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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."
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...
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.
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.
Real Porsches have air cooling.
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.
My main concern, besides noise, it's that it introduces another "break point" in the system; which means i'll have to monitor the waterblock temperature constantly (extra circuitery). Not only in case the fan dies; also if the pump dies, or the radiator becomes clogged. Besides that, it's all advantages.
Other thing i considered was a smaller heatsink inside a pipe with two fans blowing, again, at low voltages (5-9 volts). If the sink is large enough this would work quite nicely, but dust acumulation is a concern.
I'd much rater use solid aluminium sinks but those are quite expensive, so i still really don't know what to do with the whole thing.
They're not Beetles. They're bastardised abominations from the land of marketing. They're just VW Golfs with a funky shell on top --- decent enough cars in their own way, but if you want a Golf, just buy one.
It ain't a Beetle if it ain't rear-engine air-cooled.