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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'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!
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.
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.
Leaks are actually very rare.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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).
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
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!"