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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."
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
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
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
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...
That probably won't be necessary. Assuming that the original car had a 130hp engine with 30% thermal efficiency, and making a wild-ass-guess that 10% of the waste heat of the car actually goes through the radiator (rather than exhaust or other means), my calculations indicate that in the car the radiator would have a peak thermal throughput of over 22 kilowatts. A 100W CPU doesn't need to get rid of even 0.5% of that amount of heat. A fan would just seem to supply even more pointless overkill.
Yes, and back in the old days this was the most common way to watercool their system. The overclockers would make their own waterblocks, get some hoses and a pump from a local aquarium or gardening shop and they'd go to the nearest scrapyard to get a good car radiator. Back then this would also generally turn out cheaper than going for high-end aircooling, not so anymore however. These days all and everyone just go to the nearest computer enthusiast shop and get a waterblock, a pump and hoses and an overpriced mass produced radiator.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I really appreciate that he still used a glycol/water mixture. Pretty unnecessary, but certainly a nice touch.
Not at all. There are water conditioners in antifreeze to prevent the formation of scale.
Regular tap water or even distilled water can cause a radiator to develop deposits when the metal inside oxidizes.
Since there is no heater core to worry about, the total volume of liquid needed would be smaller. I'd consider using pure antifreeze.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
And if the antifreeze boils over, you're going to have one heck of a mess on your carpet (not to mention one fried processor)....
Hmmm.... I don't think AMD has had a problem with their chips being as hot as a running car motor for awhile now.
Amusingly, I note that he actually did use glycol. Unless he plans on running his system outside in the winter, however, I'm not sure what the point was. The only thing it seems to be doing is bringing a toxic substance into his living quarters. Hope he doesn't have any pets, or he may not have them much longer :/
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
A fan would just seem to supply even more pointless overkill.
That's just what I was thinking: this whole setup is probably pretty quiet.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
Not. :P) you'l se lots of people that uses old swedish Volvo car radiators, found at scrapyards. They are the coolest on the forum. They also do lots of other nice stuff. Like Carblaster.
3 _carblaster.php?page=1
3 _carblaster.php?page=10 //zyk
If you take a look in the www.sweclockers.com forums (swedish
http://www.sweclockers.com/html/artikel/art_04092
Result of Carblaster:
http://www.sweclockers.com/html/artikel/art_04092
Why not just run tap water through it, its always cool.
The general rule of thumb for gasoline engines is thus: 1/3 of the power goes to the ground, 1/3 out the tailpipe, and 1/3 into cooling (which includes running fans, and heat actually being carried out of the radiator, and heat radiating off of the exhaust, and all of the other ways heat can possibly be lost)
Ideally, it would be good to keep as much heat inside the engine as possible. We could actually run much more efficient engines (by running them hotter) if it weren't for materials and emissions (damn that N2 all to hell!) and fuel (gasoline likes to go poof spontaneously when it's hot and compressed) Too bad, that.
Agreed. I'm using a 1990 Honda Accord radiator that was bought new off of ebay. It was the cheapest radiator that was still new. I use it to cool a total of 3 computer and 2 video cards. The hose adaptors to keep it from leaking were purchased from home depot. I bought a $40 500gph pond pump from petsmart to circulate the system... works pretty well.
I did this over a year ago, but my radiator was brand new when I installed it... and it's mounted in the wall in the garage with fans on it... the water is pumped with a central heating pump and piped to 3 PC's in the house.
Anyone have bandwidth big enough to hold a picture or two because I'd get slashdotted instantly..
Who is Seg Fault, and what is he doing with Kernel Space?
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
I just had a thought: If you were building a house with airconditioning, pretty standard, how hard would it be to plumb the aircon cooling lines to certain rooms (just one or two; basement, office, etc...) and finish with tops and standard fittings. Then you can just connect all the hardware in that room to the house's full strength chiller, woot!
I'm running a normally-clocked (Linux) PC 24/5 (doesn't need to be on on the weekends) server with a fanless power supply, a Zalman 6000-series passive CPU heatsink and a pair of passive-only graphics cards. I did install the big fan that came with the Zalman at its slowest setting. (You can't hear it. Pull the plug while the system is live, there's no change in noise.) The only things that make any noise at the two hard drives. I have no exhaust fan and it works fine. Big case though. Haven't used it through a Perth summer yet, might add another silent fan of some sort then.
You can get a Z80 that runs at 33Mhz.f am=219
http://www.zilog.com/products/family.asp?