Considering Watercooling Your PC?

An anonymous reader writes "Thinking of taking the plunge into water cooling your PC? These guys have rounded up three systems ranging from cheap and cheerful, to stylish and pricey."

cheerful?

[wankledot]

That has to be the strangest adjective I've heard for any piece of gear, especially a watercooling system.

Maybe it's a japanese one...

Super Lucky Best Cheerful Watercooler 100% !@#!@# ^_^

oh man

[StevenHenderson]

ranging from cheap and cheerful, to stylish and pricey.

Only on /. could a watercooling system be called "stylish."

"Hey baby, check out my new Abercrombie watercooler!"

Text of article

[Anonymous Coward]

Server Error in '/' Application.
Server Too Busy
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Web.HttpException: Server Too Busy

Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

Stack Trace:

[HttpException (0x80004005): Server Too Busy]
System.Web.HttpRuntime.RejectRequestInternal(HttpW orkerRequest wr) +148

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:1.1.4322.573; ASP.NET Version:1.1.4322.573

Cheap and cheerful?

[grungebox]

Their server is certainly not cheerful anymore...perhaps because their stylish water-cooling system could not handle the deluge of Slashdot clicks, leaving behind an electronic trail of tears and thus flushing any attempts to RTFA down the toilet.

Ob AVForums discussion...

[GillBates0]

An old (2002) thread from AVForums [avforums.com] about this guy who took "watercooling" a little too literally. Turns out it was tongue in cheek, but the whole thread is hilarious.

I decided this weekend to try and quiten my PC by following some other members lead and going down the water cooling road. The fans on my PC were really starting to drive me mad

The first thing that I did was to remove all the fans. The one on the processor and graphics card were no problem but the one in the power unit was a bugger to get out.

The most difficult part was sealing all the ventilitation openings in the PC case with silicon. I also put silicon all around the joints on the PC case. The smell of silicon was dreadful but when my wife complained I told her to be patent as it will be worth it when we have a completely silent PC.

Because I had completely sealed the PC case the only opening near top was the DVD drive. So I opened that and put the small hose I had purchased specially for the job into the DVD drive as far as it would go. With what I can only describe as great excitement and anticipation, I turned on the water. It really is amazing just how long it took before the case was complete full, and boy was it heavy. That didn't really bother me as I didn't intend to be moving the PC anyway.

Read on...

Re:i watercooled for about a year

[Astroboy!]

I chose to do mine semi-homebrew style

Wow -- beer as coolant -- that's both imaginative and refreshing ;-)

no, but I'm freezing my laptop cooling tray.

[cabazorro]

I'm considering to put the cooling aluminum laptop
tray in the freezer overnight so I can get at least
30 min of work in the morining in my damn HP Pavillion ze4042 without the damn thing turning on the cpu fan that makes more
noise than my neighboors leaf-blower.
The laptop cooling trays are worthless.

Watercooling my computer?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about computer-heating my pool?

Re:Why water?

[tuba_dude]

I took care of the condensation problem the easy way. I can have it as cold as I want without a problem. The fix: Live in the Desert! It's rained once since I've moved here, and the air filter in my case means dust isn't much of an issue.

Re:watercooling

[Zangief]

If you are running BeOS, you can program fault tolerance into software, through intellligent use of the system calls "isComputerOn" and "isComputerOnFire". The first returns 1 if the computer is on, undetermined if not. isComputerOnFire returns 0 if the computer is not on fire, or the motherboard temperature if not.

Re:I'm past thinking about water-cooling

[death_cheese]

Did anyone else look at the pictures of the home made system [burnoutpc.com] and instantly think of the air conditioning system in the movie Brazil [imdb.com]?

Load Testing Service

[rts008]

To the admin. of /. Have you thought of turning the power of /.'s smoking servers into an additional income source? I mean, you could offer to "Load Test" some outfits new servers for a fee and then just post a link on /. announcing something like: free beer and women who love geeks-click here. If their servers could take that, then they could be assured that their servers could stand up to anything short of a direct hit from nukular WMD's!

Re:What About?

[atta1]

Well, maybe we should start saving and chilling our urine for use in PC cooling systems... I figure it'll take me about a week to fill up the reservoir..

Re:Are we done watercooling yet?

[tktk]

Go buy something? Something that's largely non-functional, and unreliable? And bolt it on to your computer? Oh, yeah! You da man!

People install Microsoft products every day.

Obligatory MS joke...I know...I don't care...mod me down.

Re:watercooling

[Hatta]

If you are running BeOS, you can program fault tolerance into software, through intellligent use of the system calls "isComputerOn" and "isComputerOnFire". The first returns 1 if the computer is on, undetermined if not. isComputerOnFire returns 0 if the computer is not on fire, or the motherboard temperature if not.

Great, now we just need a serial port controlled fire extinguisher.

Re:watercooling

[pclminion]

The same way your air cooled system handles fault tolerance -- The onboard hardware monitor detects a high CPU or motherboard temperature and shuts it down.

I don't think you actually read the parent post -- what does it matter if the CPU shuts itself off, if your entire case is flooded with coolant? You're pretty well fucked in that case.

Re:Why water?

[WormholeFiend]

yea but the vapochill system would reduce the amount of disposable money I have to a point below an acceptable threshold.

Hotglue...

[ylikone]

I once tried a new way of water-cooling by hotglueing the entire motherboard... yes, I basically coated it with glue and lowered it into a bucket filled with icy water. I obviously kept the power supply and harddrives on a table next to the bucket. All the cabling was also well glued at the connection points to the motherboard. No pumps needed, no CPU fan.

Anyway, now I can overclock my P4 from 1.8 to 2.4 with no problem... and anytime I start getting lock-ups, I just throw in a few more ice cubes from the freezer.

Re:oh man

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hey baby, check out my new Abercrombie watercooler!"

Only on /. could Abercrombie be considered stylish.