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CPU Convective Water Cooling
biso writes "The possibility of cooling a CPU with gravitational convective flow of water is here analyzed and experimented with positive results.
Many liquid cooling systems have been experimented by overclockers to better dissipate the heat from CPUs. The major part of these coolers is characterized by a relatively complex system requiring pumps or other active devices. Sometimes even liquid nitrogen is used. I built a simpler cooler, able to dissipate the same heat flux of a normal heatsink."
ok, i can see the extra bit of silence from not having a pump would be nice. but ... isnt a bowl of water on top of your computer just asking for trouble? something tells me this guy doesnt have cats.
I've built numerous different water cooled systems, and the $20 pump from the aquarium supply place is NOT the most complex piece. A good waterjacket for the cpu is by far the most complex and generally most expensive single piece, and also the one that is most critical for good performance. Still need the waterjacket in this design, so it isn't really saving anything...
I really think that phase change cooling systems are the future of the PC. Only with phase change cooling systems do you get high quality cooling able to remove the utmost heat away from a CPU and cool it to below freezing.
I saw a presentation by Intel last year in which it pointed out that modern CPU's emit more heat per area than molten lava, and they expect that within a few years they will emit more heat per area than the sun.
With these considerations passive water cooling is only a good first step and bound to be insufficient, even over the short term.
Alright - dude did this on a K6-2 450. They're about HOW many years old now?
I'd be much more interested to see him cooling an overclocked Athlon XP 2100+ with 1.9 vcore running at 2400 MHz - or something of the like - with the method in the article.
Ah well, I'm happy with my good 'ol pumps and radiator, myself.
he means insulating as in: does not conduct electricity. If they did not want heat transfer in a transformer, they would use air: cheap, does not conduct heat or electricity.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Water is corrosive. A small leak might not immediately be noticed but water will destroy everything on its path over the mobo if it gets the time.
0x or or snor perron?!
The thing that should be pointed out is this is how liquid cooling should have been done from the start. The reason their not is because most if not all of the home pc case cooling systems are things slapped together by people without engineering background in such things. Good liquid cooling systems are designed like this. There should be no pump to cool your cpu. The problem is to do it right involves doing some calculations which most don't do so they just use a pump. It's not a very hard thing as you can see by the article.
Now on a side note, if you like the idea of passive cooling loops Shuttle XPC cases now come with them. They use very similar ideas. You have liquid in a tube, when it vaporizes it rises to the upper radiator where it condenses and a fan carries the heat away and the water returns to the cpu side of the loop. Not sure if it vaporizes or just gets hot to move up the tube, really just a matter of effectiveness. It does a good job in lowering cpu fan noise. Unfortenly the noise of the PSU is very high in these things, or at least my SN41g2, though i belive the P4's have same PSU. The need the same thing on the PSU as the cpu. Also the "heat pipe" is a work of art.
Sure, heat convection flows, but your efficiency goes way up if you have an active flow. Same principle with hot water heating. They used to not have pumps to circulate the water - because it worked - but it's more efficient to have a pump.
simple multimeter tests don't just cut it, unless it can measure the 'hit through'(sorry, my english sucks and i don't know the proper word) capabilities of the substance.
water would make a fine insulator unless the 'hit through'(amount of voltage differential needed for the electricity to jump/hit like lighting through something) was small(and no, i'm not an electricity-engineer).
anyways, this kind of cooling has been done(submerging the whole mobo in something), couple of times. one guy used some biograde mineral oil succesfully.
theres at least one no-pump commercial solution too for liquid cooling, but it has a fan on the radiator.
though, in my opinion, getting rid of the pump doesn't bring you anything 'extra' since the pump makes next to zero noise, and noise damping the pump from environment is easy too. the real problem lies in how to get the water to keep cool without having extra fans(heatload on it gets quite big if you have cpu, gfx-card, chipset, psu, hd's and etc watercooled for silence). the bowl of that size that's in the article won't cut it.
and really, k6-2 could be cooled enough with just about any lump of metal compared to the 76w+ modern cpu's.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.