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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.
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!!"
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.
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.
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
It surely gives a whole new meaning to /dev/random entropy pool!
(pun definitely intended)
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
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.
Many cooling systems do use oils instead of water. No cooling oil I've ever seen (Dowtherms etc.) can compare to water for heat transfer efficiency. Water has low viscosity, high heat capacity and is cheap.
The only liquid that really does much better is mercury, not something I would want flowing round my computer.
Freezers are made to keep cold things cold, or to bring things down from room temperature to freezing. They CANNOT deal with a continuous heat load in the 200W range, at least not for long (burned out compressor, anyone?).
Why use 15 litres when you can use 15 BILLION litres???
br. I plan to live in a houseboat and tow my submerged boxen.
Already has been done: http://totl.net/Eunuch/
Leaks are actually very rare.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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.
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.
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:
1986 Suzuki GSX-R series race motorcycles used oil as the cooling device - oil ran through the radiator on the front of the bike to cool it off.
Oil can get hotter than water at regular pressures withouth boiling, can be sprayed directly onto the hotspots (which often benefit from the lubrication of the oil also) and does not have the corrosion problems of water.
So yes, there are systems that use oil to transfer heat the way water does. If I am not mistaken oil doesn't conduct electricity the way ionized water does, but it would still make a fscking mess if it leaked inside the computer case.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
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
Well, the problem with water is it's relatively high freezing point. I use Dowfrost(tm) (Propylene Glycol) in a 1:1 ratio with water running at 22 F (it could go much lower) through a 5 hp refrigerator/pumping station to keep stuff cold. You can pick up a 55 gallon drum of it for under $600 US. But then again, what I am keeping cool is a hell of a lot more important than my home office CPU - thousands of gallons of beer.
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 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...
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]
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.