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Water Cooling With A Car Radiator

Posted by timothy on from the then-he's-gonna-kill-us dept.

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."

4 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Apple did it already by caveat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  2. I was considering this... by Lisandro · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...to cool a Class-A amp i'm building right now that dissipates 200w of pure heat continuosly. My first thought was a small motorcycle oil radiator, but that would need a small fan to help the airflow and i wanted too keep it as noiseless as possible. Car radiators are so big that the surface area is enough to cool the "modest" power requirements of electronics without aditional fans.

    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...

  3. Re:Antifreeze by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    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.

  4. Re:Antifreeze by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.