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

Well that makes me feel better.

[Kenja]

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

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

[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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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...

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: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/

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.