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CPU Cooling with 15 Liters of Water
ninjagin writes "While not an OC-er, I do enjoy reading about the lengths people will go to on their way to a better CPU cooling solution. I ran across this very interesting article at overclockers.com about this guy's immense 15-liter water cooling rig for his home office PC. Might be just the kind of thing to have the contractors include when they pour your next garage slab."
i can keep my cpu temp down 10 degrees celsius by leaving the door to the backyard open. it's not 15 litres of water, but it keeps it cool. i mean, no need to get crazy :x
I've been thinking of mking a rig like this, but there are reliability problems. Check out What Happened to Dan of Dan's Data.
:-(
Corrosion is a big problem for the uninitiated
I'm not Seth.
Don't cross the streams
Ask me about repetitive DNA
I cool my PC with my outdoor swimming pool!!
.
Still having problems with dirt clogging the lines though.
On the plus side, when that happens I get a nice introduction fusion when my Athlon melts down!
Its something I thought about doing for a bit of fun.. but even though sites generally always say its perfectly safe if you set it up properly, I have this nagging doubt that i'd come back into my room and find my computer turned into an electrical water feature.
:)
That and the fact that every forum I ever read where people discuss their water cooling solutions, they always jest about times when they have found they sprung a leak and found puddles of water at the bottom of their case.
No thanks
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Finally, a way to keep the garage warm!
Does anyone else think that some people take things too far? This is the computer equivalent of buying a beat up car and spending thousands of pounds modding it to make it look "cool". Different strokes for different folks.
with that much tubing maybe he should have drilled a couple holes in the side of his fridge and stuck the radiator in there. has anybody ever done this? my garage is significantly farther away from my machine than the nearest fridge.
either way, that box isn't going anywhere. all LAN parties where he will be able to show that rig off will be held in his garage.
time & effort = nothing major, apparently.
why don't you spend that time making money to spend on a faster processor? If you're not overclocking why even bother? Just put the damn pc out in the garage if noise is the concern.
you'd have better cooling if you ran a bunch of pipe in the ground - the ground stays the same temp year 'round (within one degree F if you go more than about three feet down, 53F, about 12C) so just dig a one foot wide hole, about 5 feet down, and put a big coil of tubing down there. run water through it, and huzaah! cooler than this guy. or just adjust one of them new fangled air conditioner things so that instead of air running over the cooling coils, you run water over them, and run that water through a system like this guy's. then OVERCLOCK the thing and make it worthwhile.
you could save yourself a lot of money for a new processor if you ran some pipe up on your roof, and put that into your water heater. preheated water is FAR cheaper to keep hot, and you'll never run out of warm water at least, not on a sunny day anyway. use the money you save to power the air conditioner solution that no one has done yet, and keep your processor actively cool, not just passively cool. or, just stick the whole PC in the fridge. wrap it in plastic (or submerse it in a non-conductive liquid that doesn't freeze in the deep-freeze) to keep the bad moisture out and enjoy a pc that's colder yet.
ah forget it, you do what you want.
If there is some leakage then your computer is broken for good.
So, why people don't use other fuilds for cooling like oil etc ?
That would be no rocket science, this is just simple common sense.
Oh, I see, common sense and overclocking...
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
If the radiator is contained in the garage, why does it matter if it has fans or not? If you can hear them, invest in some type of material to block off the sound and put it around the hole connecting the two rooms. And why is this even on slashdot? It's like most other water cooling systems just with a radiator that's way too large for it's purpose. It probably would have been better if he got a much MUCH smaller radiator and made some huge heatsink for it (and it'd be more slashdot worthy, making a big effective heatsink is a lot harder than making a giant radiator out of copper pipes.) Plus with a smaller radiator he wouldn't have to waste so much space in his garage.
Put your PC in a mini freezer. Many freezers can give you -20 deg. No hassle.
I would fix my computer at a plumber... start it with a tap...Your code will have LEAKS..bla bla bla bla ...
/*Come on in ladies and gentelmen, please have your swimsuits on*/
The lunatic is in my head
Am I the only one who thinks it's absurd that there even is a need for something like this for reducing noise in current computers? I mean, I could understand it if the guy was some compulsive tinkerer who overclocks everything in sight, but for silence in a home office PC?! It seems insane.
I sometimes think that, for those of us who don't play the latest games anyway, PC's are becoming too powerful for their own good. Most current PCs have a large pile of case fans, a big noisy CPU fan, two fans in the power supply (sometimes very noisy, sometimes not), a small and very noisy fan on the graphics card, and another one on the chipset. I've seen mods that add fans to RAM, although those are still only needed by overclockers.
Six sick
Maybe he should have used the money for a new car, or at least a paint job ;-)
It surely gives a whole new meaning to /dev/random entropy pool!
(pun definitely intended)
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
Instead of spending with such weirdness, he should save to buy a new car.
Ya know...I'm not sure, but the [parent] might - just might - be a troll...
Maybe he should have used the money for a new car, or at least a paint job...fucking troll.
When the system was finally completed, the flow rate was tested and determined to be 3L/minute.
I'd guess that his estimate of the flow rate was off because his pressure drop calculations assume a straight pipe - they make no allowance for the effect of the multiple 90 degree elbows in his radiator.
Why not just imerse the whole PC into some kind of non-conductive liquid and circulate the liquid through a big surface radiator?
Would not a convection based water cooling be the ultimate noiseless CPU cooling system? Now, is there anyone who would have an access to the blueprints of the US Navy's nuclear submarine reactor cooling system (pumpless and convection based at low speeds)?-)
BOO! TERRO
Did anyone else see the banner ad for overclockers.com that was running on /.? I saw it within the last 48 hours or so, and now we have a story here that is about an article on their site... coincidence? Buy your own /. story today, only $49.95!
This clown should spend his money on buying a new car rather than wasting his time with this ridiculous project....and all to cool a PC!! I bet you he is running 95... ;)
The Sisters rock!
What is wrong with people? It's just a P4 2.2 G. Not like this guy is cooling some 4 way system or something. Jeebus.
Sorry for replying to my own post, I just saw the ad, here is the URL.
f
/. for advertising is now having an article that focuses on their site..
http://images.slashdot.org/banner/over0001en.gi
Now tell me that this is not a coincidence that someone paying
The ultimate cooling solution for your hardware is already standardized: the BeerBox. Read the report on this contraversial issue. RFCs, benchmarks, pictures :) http://www.ranish.com/beerbox/
Why use 15 litres when you can use 15 BILLION litres???
br. I plan to live in a houseboat and tow my submerged boxen.
I note that the huge big air duct almost completely covers the 'outbound. air fan.
Perhaps if he'd have moved the ducting to the outbound fan and left a small inbound air fan he'd have had more luck with air. My Dell has something like this already when they built it!
of course it wouldn't have been as quiet, but if he wants quiet he'd should look for better air flowed cased IMHO..
What is it that motivates you to spoil the fun for the rest of us? I sincerely hope that Malda hunts down you trolls, you in particular for writing that piece of crap, and sues you to the ground!
BOO! TERRO
Why do people chase a little white ball around 10km of grass? Because it's fun. Because it's a challenge. If you want to walk out of the pro shop, drop your ball straight into the 18th hole and call it a day, go for it. Leave the rest of us can enjoy our pointless persuits in peace.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
... to the device you put on your roof to heat the water of your pool, but this ones takes the idea all backward! Nice thinking!
So he lowered the noise of his machine be nixing the CPU fan. He still has the powersupply fan to deal with. We have servers at work (1U rack mount) that are p4 2.0ghz machines whose only cpu cooling is a copper HSF combo and they really arent that loud. There are 12 of them and honestly the loudest part of the boxes are the powersupply fans. Even with those on and under heavy load (cluster used for wireless simulations), its still really quiet. He could have saved the cash and bought quiet fans and a new powersupply.
Ive also had positive experiences with the latest Dell boxes. P4 2.0ghz machines that you can barely tell are on because they are so quiet. If they can be that quiet, any machine can be built with that kind of noise output.
I do applaud the effort, but I wonder about his practicality.
The article brought up images in my mind of Lain's bedroom with all the intense looking tubing to cool down her NAVI.
I'm not really sure why I don't experiment with this stuff. My workplace has tons of this stuff just lying around since we use it to cool down LASERs and intense pulsed light devices.
If you outlaw the law, only criminals will have laws
What about making an aquarium like with sunflower oil and remove all the fans and radiators ?
;-)
... they with a few light would becom a great show :o)
By heating th oil should change from density and so the oil will start stream on its own !
No need for whatever pump !
By the way, could be nice to make fries
Anybody wanna test this ?!?
The only problem i can see is for the hard disk unit. The only thing would be if the hard disk is completely hermetic (this is supposed to be the case for now, but real fact happen to say that for technical reason DH are no more 100% hermetic devices !)
Anyway, you could put some less colored oil and had a blue color to it
By the way, why temperature and power consumption is not something that people take in consideration before buying a device ? We should have a sticker that clearly put : the noise, the power required to balance our choice with the power...
-SLK
Now that's just damn creepy... I was thinking about doing something very similar just yesterday. I'll be building a house soon, and was thinking about what I'd do if I could build a cooling system directly into the house. The idea I came up with is similar to this one, but I think I have some improvements.
;)
The garage floor is at ground level, and concrete is an AWFUL conductor of heat. This presents two points of inefficiency; the temperature of the concrete will be affected by seasonal temperatures due to air temperature and proximity to heated surface earth along the edges. Depending on what part of the country you're in, the ground temperature below 24-36 inches is a constant temperature in the low sixties or upper fifties. SO, while the base of the garage floor's foundation is likely below this point of constant temperature, the poor conductivity of the concrete will likely render the system far less efficient than it could have been.
My server closet would be in the basement, preferably with the systems close to the ground. The system I envisioned is identical to his up until the heat exchanger. Rather than dumping heat straight to the concrete floor, I thought of getting a 18" x 18" steel plate and welding 1" thick, 24" long iron bars to it, perpendicular to the surface of the plate. 16 bars should do. You then sink the bars through holes in the wall straigt into the earth as close to the floor as possible, resulting in the deepest possible depth for the bars. Your heat is then dumped to the very cold, constantly cooled earth at a depth of anywhere from four to five feet.
On a practicality scale of 0 to 10, 10 being as practical as brushing your teeth and 0 being as practical as replacing your teeth with screw-on ceramic chompers that you can toss in the dishwasher, I give this solution about a two. Nobody in their right mind is going to go to all of that trouble to cool a few CPUs. Or drill holes in their foundation, for that matter. But it would still be cool.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Every time I read of anyone making an attempt at developing a better approach to cooling, I'm reminded how really awful things really are. Today, the average PC is far too noisy, with or without replacement fans, replacement power supplies and case mods.
As for those who claim they "don't mind" or "have gotten used to it" I'd suggest that it's irrelevant to make such a point that out as we can all get used to anything if we have to. That includes everything from traffic and freeway noise, barking dogs to nagging girlfriends.
The real issue is how ridiculous it is how the PC makers haven't yet bothered to address the issue. Antec is one example. Their latest and greatest home-user case comes with noise-reducing rubber grommets. Whoopee. At the same time, enterprising individuals searching for workarounds are left to their own devices and are relegated to the fringes.
Yes, I've performed a few of my own modifications. All my fans are the quietest possible and are rated at 20dB or thereabouts. Might be ok for some, but throw in a second or third system, or even a few rack servers and you can start counting down the minutes until your concentration starts to wane, a headache of unknown origin develops, and you start wondering why you wish you were doing something else. You think that a typical sound recording studio puts up with background noise for their electronics? Not bloody likely. I'm even starting to wonder whether the use of a thin-client would be a better approach.
There is no technical reason why a modern PC shouldn't be absolutely silent. Aside from the drives, there are no moving parts integral to its functioning, and anyone who remembers their high-school physics should know that heat is a form of energy, energy that could be used do something useful. Until the irony of that dawns on PC makers and they realise that many of us would be willing to pay more for an alternative, I'll cheer for anyone working away in their garage trying to develop a better approach.
I heat my pool with my PC... (not to mention hot water for the house)
That's actually a good idea but he has problems that would prevent that. Because he indicated he turns his computer off, chances are he's running windows. This makes having a nice quiet terminal in the house and a noisemaker in the garage much more difficult. That rack he had in the garage was nice. There was room for all sorts of beige boxes out there.
you could save yourself a lot of money for a new processor if you ran some pipe up on your roof, and put that into your water heater.
Well, he can still do that. I'm not sure how well that will work in a Canadian winter.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Think about it this way: At field rates, that's 150 literjons, so maybe it's not such a bad deal after all.
Now, in terms of the whole "No machine may be made in the likeness of a human mind" thing, we may have some other issues going on here. JIHAD!
Mr Bean would use a toilet for a water cooler 'cause Mr. Bean knows that a toilet has aproximately 1.6 gallons per flush which is much more efficient than some old small pissy assed water pump....
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
So if I get this correctly:
Athlon + this water cooler + coffee filter = 15 litres of hot coffee ?
The guy who did this must *really* hate sleep...
Liquid sodium is pretty good too, and a "eutectic" alloy of sodium and potassium melts at much lower temperatures.
Then, instead of a boring neurotoxin like mercury, a leak could cause an unextinguishable class D fire with smoke full of sodium and potassium hydroxide (think Drano(tm), or oven cleaner).
I was impressed by the engineering that went into this system. Certainly going a lot further than buying a watercooling kit from Popular Discount Computer Mod Store. I liked the switch and relay box that turned the pump on when the computer was switched on, saving a walk to the garage. The only question I had was this: He has a water transport loop a good deal longer than your average watercooling rig. Would the delay in getting the water circulating cause an undesireable or even dangerous heat build up at the processor before the water system was ramped up enough to deal with it? Would it be better to build in a timer that starts the pump when the machine's power button is pressed, and then starts the computer after a suitable delay?
This may be a complete non-issue. The water in the system may be sufficient to transfer heat for the couple of seconds before the pump is moving things along completely. The processor may take more time to heat up than I'm assuming. It's just something that bothered me a little, and none of my Mech-E friends are around for an impromptu consultation.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
The guy is obviously a fruitcake. Anything as unstable as a home-built water-cooling rig should never be used as a work machine.
For fun... yes. For games... yes. For making one look l33t in the local ale-house... yes. For the office.. no.
Maybe this guy is just attention-seeking?
The more advanced the technology, the more open it is to primitive attack
"The humming noise was eliminated by installing 13 mm (½") ID latex tubing on both the intake and discharge ends of the pump."
For using "humming" and "latex" in the same sentence.
An example: most OC'ers I know think most of thermaltake's products are shit (which they are), while oc.com keeps plugging away with the good reviews. My Volcano 11 keeps my Barton 2500+ Oc'ed to 2.0Ghz @ 49C (way too hot) and the damned thing sounds like a harrier is about to land on my roof (not to mention how badly the thing needs a lapping). What does OC.com have to say:
No it doesn't! It offers "hot" or "really hot!"
Just make sure to check multiple sites if you decide to go with water cooling. OC.com is starting to feel like a yes-man site to me.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
He could have done a little more testing. I mean, aside from the image manipulation, office apps are pretty light on the CPU. He put all this work into flow rate equations and graphs, and then at the end he doesn't even play any games to show a system under REAL load. No idle temps either. What gives?
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
I begin to wonder whether the power efficiency of CPUs
as radiating element starts to exceed that of traditional
heating elements? Imagine embedding into the floor 2
AMD CPUs per square meter, with the marble floor plate
serving as "heat sink" (for the CPU) and "heat source"
(for the house). Now, that would probably make quite an
energy-efficient radiator, which as a side-product is also
able to perform massive-parallel computations such as
cracking crypto-keys or google-type database lookups.
Marc
In Soviet Russia, CPUs cool you
But if anyone is interested in the topic, your first port of call should be here...
I was tired of my computer making all sorts of noise too. For the cost of that, he probably could have gone to EndPCNoise.com and got a silent CPU fan and PS. I got a Nexus CPU Fan for my 1500+ and I can't hear it at all. Also went with the Nexus 300W PS. The only thing that makes noise in my computer is the HDD's, and those are the next thing to go. Plus it's a lot more practical and reliable then all that copper.
my first priority would be changing my life so that it no longer featured Tercels. water cooling can wait.
...anyone who even dares to mention selfbuild-cooling-system in my presence is about to get beaten' seriously.
No, I have no reason for this. Do I need one?
It's an idea I have been throwing around. Put the box in a different room, and then run cables to your monitor, keyboard, etc. There are a few problems I can see, such as issues with longer cables (especially monitor cables), and what about when you need physical access to the box (I'd hate to have to run to the garage every time I need to burn a CD). Serial ATA and meter long cables may allow for the CD drives to be next to the monitor though.
The only other issues are the fact that my garage gets full of dust, cottenwood seeds, leaves, spiders, etc. that would wreck havoc of any fan cooled computer. The other idea would be a closet, but I fear the computer would simply roast itself in a closed closet.
This guy is a true geek.
/. ers are like that, but it still feels good to read about a guy making something good out of something bad.
He turned something not so good into an opprotunity to learn and try something new. I know that it's not really a big deal, lots of
Huh?
On page four of the article, the author lists that he used the system for typical office applications like email, word processing, and digital imaging. I'd have to wonder what the temps would be like if he torture tested it instead.
That's nothing, I heat my olympic swimming pool with my PC! ;-)
Still having problems with dirt clogging the lines though.
I've had no problems. You need to use a closed cooling loop through the PC and dump a small heat exchanger in the pool.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I see a problem with this. His CPU block is the highest up componenent in the system, thus that is where air will want to get trapped. And you don't want air to be trapped in your block - it will not work as well. He needs to come up with some sort of air trap system above the cpu block.
And as other posters have commented, corrosion can be a problem in these systems. Particularly when you are using different metals e.g. copper cpu block and brass fittings, and aluminum radiator. (I know that's not what this guy is using!). My solution to this problem has been to mix 2 parts water with 1 part VW/Audi G12 engine coolant. G12 is the currently sold vw/audi coolant and it is pink in color. I have watercooling rigs running for over a year that I've dissassembeled and found not even a tiny bit of corrosion! And that's with dissimilar metal components!
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
This discussion makes me think about a world where cooling is provided as a distributed service rather than on a product-by-product basis. Obviously the concept is not new; I know of central cooling systems which serve multiple buildings, and I'm sure there are systems I don't know about which serve more than that. But I also think about the interconnection of cooling systems to cooling devices and to other cooling systems, and modularity thereof. Imagine a site with a central active cooling core, with universal connections between that core and whatever it serves. If you then want to connect an AC system to the core, just make sure it is UTB (Universal Thermal Bus) compatible. And your computer has another connection to the core (independent of the AC), made possible by a Heatsink-UTB connector. If the UTB is well-designed enough (or even practical at all), and the thermal isolation of the cooled systems is sufficient, then for a while all you have to do is upgrade your central cooling core. Suddenly want to overclock one of your machines, and your existing cooling settings won't do? Just lower that particular node's temperature minimum. If the core can handle it, it will. The big problems I see now: Do thermal systems like this combine nicely? For example, will adding only a few more cooled nodes or cooling subsystems lead to exponentially greater load on the cooling core? Is the isolation of the different elements practical at all, and will it ever be? The system sounds like it could get pretty complicated, and many parts would need constant computerized control. There would be a lot of controllers, probably proportional to the number of splits in the cooling network. What to do about the heat generated by the controllers? Is it possible to make controllers that are so energy efficient they are sufficiently cooled by the very system them control? Wow. I can actually see the loser emanating from me.
Faced with the same problem, I just got longer VGA/mouse/keyboard cables and put the whole PC in the next room. Its cheaper, less hassle, and even more quiet. With a USB CD-Rom drive, I only have to get up to use a floppy.
pfoofter!!
Not only that, but this guy breaks from established scientific convention, using the Tercel measurement rather than the accepted standard VW Bug!
Why not do like the big boys and dunk the MB in Flurocarbol liquid? Non conducting and can cool down the whole board!
Props for the guy who did this. He must have had fun making it and feels great seeing it work. But, if he was concerned about his PC being quiet why didn't he also rig the power supply so it does not need a fan? He could either put a massive heatsink on the power supply transistors or rig them to be water cooled also. How necessary is the fan on the power supply especially if it is not being used near its rated wattage? Or just buy an iMac, they have been wisper-quiet (no fans) for a few years.
I got tired of all the noise my '486-66 PC was making, so I decided to move the machine further away from my desk. I went down to Fry's and picked up some VGA/keyboard/mouse extension cables, cut a hole in the wall, and ran the cables through the wall. With the machine in the other room, I could barely hear it.
But if put my ear to the wall, I could still discern a hum. And my CPU temp was still consistently above 20C. I considered freon cooling, but that's bad for the environment. I then tried water cooling, but zebra mussels clogged my water pump.
Then ZAM! I thought of Arctic Cooling. So I called up Belkin and ordered 3000 miles of VGA/keyboard/mouse extension cables and ran them along the Alaskan pipeline. I wanted to place the '486 as near to the north pole as possible, but financial constraints forced me to put it outside a raindeer herder's shed in Nome.
When I first hooked everything up, there were some minor glitches to work through. Timber wolves had chewed through the VGA cable in the northern Yukon. This was easily fixed with my trusty portable butane solder gun and Kevlar heat-shrink tubing.
Back in my home office. I couldn't hear the PC at all. And CPU temps hover at just about -18C most of the year.
Now about that faint buzzing produced by my monitor...
s/color/colour/; s/check/cheque/; s/donut/doughnut/; s/fulfill/fulfil/; okay boys and girls... different people from different places spell things differently. is it really *that* hard to accept? on a side note, every time i see "metres" it looks like "ME-trez".
I really, really, really don't get it. If he's that concerned about noise, buy a fucking eMachines. My parents bought one a few months back and while it's a POS technology wise (doesn't even have a fucking AGP slot *CRINGE*) it is dead SILENT.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
Why not use a standard domestic "radiator", i.e. heat exchanger? Pressure tested welded joints, cheap, all the surface area you want in one handy package. And then why not a standard central heating pump, usually with several speed settings and designed to be quiet. Use a header tank, have out and back branches, run the CPU cooler between the branches with a thermal sensor and possibly a flow switch and, if you are really worried about corrosion, one of those in-line transparent fuel filters.
Not, you understand, that I'm going to do any of this. I can't hear the server because it's away in a cupboard on the cold side of the house, and I'm certainly not allowing water cooling and plastic pipes near anything I work on.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Some people may know the design of a Compaq case. It is all of the components mounted on a fairly open metal structure that slides into an enclosure. My bright idea: Take the guts out of the enclosure and introduce it to my 8 po fan (bonus points if you know what that means). Lots of cooling. Horrendus noise though. Time for meter-long VGA cables. (If you don't know, po is the French abbreviation for inch. Just wanted to annoy someone that way :-)
Maybe he should save his money and repair the rust on his car... or buy a new one???
rust
No she doesn't. Actually we learn that Darth Vader is Harry Potter's father.
How ya like dat?
Water Cooling, is in most cases just not practical. I'm not trying to advocate *against* water cooling, I am however giving any other readers not versed in water cooling a bit of anecdotal experience.
1. Water Cooling is entirely unreliable. Sadly, Unless on eis prepared to design a water cooling system with redundant water pumps, and alarms to alert the user when the pumps fail, then I would absolutely NOT recommend water cooling to anyone who leaves there computer on while not home. Almost all pumps that I have found are rated for less than 5000-8000 hrs. (around 9mo - 1yr) You need to worry about pumps, reservoirs, tubing, radiators, corrosion, seals, coolants, and everything else holding together the entire system.
2.) Water Cooling is not particularly portable. I can say from experience, and also from the experience of most of my friends, that water cooled systems are NOT portable. I mean damn, just look at the guy with the garage, He would have to worry about cutting new tubing if he just wanted to move his computer out of the family room and into his office. Friends of mine with water cooled computers always worry about leaks, the reservoir, and altogether moving around an extra 3/4 -1 gallon of water with them. Simply put, they are not good for LAN parties.
3.) Water Cooling is not that much more Colder. Really people, you can't get colder than room temp with plain H20. In fact, you can't even get to room temperature. Unless you invest in more equipment to actively cool your coolant, then you are bound to never get any colder than what, 76-80F degrees. (Unless you run some plumbing through your wall, and into an underground concrete slab.) Water Cooling will not cut it for extreme OC'ing. I just look at it this way, if all you are really after is quiet, then save yourself the $200 and get yourself a quality fan, and some foam to sound proof your case.
4.) Water Cooling aint that much quieter. Water cooling is Quieter that most Fan/Heatsink combinations. Fine. So why not get Fan-less heat sinks? Pelltier Heat Pumps? Sound proof the case, or better yet do a combination thereof. Seriously though, I can't think of any reason why Water Cooling would be the only/best quiet cooling method.
In my opinion, the only reason to have a water cooled box, is because of the cool factor. And frankly, it ain't even that cool. I mean really, most people I know use water only to show off the inside of their box, (UV lighted water, etc) Granted it looks neato, however most of the people I know made these custom computers to show them off (normally at LAN parties), and now they can't even bring the computer with them to the LAN parties because the whole thing becomes to delicate, and too complicated to bother with.
I say that water cooling, as most people are familiar with, is only suitable for a hobbyist who just wants to build something cool.... who wants to say that he has a computer that is water cooled. But don't get me wrong, it is fun to build one, and even more fun to tell people that you have a water cooled box. IMHO, I think it is even MORE fun to tell people that you cpu's are below freezing.
Simply put, Water Cooling works for some people, and it can be a satisfying build project. And yes, it can look pretty awesome. But for me, I would rather spend my money on other cooling methods.
I enjoy my loud ass dual 1.64ghz Tualatin OC'd box heat pumped, and running at a very cool 2 degrees Fahrenheit. I *like* to pretend I am sitting on a flight deck.
Don't be a tool. http://insight.matrixflux.com [matrixflux.com]
The BBC has a story about a scout leader who hiked to the south pole last January. He took his laptop and a satellite phone to keep in touch with his troop. The story mentions that one pitch dark and bitterly cold night he decided to play around with his laptop and overclocked the 1.4 Ghz CPU to 8 Ghz! Can you believe it? He personally wrote up the story, but to help with the slashdot effect, I mirrored it here.
"Computer Scientists can count to 1024 on their fingers" (non-mutant, non-mutilatated, human computer scientists)
I used to replace the stock oil cooler (joke) with a radiator styled externally mounted (out from inside the shroud) oil cooler on all my old "air cooled" VWs. It was (still is really) one of the most common mods to those engines. It made the engine run much cooler.
Most cars use less than 15L of coolant and run a lot hotter (Aprox 208F) ... you would think that a more efficient system could be developed.
If the boxen were old, then they would be real boat anchors..
While I enjoyed reading about Ron's creative engineering, it would have been more pragmatic to buy a Koolance Exos water-cooling system, as I did. I have a PC at home that runs 24/7 as a server, which is in a room that has limited cooling, and during the summer temperatures in that room can reach or exceed 100F (38C). I have had my Exos system for about a month now; we've already had several over-38C days, and the CPU temperature of that system has never exceeded 40C. It took me about an hour and a half to set up, fill, and start my Exos system, which sits on top of the tower case and produces less noise than my 120GB WD hard drive (I hear the drive but not the three Exos fans). I can only guess that Ron spent a fairly large multiple of that amount of time on his project. My (billable) time is worth enough that saving so much of it in exchange for $290 (Exos and three blocks, cooling CPU AND VIDEO AND M/B CHIPSET, with an HDD block waiting for insertion) was a worthwhile trade-off. I *am* a bit jealous of the creative fun he must have had doing it, though. :-)