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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."
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...
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.
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
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
"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
$420 bucks saved in return for having a junk yard in your house. Proof of concept? Cool. Pontless 'because I could'? Cool. Way to save money? Lame.
Pretty nifty idea though... I have a Brish Leyland duce and a half truck rad around here somewhere... now that thing should be enough to keep even a P4 within normal operating temperatures.
Beep beep.
It's water, but it's too expensive and hot for you. It's de ionized and monitored for purity so that nothing plates out and it does not eat your cladding, that's the costly part. But, under pressure, it's hot enough to light paper on fire. That's a little too hot for your little cpu.
I'm not a car mechanic. Duh.
Do not, learn not. Your loss. Ask yourself what's the worst thing that can happen. If you can live with that, go for it. If not take steps to mitigate the worst. If that's not enough, then you might not do it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ 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
Porsches use aircooling, so you have to run around the block with you're PC....
If X is the new Y, and Y is "X is the new Y", solve for X.
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...
The real question his how long will your wife or girlfriend put up with a car radiator in the house...????
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 you meant s/wife/mom/
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.
Or even better, a hot tub? At least that may get you a girlfriend...
Oh well, what the hell...
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.
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!!!
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...
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.