Do-it-yourself CPU Water Cooler

Foss writes "This article on EIMod.com shows a (very) cheap and effective way of getting that usually-expensive water cooling system that many of us have thought about. There are some pretty pictures too :)"

Cheap and effective?

[SimplyCosmic]

Sure, for the ten minutes that the article mentions that the pump runs before overheating.

Why water, try oil.

[bluGill]

Water conducts electrisity. Well, pure water doesn't, but pure water will eat metal until it does conduct. That means you have to keep your water carefully sererate from everything else.

By contrast, oil doesn't conduct, doesn't disolve metal. Fill your case with oil, and you have better cooling than air, and much easier to deal with. (Note, oil isn't as good as water for heat capacity, but it is still better than air and has all the other advantages)

Do slashdot editors read the stories they link to?

[linux_warp]

Did anyone else read the part that the thing only runs for 10 minutes? Oh what a bargain. Buy all the watercooling stuff and have it work for 10 minutes at 1ghz. Woohoo.

Re:Personal Experience

[quantax]

Oh yea, I forgot to mention, skimping on these sort of things for money is dumb because by using jury-rigged methods such as this, you usually end up spending MUCH more in hardware replacement costs. All it takes is a couple drops and could easily blow every component attached to the mobo (which is pretty much everything). Watercooling is not the sort of thing you cheap-out on since the consequences can rack up in cost pretty quick.

Re:look at what I found on eimod.com

[stoolpigeon]

These guys have some time on their hands.

That's cool though- they are just thinking up ideas and trying them out. They are not worrying too much about convention apparently.

How many great ideas started that way?

More than I could name.

.

Re:Other liquids

[Anonymous Coward]

Liquid nitrogen is probably too cold. Most commercial semiconductors are only rated to 0 C. Specially selected units can go much lower of course.

When you get semiconductors too cold, they are subject to weird feedback effects, and destructive spurious oscillations (probably because the ohmic value of parasitic damping resistance is lowered, increasing circuit Q which leads to oscillation).