Extreme CPU Cooling

Darkfell writes "Check out todays HardOCP. An article was posted by a guy who cooled a dual PIII down to -59.7C. Very nice setup." This is worth a read- quite detailed for you do-it-yourselfers willing to risk destroying your computer.

Comments

Go water! Some URLs and some info all might find i

[BLKMGK]

I've been interested in this sort of thing for a long while and have been overclocking since the old 8088 days when it took a soldering iron and crystals from the local 'Shack.

Anyway, cooling with refrigerant has never really appealed to me much. There may be some danger in working with the Freon, I'm not terribly familiar with the technology involved, and the power drain could wind up being significant. Some of you have posted about simply placing a computer in a small refrigerator - this has already been done and it was found that the compressor in the 'frig couldn't keep up with the heavy heat load of an overclocked CPU - the compressor ran full time. The OCP article mentions this problem too, frankly I found the article very well written covering many bases most people forget.

Anyway, my focus has been to build a water cooled Peltier assembly. I currently use Peltiers to cool a PPGA 300A enough to go 504mhz (stable) but the heatsink become significantly warmer due to the Pelt's heat. Obviously such a setup isn't ever likely to go below ambient either.

Some have mentioned condensation and water as being really big issues. So long as the water is sealed out of your sink this isn't an issue. Condensation can be avoided by decent insulation - remember that condensation only forms when components cooler than the dew point meet humid air. Avoid this and you're fine.

One of the last hurdles to consider (IMO) FSB speeds. Currently there just aren't enough selections and Intel's damned multiplier locking is making life a bitch. The Turbo.PLL the Japanese are working on may fix this as it'll allow you to vary the FSB in increments while keeping things liek the AGP and PCI cards at a normal speed.

Way below are some URLs to check out. Note that some are in Kanji as the Japanese have really had a good time with this. Note too that Melcor sells components to water cool Peltiers for industrial applications and apparently not retail, someone needs to resell these parts! Lastly, the Socket 7 CPUs and the PPGA Celerons share a common size, the PPGA chips also appear to run cooler than their slot one brothers. My fastest systems all run the PPGA Celerons including one dual SMP system that's not actively cooled but still gets 2X464mhz. Note that I've not yet managed to get a successful water system running but am working on it. Car heater cores work well for heat exchanges, RedLine Water Wetter helps improve heat transfer, and small fountain pumps move massive amounts of water - these are designed to be constant duty too. All Electronics sells Pelts cheap BTW.

On with the URLs! Here are just a few of what I've got and I'd welcome correspondance on this subject if my HotMail 'box can handle it!
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http://www.melcor.com/ - Industrial hardware cooling supplier
http://www.agaweb.com/coolcpu/ English water cooling site w/plans
http://e-sdi.com/west/intro.htm English water cooling project, self contained
http://www.mune.com/mcp2.htm Japanese site, Kanji w/Multiple projects shown.
http://www.kumagaya.or.jp/~touma/index.html Japanese hardware site - Kanji
http://www.jah.ne.jp/~ken1/kenO.htm Japanese project - Kanji

I'd post more but after 5 Netscape crashes I've got to run. Explore the Japanese sites and check out the Turbo.PLL if you happen across it - that site is slowly being translated. If this is of real interest I'll try to post more URLs when I've more time!

Enjoy!

P.S. no time to preview, hope it comes across okay!