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Water Cooled Power Supply
lmd writes "Digital-Explosion has an article with step-by-step instructions on how to cool a power supply with water (yes, water) instead of fans/heatsinks to make it quieter. Please read the warning and disclaimer (and buy insurance if you don't have any) if you decide to try this at home."
Here's a thought I had, but probably will never get around to building.
Lots of people go to the expense and effort of building/buying radiators or using large tanks of water as the heatsink for their water-based CPU cooler systems.
Last year, I started measuring the temperature of the water in my toilet tank. After a flush, it drops to 5-6 degrees Celsius. Between flushes, it gradually reaches room temperature, of course, but this is still no worse than a radiator or bucket. In practice, however, it never actually gets above about 10C (while room temperature is about 20C).
In other words, it's a supply of cold water which you were going to simply flush away.
Place a small bucket inside the toilet tank. Put a submersible pump in there, run the water to the CPU coolers, bring the water back and drain it over the bucket in the tank.
Everytime you flush the 6 beers you went through while flaming me for my Linux isn't ready for the desktop article, you can rest assured that the water which cools your CPU is being replaced with fresh, cold water. No mold, no mildew.
The purpose of putting the pump in the bucket is so that there's always a supply of water for the pump, even during the flush. And the purpose of draining the return line over the bucket is so that if your toilet tank doesn't refill for some reason, you'll still keep your bucket full of water and buy some time for hardware monitors to shut the system down if it's getting too warm.
I don't know how hot the water in the toilet will get, but think about this:
Of course, the only thing I'd worry about is the quality of the submersible pump. After all, if water leaked into the pump, then the water in the toilet could come into contact with one side of the AC line... the other side of which is grounded to your fusebox. If you happened to touch another grounded object while urinating (concrete floor, sink faucet, etc), then enough current could find that your stream of urine and urethral tissues are a more attractive ground path than the plastic sewer pipe. I think I'd invest in an isolation transformer (search ebay) to reduce the risk of highly ...unpleasant... damage.
I think if one were pumping water through tubes soldered to the heatsinks of their power supply, the risks would be compounded, conceivably by a failure on the primary side of the power supply: I think I'd make a point of running the computer on an isolation transformer as well.
Ahh... the joys of being an eccentric genius.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Makes me wonder if desktops still have huge transformers at 50Hz instead of the modern switching type. We do live in the 2000s, the space age once dreamed of, you know. I fancy getting a mini-itx system some day, but only if I could use a laptop style, totally quiet PSU. I mean, PSUs are supposed to convert energy, not dissipate it, or what?
Then again, fans are not that bad compared to the sound from IBM hard drives...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I'm not too sure liquid sodium is the best choice to cool your computer, since sodium melts at 208 degrees F (98 C). Besides, when you first boot up the computer, you'd have to have special heaters installed just to melt the sodium and get it moving! But, you know, in the end, I know you were being facetious. Nice job.
I want to run mercury through my cooling system. I've got a couple of pounds of it, and it would certainly absorb heat more readily than water.
But just one drop of mercury inside your computer and it's finished.
Maybe could use gallium with small heaters?
Fire and Meat. Yummy.