Do-it-yourself CPU Water Cooler 207
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 :)"
one of the better ones that i've seen.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Liquid Nitrogen Cooling (Score:5, Interesting)
Why go to all this trouble? This [octools.com] is obviously the way of the future.
Has anyone just stuck the board in the fridge? (Score:4, Interesting)
-S
Geez (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, and it'd work for more than 10 minutes too!
The things a guy will do...
Hydroponic CPU's (Score:4, Interesting)
if you turn the thing on with a cool reservoir, the CPU temp stays below 76F. but after being on for 10 hours, the reservoir temperature raises to about 113F due to my lack of money to buy a real radiator. so my equilibrium CPU temp with an Athlon XP 1600 is 123F, when the fan it came with ran it at 145F.
you can see pictures and stuff here [mit.edu].
granted, copper slugs and machining equipment and "free" swagelock (and peltiers!) is not something everyone has, but use what you got, right?
hope someone finds it useful or interesting.
muerte
why not combine both? (Score:1, Interesting)
So, who's going to patent this? this technique will be called überfan(TM), and will be copyrighted by aww.. forget it.
You don't need a radiator... (Score:4, Interesting)
...to shed heat from the coolant. Just run the water coming from the cpu to a shower head (or similar) suspended above an open reservior. The water is dispersed by the shower head (increasing surface area) and cooled by the air as it falls into the container below.
Granted, this approach requires an open reservoir outside of the case, but it's simple, effective, and cheap.
Bonus: it can also replace those stupid "Sounds of Nature" tapes that people use for background noise at bedtime.
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
There's two reasons for you right there
Snipes (Score:2, Interesting)
2.) Use caulk to seal the hose to the piping.
3.) Look around (larger Chinese groceries are good) for pre-formed metal trays, some of which have mtal lids that could be caulked shut.
Re:You don't need a radiator... (Score:2, Interesting)
then you would have to clean out the whole thing with CLR or some crap, and it would be a huge pain. and good system should be as closed as possible while still allowing for some thermal expansion of trapped air.
the trick is to find a good radiator, CHEAP. or free. maybe a heater core from a car from a junkyard? maybe the heat exchanger from a junked air conditioner?
the hard part is not getting the heat from the CPU to the water, but getting the heat from the water into the air.
muerte
I am planning on running 10 home built 1U's (Score:1, Interesting)
I will custom build my own blocks, use at least 4 medium sized pumps with any two having enough capacity for the system to work and a radiator with the top resevoir being a waterfall like the old Crays.
Between 2 and 4 feet of water pressure will allow the water to naturally flow through the water blocks then down to the lower resevoir where the pumps force the water up through the radiator and out over the waterfall.
A thick plate of copper will be used as the base and a box very much like the main part of the heat sink being reviewed here as the top of the block. Although I am thinking that I can use a slightly thicker copper and hammer it out into the top so that there are no corner copper joints. There will be internal fins to help conduct heat and direct the water flow optimally. I want to scavenge the mounting clips from old fans from a salvage shop I know. They have stacks of old CPU heat sinks.
Compression fittings will be used on the blocks and every where else where a plastic fitting meets a copper fitting. The copper tubing will all be soldered.
The only fans will be on the 10 fans on the heat sinks inside the closed case, so they shouldn't be too loud. Plus the half rack is going to be out in the garage. I am wondering if I can mount a larger diameter fan to the power supplies and remove the too small noisy fan from the inside of the power supplies.
Finally I am going to put a large slow moving fan on the top of the half rack. It's a totally enclosed rack with front and back glass doors, so it's nice. An air filter in the bottom will keep out the dust.
When all is said and done I will have a beowulf cluster of 10 dual AMD's. I also intend to install Mosix on all the boxes too. I will be able to achieve quite high frame rates on video rendering, which is the main reason I am going to be doing this. There will also be dual 80GB hard drives on each box for a total of 1.6TB of journalled file space. Most of this will be used in a fun project I have that to calculate primes.
Freezer-box cooled CPU (Score:1, Interesting)
My idea to cool my next CPU involves a water cooling block [say...swiftek] and a couple of hoses running through a fishtank pump. I also had a brilliant idea of placing the water reservoir inside my mini-freezer and running the hoses into the freezer to get some really cold water through the system. This will be done by making a couple of holes through the freezer's door seal and porting the hoses through those holes, using a bit of caulking to seal everything nice and tight. The water reservoir will be something small enough to fit in the door of the freezer (like a 2-liter bottle of coke, a small ice cream container, a tupperware, etc...). The hoses will go in opposite ends of the freezing water tank, to maximize cooling, rather than one next to each other. I'll also make sure that the computer is placed close enough to the freezer box in order for the water from the freezer to get to the water block cold enough for it to have the best posible cooling effect. I'll probably use some pricey isolated hose to get the water to the block as cold as possible, and use a regular cheap rubber hose for the returning water. Replacing the water in the reservoir will be mandatory, at least once a month, once I build the system. I was thinking about using distilled water to minimize mineral buildup in the water cooling system, thus giving it more effectiveness and a longer service life.
The reason why I picked a fishtank pump in this project is because I've had a cheap fishtank pump in my fish aquarium for over three years, without problems, it runs 24/7, and makes very little noise!
I hope this cooling idea helps anybody who has a mini-freezer, or is buying one for their room. I'm almost positive that this way of cooling the CPU will increase cooling performance by a considerable amount, as the water entering the block is near frezing! with this said, just imagine what you can do to your AMD T-bird / Duron / XP / MP.
Happy cooling,
Syrcam