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."

Comments

Water Cooling..

[Chicane-UK]

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 :)

OTT

[Justatad]

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.

Re:OTT

[Anonymous Coward]

People buy $15,000 old car body frames to fix up. They usually end up with something unique and customized, for around $100,000 (time+expenditures). 6 grand is a lot, but the car can be as well.

Personally, I dig this sort of thing. When you see a unique car on the road, it's impressive, not because it cost a lot, but because of how it is and was built.

Obviously, not everyone sees the point of this, just as not everyone sees the point of having a v6 or buying a 1 million dollar house.

I know some northern folks that have run radiant pipes under their sidewalks and driveways. Nowadays, they do this with some joint electrical resistance, think a thermal blanket but instead of the blanket, it's your concrete sidewalk. They never have to shovel snow and don't worry about ice buildup. They simply check the line level and the antifreeze to water mix.

I just had a concrete slab poured in a renovated garage. I thought about running radiant pipes, but decided against it (there is a high likelihood I will need to punch through the floor for some stability (shelving, etc.), and don't want to run the risk of puncturing. (This guy obviously didn't put his pipes in the concrete itself.)

But I'll probably end up using some geothermal. If you have a large lot, and after finding the utilities, you get a trench digger and some large plastic hose (PEX, polyethylene crosslinked). Filter on one end. This is trenched in the ground and below the frostline.

The earth more or less stays a constant temperature or near so. For the summer months, the water is cooled. In the winter, it's warmer than the outside temperature. Only running a pump, people use this to cool their homes, using radiant heat or cooling (e.g. running to another sink, like a concrete slab, which has fans running off of that, esp. during the summer).

You could easily pipe several computer systems off of this during the summer months. In the meantime, add some antifreeze to a custom outdoor job to switchover to in the summer.

Is it too far? Maybe. But I have several machines running constantly, and this is bound to save some energy from ac during the summer, plus give better performance, not only due to heat but also energy to remove that heat (your fans). This may save time as well if they overclock. For some people, their time is a lot of money, even after you subtract out the time and effort to rig up such a setup.

To others, the huge reduction in noise since you don't run fans is a BIG issue to some. I own several EPIAs for this purpose, despite them being severely underpowered for certain things, such as gaming. But 90% of the time, they work well, esp. when I have to write or surf.

Current PCs and noise

[Simon Kongshoj]

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.

Re:huh?

[RPI Geek]

If you're not overclocking why even bother?

Because he can.
Because by putting this on the internet, now someone else can who may not have been able to before.
Because of the joy of building something.
Because it's quieter now.

Bend allowance

[BenjyD]

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.

Coincidence?

[pclinger]

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!

Re:huh?

[Eric Ass Raymond]

I barely notice the noise of my CPU fans.

Maybe you should have your hearing checked out.

I was not annoyed by the cars, the wind or (most) people back in the days when the PCs didn't have any fans in them.

The annoyance began with the Pentium Classics (the fan bearings would wear out after a while) and culminated in the 72 W AMD CPUs and the monstrous graphics cards with a half-pound heatsink and a high speed fan.

There was some light at the end of the tunnel when Intel released low-power (30 W) Tualatin PIIIs. One could almost run a 1.2 GHz/512 MB cache Tualatin without active cooling. I used a huge heatsink, tweaked the fan so that it would run only at around 700 rpm and padded the case with noise-absorbing material. This coupled with a silent Maxtor 5400 rpm hard drive, fanless graphics card and noise-killer PSU made the system practically silent.

Re:The Problem with water Cooling

[macdaddy357]

These huge water cooling rigs are going to make modern computers as big as ENIAC again. So much for compactness and portability. I've got an idea, lets make larger die CPUs, so they won't have these overheating problems.

Re:My variant

[YU Nicks NE Way]

If you're going to use ground temperature, though, why not go the whole way, and use a geothermal heat pump? Run non-reactive tubing through your yard (or vertically, if you want to), run a liquid coolant through that tubing, and use the 17 C ambient earth temperature to heat and cool your PC without drilling holes in your foundation.

And while you're at it, you can also keep your dwelling at a temperature not too far from the temperature at which your computer is kept. And, as a bonus, it'll cost you about $0.50/day to maintain this constant temperature.

Mmmm. Saving two thousand dollars a year of heating and cooling costs -- better add a few more meters of tubing there, to handle the new computers you'd be able to afford.