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."

Comments

So...

[rusty_razor]

If you leave the radiator attached to the car, you could drive your PC to LAN parties!

Well that makes me feel better.

[Kenja]

After having seen that guys work station, I feel better about he mess in my apartment.

Re:Well that makes me feel better.

[JimDabell]

He's got nothing on this guy.

Re:Well that makes me feel better.

[Kenja]

"Yeah, but is your apartment full of spare parts and hacked gear like a mad scientist's lab?"

Lets put it this way. I have fiber optic gigabit running in my bed room to everything but my SGI and Sun boxes.

Antifreeze

[dykofone]

I really appreciate that he still used a glycol/water mixture. Pretty unnecessary, but certainly a nice touch.

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...

Re:Antifreeze

[Waffle Iron]

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.

Re:Antifreeze

[Lord Kano]

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

Re:Antifreeze

[the_mad_poster]

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 :/

Re:Antifreeze

[Anonymous Coward]

You can never have too much cooling.

In some tests I did some time ago, a small car radiator (used to water-cool a PC no less!) had a thermal resistance of 0.093K/W with no fan, and 0.018K/W with a fan. In the case of a 100W CPU, that means the difference between 9.3K temperature gradient compared to only 1.8K, which is very significant.

Re:Antifreeze

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Antifreeze

[Bilestoad]

I don't think you really understand. A fan can only help a radiator bring coolant to ambient temperature. If this radiator already provide 200 times the required cooling then adding a fan isn't going to make it "much" cooler, probably not "any" cooler.

Re:Antifreeze

[Cylix]

Glycol is neat, but it isn't without problems.

I was talking to an engineer who retired from PAX, but now does solely contract work.

Anyhow, apparently there is a problem they found out with glycol. It coats the metal surface and of course transmitters produce lots of heat. So after a period of time this glycol coat solidifies. It becomes an insulator.

I guess not so long ago, they finally started diagnosing OLD dead transmitter tubes. It is expected to burn out at some point in its lifetime and normally a diagnostic hasn't been done.

Though there isn't a replacement yet for glycol as the tubes and compoenents were designed with its characteristics in mind.

Though given he is not going to be using this system for a decade... it's just an interesting point to note.

Re:Antifreeze

[BlueAdept]

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..

Re:Antifreeze

[Firethorn]

Antifreeze may be the cheap solution, as many people have some left over for their car, but it's not ideal. I've read that Glycol only has about a third of the heat transfer ability of water. Thus the idea of the "water wetter" type products. You don't really need the glycol, you need the anti-bacterial and anti-corrosion treatments. So they made a product that contained them, along with something that reduces surface tension (better cooling).

This site has some advice

But I'll say that I know that antifreeze has anti-biological properties. And if you use it, you can probably leave it alone for alot longer than a year as long as you have a resevoir and keep it topped off. My antifreeze is good for five years in my car.

And?

[MightyPez]

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.

Re:And?

[SorcererX]

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.

Re:And?

[catch23]

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.

Heh...

[TWX]

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...

Hmmm

[ShatteredDream]

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...

Re:The reason I don't use a car radiator

[zaffir]

Actually the very first 100% homemade watercooling setups used old car radiators.

Would a five gallon bucket been easier?

[MyNameIsFred]

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.

Re:Would a five gallon bucket been easier?

[red_dragon]

Quite possibly true. Also, car radiators are intended to work better on a moving car, in order to transfer the heat to the air that flows through it. Unless you dropped it from a tall building, a PC would have a hard time reaching the same speeds.

Re:Would a five gallon bucket been easier?

[jcr]

Plus with an exposed water surface you get evaporative cooling for free.

Not only that, it's a humidifier! (Handy for those winter months..)

-jcr

I'll give someone $5...

[Zoc_All_Alone]

I'll give someone $5 if they can do this with a VW beetle radiator :P

Re:I'll give someone $5...

[david.given]

Can it be the "New" Beetle? Those are liquid-cooled and have radiators.

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.

Re:I'll give someone $5...

[SuperBanana]

I'll give someone $5 if they can do this with a VW beetle radiator :P

I'll give them $20 if they manage to do it with a VW beetle.

from the forum

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a Porsche or Ferrari fan with it

Real Porsches have air cooling.

Water bogged.

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:Water bogged.

[MachDelta]

Actually, the car could probably still go somewhere - it just wouldn't make it back. ;)

Beats using the radiator for moonshine...

[billstewart]

You might be a redneck if ....
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.

D'oh

[Realistic_Dragon]

$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.

nuke cool

[twitter]

why not use whatever they use to cool nuclear reactor cores to cool your computer

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.

Nothing new.

[Pirow]

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.

Apple did it already

[caveat]

The G5's liquid cooling system is manufactured by Delphi, a pretty well-known auto parts manufacturer.

Re:This sounds a little extreme

[1001010]

Porsches use aircooling, so you have to run around the block with you're PC....

Re:This sounds a little extreme

[Edie O'Teditor]

i have an old porche i can use for this..

Porche? Pah - I've got a verandah!

I was considering this...

[Lisandro]

...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...

Re:I was considering this...

[Lisandro]

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.

Re:I was considering this...

[Stepping Razor]

The tricky part is to make it look good though...

Not for me, I build aluminium radiators for a living. I've been thinking about making one specially for watercooling. I was thinking about getting a tall thin core so that the air rises up thru the rad creating a chimney like effect, so that the hot air rising would pull cool air in the bottom, making a fan unnecessary. It would be silent and I could make it seriously beautiful.

Re:The reason I don't use a car radiator

[gl4ss]

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...

wife or girlfriend

[rshimizu12]

The real question his how long will your wife or girlfriend put up with a car radiator in the house...????

Re:wife or girlfriend

[sexecutioner]

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!

Give the man a cigar!

[r_j_prahad]

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.

universal solution:

[to_kallon]

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.

Re:My god

[kingkade]

Why?

Because his VW was in the shop.

Re:what a mess

[gnuman99]

I showed the pictures to my wife so that she stops complaining about the mess in my room.

I think you meant s/wife/mom/

Heater core

[anethema]

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.

Re:Heater core

[Man in Spandex]

Water Cooling IS simple and easy to setup.

But, when it comes to liquids and electronics, the average joe will say "ARe you crazy? I don't wanna destroy my Computer"

Deal with that. If you can, and in general it's not hard to convince somebody to go with water cooling, they will not regret it.

Usually water cooling kits, if the pieces are well selected, will last many years no matter which cpu you'll have. The worst would be you'd have to buy a new cpu block but some manufactures sell kits which can fit the very same waterblock on many types of sockets.

Re:Heater core

[Bilestoad]

Five years ago you would have been right - but you're obviously not keeping up. Many mfrs now offer water cooling systems, there are even all-in-one systems from companies like Thermaltake - if you can install a conventional CPU cooler, you can install water cooling.

When high quality reasonably priced waterblocks became available from Danger Den, Swiftech etc. it became a complete waste of time to make your own unless you're unemployed and have nothing better to do.

Inside springs are a thing of the past (which is great, because it was hard to get the little buggers where you needed them), outside springs work very nicely - google on "coolsleeves". And if you use quality tubing, silicon or Tygon brand then they're not needed because only the most acute angles or twists will cause kinks.

Best solution today - Innovatek, using their convection radiators that mount outside the case, no fan required, and their 12V pump that just plugs into a drive connector. Very pricey but the best always is.

just hook it to the tap.

[ender_wiggins]

Why not just run tap water through it, its always cool.

Aquarium

[HermanAB]

Why not just heat your tropical aquarium with it?

Or even better, a hot tub? At least that may get you a girlfriend...

Re:The reason I don't use a car radiator

[vasqzr]

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.

What is this "overkill"?

[Chas]

Silly geekboy! There is no such thing as "overkill".

There's only "kill" with greater and greater measures of assurance.

Upscale radiator...

[Polo]

If you're getting a surplus radiator, it might be more interesting to
hunt around for a curved radiator like those starting to appear
on recent motorcycles...

for example:
http://www.motorcycle.com/mo/mccagiva/mcphotos/mv_ agusta18.jpg

Not New

[heli0]

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/

Re:Not New

[xs650]

For $19 you could buy an entire 1986 Chevette.

The Chevette itself is worthless, but at least you would get the shroud and fan along with the heater core.

Imagine

[Duhavid]

A beowulf cluster of PC fans cooling your cars engine.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Here's an even better cooling idea.

[LazloToth]

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!

Re:Power Supply

[Kris_J]

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.

Check out the screenshot

[serutan]

He takes that thing to a LAN Party ???
Whoa.