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Water Cooling With A Car Radiator
sH4RD writes "Why go out and buy a water cooling system when you can do it with an old car radiator? That's exactly what One of The Twelve figured when he used the radiator from his brother's 1979 Toyota Corolla to cool his system. His Athlon64 3000+ can hit 2.5GHz smoothly now. Check out the original forum post complete with benchmarks."
those stickers won't give you extra hp
but then again, i think i have an old porche i can use for this..
If you leave the radiator attached to the car, you could drive your PC to LAN parties!
After having seen that guys work station, I feel better about he mess in my apartment.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Radiators were made to have a flow of air over them, so putting a fan blowing over that thing would greatly increase its cooling abilities. Of course, he's still stuck with old shitty car parts under his desk...
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The ricers of cars and the ricers of computers UNITE!!
I hate to sound like an elitist, but this is fairly common practice for water cooled PC's. Except most people tend to use smaller heater cores. That, and tend to buy them new and clean.
They could have pushed it to 3.5GHz if they'd used the radiator from my '78 Chrysler Cordoba. It probably weighs more than the entire car that they pulled their radiator out of...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
this dude needs a life.
After looking at his desk area I'm still trying to figure out how he gets air flow to his pc...
Something tells me that half of this would have been unnecessary with 10 minutes of cleanup...
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Actually the very first 100% homemade watercooling setups used old car radiators.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
Very news worthy indeed :-/ since when does using car radiators for liquid cooling in computers qualify as news...
Back in the old days people could not buy water cooling kits, thought about that? Take a wild guess what they used back then as a heat dissipator...
Why? Because we can.
Liquid magnesium?
With the amount of coolant in the radiator, would it have been easier to use a five gallon bucket? It's not like he's really using the radiator's fins.
I'll give someone $5 if they can do this with a VW beetle radiator :P
I showed the pictures to my wife so that she stops complaining about the mess in my room. But a fine job indeed !
Real Porsches have air cooling.
"Why go out and buy a water cooling system when you can do it with an old car radiator? That's exactly what One of The Twelve figured when he used the radiator from his brother's 1979 Toyota Corolla to cool his system. His Athlon64 3000+ can hit 2.5GHz smoothly now. "
Unfortunately the brother's car no longer goes anywere.
Moonshiners occasionally used radiators to make cheap stills instead of doing the work of winding copper pipe. It was a really spectacularly bad idea, because they tended to have lead solder in them and other compounds that were really unwise to drink after they'd leached out into your distillate.
Not sure if there's any relationship to the safety of using this for your computer cooler, though. And a 1979 Toyota seems about right for recycling by now - we just got rid of our 1985, which was still running after ~190K miles, albeit pretty roughly.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
$420 bucks saved in return for having a junk yard in your house. Proof of concept? Cool. Pontless 'because I could'? Cool. Way to save money? Lame.
Pretty nifty idea though... I have a Brish Leyland duce and a half truck rad around here somewhere... now that thing should be enough to keep even a P4 within normal operating temperatures.
Beep beep.
People have been using car radiators to cool their PCs for years... How can this possibly be classed as news? Just because one person has done it on their system for the first time?
Have the people who posted on that thread got the faintest idea about performance cooling? Sheesh. Go and see some decent watercooled beasts at 2cpu forums
It's water, but it's too expensive and hot for you. It's de ionized and monitored for purity so that nothing plates out and it does not eat your cladding, that's the costly part. But, under pressure, it's hot enough to light paper on fire. That's a little too hot for your little cpu.
I'm not a car mechanic. Duh.
Do not, learn not. Your loss. Ask yourself what's the worst thing that can happen. If you can live with that, go for it. If not take steps to mitigate the worst. If that's not enough, then you might not do it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
People have been using old car radiators for water cooling for ages, probably before the advent of commercial water cooling kits, so I don't see what the big deal is. A quick google search shows that people using car radiators for water cooling is nothing new so I'd hardly class this as news.
The G5's liquid cooling system is manufactured by Delphi, a pretty well-known auto parts manufacturer.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
This is why online stores like www.dtekcustoms.com sell heatercores at a price uncomparable to those expensif blackice radiators.
Or you can find a Lada on the street and help yourself with it.
Those old car radiators can be found in different sizes, and they're dirt cheap if bought as replacements for old models - or free if found lying arround as junk.
The tricky part is to make it look good though...
soo..
would you rather buy car parts on premium, relabled as "computer cooling" parts? because that's what most people buying pc watercooling parts do(for the radiator anyways.. most common being heater cores).
this guy certainly is not the first to do this kinda stuff too...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
.. go out and buy one for a computer instead of using the one in your car? Hmm i don't know, maybe the one for your car is made for your car!
...
It's kinda interesting, but using a used car part for my computer isn't very attracting. What's next, using a computer's fan to cool a car's engine
The real question his how long will your wife or girlfriend put up with a car radiator in the house...????
Magnesium? Did they run out of sodium?
If X is the new Y, and Y is "X is the new Y", solve for X.
Does it run Gentoo?
I bet now he can REALLY feel the heat from some hot pr0n.
The current model is completely irrelevant...link to the 1979 model.
you had me at #!
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You're right. With that amount of liquid coolant, he could just as well have used a featureless box rather than a radiator. Any cooling benefit was probably derived from the thermal mass of the coolant.
Why go out and buy a water cooling system when you can do it with an old car radiator?
Maybe because it's bulky and ugly?
...does this mean we now have to change the oil every 3 billion machine cycles?
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
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It was really difficult to attach so that not a single leak occurs.
notice the use of duct tape in a number of the pictures...
when it's gotta be *totally* leak proof, i choose duct tape. remember kids, there's no problem so great that duct tape can't solve it.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
-Oscar Wilde
I think it would be more impressive if he managed to hide that thing in the case.
So, do you have to get it serviced every 10,000 KMs?
The friendliest digital photography forums on the net!
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Why?
Because his VW was in the shop.
why run from Vincenzo?
What most people do with home brew water cooling is take the heater core out of a car.
The fins are generally finer and denser, and the core itself is a much more managable size.
Then you get a beefy aquarium pump, small resevoir...and make your own waterblock with a drill press.
The waterblock is the one part you might want to buy.
Throw some fans on the heater core, hook it up with clear tubing (put springs inside where the tube needs to bend to avoid kinking), install, fill, add some antifreeze to avoid growth and corrosion, and up you go.
Its really not that hard, even for a layman.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Watercoolers have been using car heater cores (the radiators that go in the dash for the inside heating/cooling) forever to cool their loops. You can even buy them with the ends pre-cut for normal hose sizes (I just bought one from a junk yard for $10 and cut the hose ends myself). This is a just a normal "bigger is better" (and impractical...) progression.
Why not just run tap water through it, its always cool.
Is a forum that has not been /.'ed to a standstill.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
25 Million Mac addicts scream out at once.
Or even better, a hot tub? At least that may get you a girlfriend...
Oh well, what the hell...
is this a story? Im not a serious watercooling geek myself but even I knew this was common practice stateside. WTF is SD going to make of the peeps with their watercoolers wired into their crappers? *sheesh*
It'd probably be just as easy to use an automatic tranmission cooler. Much smaller and easier to use.
Here's an example
$50, and it'd be new, instead of have an old rusty car part in your house.
So how is the power supply being cooled? That fan is the biggest noise source in all of my gear.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
I remember seeing a previous /. article about using one from something like a 57 Buick.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I have a passive watercooling set-up (no fans) using two household radiators attached to the wall. Silent cooling for 40$.
You're new here, aren't you?
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
With the benches only beeing at 2.4 ghz if he can hit 2.5 ghz so smoothly?
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
...wait a couple months until you can buy a chip that runs at those speeds without a radiator.
My favorite quote:
you should've used a GM rad lol that toyota one will give out lol
What the fsck does this mean?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Silly geekboy! There is no such thing as "overkill".
There's only "kill" with greater and greater measures of assurance.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Sorry, got confused. Was thinking of Magnox. Pretty improbable I suppose.
Initially, and not too long ago, people made use of these sorts of things to do water cooling. It's only recently that 'kits' and purpose-built equipment has become available. The hobby hasn't matured enough for this to become 'old skool' yet...
I have seen a few ways to kill a car most of them ie not hiting anything will leave the radatior intacked and the engine damaged past repair.
... the list goes on. Note if fitting a new engine it is normally wise to fit a new radator so a old radator does not kill the new engine. So I guess the old radator was junk.
Cracked engine block broken cam
that's the new designs... a lot of the current (ha...) reactors in the usa use water at 140atm... and several of them are ~50y old.
http://www.blue-hardware.com/forum/lofiversion/ind ex.php/t6415.html
.. :p
http://www.pcinpact.com/forum/sujet_19019_0.htm
using a twingo radiator : surely the only use for that oversized toy car
old "air cooled" VWs DID have radiators-for the oil. Those engines run at 315F, so oil cooling is critical. It's under the tin shroud, maybe why you never saw one. When you hot rod one of those engines, one of the first things you do is to install an adapter in place of the original tiny oil cooler, and run a remotely mounted larger radiator.
;)
So, please forward my 5 clams to the EFF, because it *can* be done.
I just had this ideia yesterday, when I saw the radiator on my friend's F650 BWM bike...
I guess a motorcycle radiator will be best suited for PC cooling than a car radiator, don't you think ?
MaxxxRacer here (too lazy to make an account)
The car radiator is a bit over the top. I run water cooling and I use a chevy heatercore (heatercores are what heat up the air when u turn on your heater in ur car).
They are much smaller 250mm by 150mm. And they are highly effecient in their design. You can get one for 25 bucks from your local auto parts store or buy them pre modded for use in computers.
The tranny coolers are also a good idea as they have less resistance to air thus allowing more airflow with lower pressure fans.
If you're getting a surplus radiator, it might be more interesting to
_ agusta18.jpg
hunt around for a curved radiator like those starting to appear
on recent motorcycles...
for example:
http://www.motorcycle.com/mo/mccagiva/mcphotos/mv
This is not something new. The 1986 Chevette radiator for $19 at Autozone is the most commonly used radiator for DIY water cooling on a budget.
http://www.overclockers.com/tips1022/
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
A beowulf cluster of PC fans cooling your cars engine.
emt 377 emt 4
When I get home, my brother is gonna be DEAD MEAT!!!!
rtfa, he can do 2.4ghz now, not 2.5ghz as the summary states
plus, the average limit of a overclocked a64 tends to be between 2.4-2.6ghz, so this isn't anything special
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Water is kinda scarce.
emt 377 emt 4
So many people do this it's not even funny. Most use 87 Chevette rads because they are the right dimensions. Damn, you can even go on DangerDen and buy ones that they have welded the right size fittings onto...how did anyone manage to think this was special enough to get on the front page?
hi
Ever thought about what you could do with the forced hot water heating system in your house??? The typical 1800-square-foot house probably has, what, a dozen radiator units or so? My god, you could probably run a Z-80 at 36 Mhz with such a thing!
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
.... using car radiators has been around for years. many sites have advertised that the best way to cheaply get into watercooling involves buying a car heater radiator, which is at least smaller than a full car radiator, and if you're using second hand parts also a lot cleaner. Same goes for people thinking for the last few years that modding is a new thing. I remember people soldering 486's onto their heatsinks in ovens in like 1994. That's at least a decade ago, and before that people were doing crazy things swapping clock crystals to overclock things. These aren't new ideas. There's nothing original. These people are just slow catching on, and think they're a big deal cos they finally got something done. Big deal.
It's a good thing he did gut the radiator out of a Delorean cause he'll need it for building a time machine to go back in time and recover all that wasted time he spent doing this case mod from hell.
in other news ... my car with the thermaltake stuck on the roof keeps overheating
If you're considering doing this i don't think that's a problem...
Anyway, I'm betting that when his server got slashdotted tonight it was the duct tape that gave out.
John
I am running Fedora Core 2 x86_64 on my Desktop HP AMD 64 3200. I have installed both X86 and x86_64 rpms. I would guess the x86_64 rpms take advantage of the 64 bit cpu? I don't know that this is fact, maybe they just are compiled with the 64 bit flag. I don't even know if I am safe from the 2038 time limit? It was time for an upgrade for me and the whole damn computer only cost $949.00 including the usual onboard sound, USB, firewire, and lan. It has a real modem card, a Gforce video card and DVD and cdrom and memory card readers (no monitor and no floppy drive). I didn't think I was paying a big price penalty for the 64 bit AMD. No problems so far.
You stupid fucking geeks
He takes that thing to a LAN Party ???
Whoa.
they are fairly smal have a good fan with long life dont take up much space but will take a lot of heat some can be mounted to the side of a case and the fan is 12 volt. kev
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Efficiency of a heat engine is a function of the difference between the inside and outside temperatures, BUT, spoiling the path between them is the same as raising the outside temperature. you are efectively reducing the temperature difference.
This is great-
finally some validation of the philosophical aspects of my project to power a Vibrator with a 1.5 HP Briggs&Stratton gasoline engine...
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
Very cool (haha) no doubt, but only if you don't mind a big old dirty car radiator under your desk. This may be an issue for people that have limited leg room or a very clean carpet :)
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
I built a nearly identical setup ~2.5 years ago (except with a 1997 Corolla radiator.) I am sure countless other people have done so before.
That thing is less than half the size of my old Dodge Spirit's radiator. And my family's new Subaru has a radiator about the same size.
BTW, if you don't mind a fan (albeit a large slow-speed one, typically very quiet despite the ability to move lots of air), automotive heater cores are quite popular with watercoolers I believ.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I was actually thinking about something like this a while ago, but with a car oil cooler instead. You could probably put that into your case.
Might even be useable, but im not sure if it would be effective enough.