Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?"
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.
I'll give someone $5 if they can do this with a VW beetle radiator :P
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.
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.
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.
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!!!