to make a hot-coffee/tea tap on the side of your gaming-box?

Fit a Pizza-oven to it as well and we'll never need to go out again...

Re:Important question...

[Papineau]

No, the water is not hot enough, even with a dual Athlon XP1800+. I know, that's the setup I have, although it's from another kit than the one in this article.

Now on to the explanation: heat goes from a colder place to a hotter place. If you want to make coffee from the water, it needs to be at least 80-90C. Now, that's the max (read: if you reach that, pull the plug!!) temperature supported by the XPs, and I think Intel's are a bit lower (75C). If your cooling fluid is hotter than your CPU, it's not cooling anymore, so you have a big problem (actually, the temperature of the CPU will just raise until either it melts or it's hotter enough than your cooling fluid to create a new thermal equilibrium). So even if you wanted to have a coffee tap, all you would end up with is a fried chip.

Just an Ad

[BlueTooth]

Kits like these have been around for a while...Do we really need to put up with stories that are just big ads now too?

Re:Just an Ad

[garcia]

no, but it won't stop. People have been submitting these stories to get /. exposure more and more recently.

Can we start having an option to moderate stories down? Rate them 0 to 10. That way you can browse at whatever you want (either get them all or get only the top)?

Oh wait, that would make sense.

Re:Just an Ad

[Reality Master 101]

Can we start having an option to moderate stories down? Rate them 0 to 10. That way you can browse at whatever you want (either get them all or get only the top)?

If you want that, you know where to find it. In my opinion, that's a bug, not a feature. You only have to look at the moronic articles that moderated up to see what happens when the lunatics run the asylum.

I like Slashdot just the way it is, thanks, flaws and all. I don't want to see it turn into another socialist mutual masturbation society.

Man

[Jonny Ringo]

If I had the latest in cpu's, motherboards and graphics cards for my computer I wouldn't need a water cooler cause I'd be drooling all over it.

Whoa: Now every little watercooling kit posted?

[purduephotog]

I'm not one to begrudge a nice review, but on 1 water cooling kit with nothing special?

The water cooling phenomenon is pretty common right now- I'd love to go on about my current issues around a ground-phase loop (i unplug the pump, the computer reboots) but that isn't relevant.

Now if this was an informative article about a number of different water cooling kits, then yes, I think that would deserve a large posting. (yes, the server is slashdotted already).
However, I'd say this is more like direct marketing. There isn't even a link to the manufacturer's link in the slashdot posting, making it impossible to even review the that.
Water cooling is very expensive- pumps run 40$, blocks run 30$, tubing and fittings run 20$, radiators run 50$......
Anyway... thanks for the direct markting blurb, but i think there are more professional ways to advertise a product :)

better solution ...

[Frag-A-Muffin]

Instead of wasting money on a water cooling unit, why don't people just spend that money on a faster processor!?!?! :)

silly overclockers! :)
</sarcasm>

I have one!!!

[Xzisted]

I actually bought the $300 system from Innovatek for my gaming rig. It keeps the proc around 32 degrees C. They are kind of expensive and for most people completely over the top useless. In my situation it was perfect because my computer sits in a dead air section of my apt. and just kept recycling the hot air pumping the cpu temp up to about 60....which is too warm for my tastes.

The install hassles for a system like this are too much for most people. You have to drill and clean your case and you have to remove and reinstall all the equipment from it. Then you have to spend the time to connect all the hoses and bleed air out of the system. Then...about 7 hours later (yeah...if you do it right...it can take that long) when you finally boot the PC, you get your just rewards....a nice water cooled system that now is about 10lbs. heavier than it was the day before and has about zero functionality added to it.

Like I said...its a little too much of an ornate system for most people.

Re:Too Hot?

[Jonny 290]

Ah, but they do care. 85 C seems to be the official redline.

Although, informally, if you're breaking 60, rethink your cooling setup.

Watercooling is getting interesting

[JanneM]

It's getting interesting, but _not_ for overclocking or something like that, but rather for noise reduction.

Once, small computers were totally silent. Think of the CBM64, the Mac and others. Even when they got harddrives, it was just a faint whirr in the background. Today, a modern desktop sounds like a passenger plane taking off next to you. In my machine I have five fans and two drives, and that's nothing unusual. At work it's bad enough that I sometimes wear earplugs just to get away from the noise.

Watercooling can help in two ways. First, with a larger, efficient radiator, you don't need a high-rpm fan - and elliminating just one fan does a lot to reduce noise pollution. Second, and for the future, I can envision a water-cooling system that can collect heat from several heat sources in the machine, and cool them all using one radiator and one fan. And when you have that, you could enclose the machine far better than today, getting rid of the noise from the drives as well.

/Janne

Re:Too Hot?

[AntiNorm]

maybe NT 4.0 didn't do the NOP cpu idling trick

To be a bit more accurate, it's the HALT instruction and not the NOP instruction that does this. NOP tells the CPU to 'do nothing and proceed to the next clock cycle' (note that the CPU remains fully on for this) while HALT tells the CPU to 'shut down, but be ready to spring back into action when you receive an interrupt'. HALT powers parts of the CPU down, NOP doesn't. This is where the cooling effect comes from.

As long as we're running ads disguised as stories

[CaptainCarrot]

...Let's at least be more comprehensive. Here's the kit from 1coolpc, formerly 3dfxcool.

There's also the Koolance and Sen Fu product lines at Plycon Computers

Those are the ones I knew about. A Google search turned up a whole bunch more. Man, I'm glad I don't subscribe -- ads are unavoidable, it seems.

Whoa !

[NTSwerver]

Check this guy out !