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."

I'm past thinking about water-cooling

[stecoop]

I once thought peltiers would be great with water cooling but we read on /. the other day [slashdot.org] that these devices are 5% efficient so that's a no.

Water-cooling has a few kinks like electricity near water and corrosion - at least a few years ago that may be solved no days with Antifreeze but you still are at the mercy of the ambient room temperature. It's finicky enough that you couldn't build a machine with water cooling and leave it in a room for 3 years so that leaves a hole in reliability as I couldn't leave my machines on while going away for two weeks on vacation unless I didn't mind rolling the dice to seeing fire trucks at my home.

Considering Water-cooling Your PC? This was the leader I was until I saw a home made [burnoutpc.com] active cooling system. I first saw active cooling systems from http://www.vapochill.com/ (website down?) and have been waiting for someone to take an AC compressor and attach it to a computer case. It seems that were just on the verge of DIYers of achieving satisfactory results in active cooling systems; therefore, I will hang on to old reliable (the passive radiators) until I can muscle up the nerve to go the active cooling route.

Why water?

[BeerCat]

OK, so water is cheap, but why not go for materials with better cooling properties (like in a fridge), which would be more efficient?

Something that is non-destructive to PCBs if it leaks would also be a bonus.

watercooling

[Large Bogon Collider]

The major hangup I have about watercooling systems is fault tolerance. How the the whole system handle 1) pump failure, 2) water leak, 3) coolant loss, etc without destroying the PC, or worse, starting a fire.

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Re:Why water?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you used a fridge there would obviously be major problems with condenstation. I guess the main selling points of water cooling is that it's better than air and it's not as expensive as something like VapoChill. . .Plus it looks damn cool with some UV die :)

Cheap? Cheerful? How about WORKS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, if I'm going to pipe water through my PC, I want it to be reliable and effective. That's it.

Who the hell cares if it's neon?

Re:Why water?

[Ironsides]

Refridgerators use a heat pump which has an efficiency of about 5%. Thats not acceptable for cooling processors which output 100W. You would need a power supply specifically for your cooler.

i watercooled for about a year

[kochsr]

It was fun, i only had one leak (that was my own fault) but it was expensive. These systems are not for real world computing. They are for hobbyists that want something to do. I chose to do mine semi-homebrew style. I fabricated some stuff myself, and bought the other parts.

The only reason i did it was that it was nearly silent. Of course, you can do that with conventional cooling nowadays.

Another interesting fact is that i got out of high performance PCs, and now my only computer is a 12" powerbook.

Re:watercooling

[The Asmodeus]

How is this different than a heat sink + fan? If the fan gives out, you're toast.

Re:oh man

[Migrant Programmer]

Surely the Power Mac G5 is at least a little stylish [apple.com]...

Re:watercooling

[Minwee]

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.

After looking at how CPUs handle faulty heat sinks [tomshardware.com], you would think that having a large supply of water nearby would be a good thing.

This isn't something to encourage.

[pclminion]

Water cooling, I think, isn't something we should be encouraging. It's just one more excuse for chip makers to ignore their chips' power requirements. The real solution is for the chips to run cooler, not to slap bigger and more complicated cooling systems on them.

If you're using water cooling for noise-reduction purposes, okay. But if you literally need it in order to keep your chip cool, there's something very wrong.

We should NOT be encouraging chip makers to continue avoiding power problems. It's environmentally irresponsible.

Re:watercooling

[Large Bogon Collider]

Semi-true. In many newer processors, if the fan gives out, the CPU on-die heat sensor throttles back power consumption to prevent overheating. However, with a HS+fan, there is only one point of failure, the fan. With watercooling (which I have thought long and hard about), the fan can fail, the tubes can crack/leak/break, the connectors and fail, the pump can fail, corrosion can block the waterblock, etc. These are not just hypothetical situation - they have happened. The scariest part is if the water leaks and shorts out something expensive - esp. the CPU and graphics card (which is usually sitting directly below the CPU). I would be upset if the cooling system caused a fire, but would be even more so if insurance decided not to cover it because of my modifications.

Are we done watercooling yet?

[karlandtanya]

Reminds me of a 16 year old that bolts the entire Summit Racing catalog onto his mustang and thinks now he's a gearhead.

Go invent something. Go build something. Heck, even go break something while learning about it. Join you local tesla coil or ham radio club and learn something. Contribute a patch to an open-source project. build a watercooling system out of parts from Lowe's. Be proud of that.

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

Care is for girls

[Cigarra]

"With proper care, it's safe and a quiet way to cool your machine."

The thing is, i don't wanna HAVE to be careful. When these things ain't need no proper care nor love nor sissy feelings at all, THEN they will be ready to hit the masses.

Re:water cooling routers?

[cangeceiro]

i think i know why

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

Re:Cheap? Cheerful? How about WORKS?

[Artifakt]

The original points of this were:
it's easier to trace small leaks with neon or florescent dyes in use. Use opaque hose, and bring an actual black light near it, and you have one of the world's best cheap tests for system integrity.
Stock antifreeze is florescent green anyway, and it prevents some kinds of corrosion, so why not use it.
Now the case modders are going for the whole hobby effect, with transparent case windows to show off the glowing water inside, and built in UV sources to heat up that case they are trying to cool down (and even cold cathode lights produce some heat), so they are worrying more about apperance than substance. It's the geek equivalent of oversized exaust extensions on a rice burner. But originally, this was about being reliable and effective.

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

All of these systems seem to be based on the idea of bringing the water to the chip; couldn't you run a long peice of metal to the chip and then cool the end of that with water?

I was considering water cooling, but....

[Wellmont]

After i did a few calculations and "wonderings" of my own i decided to just build my system around a better heatsink similar to the design of the radiator found in most normal watercooling systems. Most people use watercooling for performance, but there are others who use it for stability and the noise factor. The problem is that the manufacturers will tell you that watercooling is better because:
1.) better cooling
2.) less noise
3.) less vibration

The fan that is currently installed on my copper based heatsink is realatively quiet and i can control it with the rheostat i put on the front of the computer. What most computer "hobbiests" don't realise is that a watercooling system must include a fan that is larger then the fan used on most modern heatsinks.
What watercooling systems do is transfer the heat away from the CPU quickly. However because the water has to cool before being recycled, to the "plastic" resevoir so common in today's designs, it must be pushed through a large metal maze similar to the radiator on most cars. This radiator must be cooled by a fan, and more often then not the radiator is placed outside the case to achieve maximum performance and airflow. So in conclusion if your looking for performance, go straight to vapor cooling (that's real quiet). But if your looking for silence stay away from watercooling.

Boiling points, refrigerants, and watercooling...

[Svartalf]

In actuality, water's a superior refrigerant so long as you're not trying to cool down below freezing and can come up with a compressor with the right volumetric capacity under vacuum. When water boils, it pulls roughly 2700 BTUs out of the surounding environment per liter boiled. At 6 bar, water will readily boil at somewhere around 40deg F, dragging that much heat out of the environment as quickly it can be absorbed by the water under those conditions. The big issue is that it's volumetric rate (how much volume you have to pump out of the low-side of the system...) is roughly double any other possible refrigerants out there. There's currently not that many vacuum pumps that can actually DO this sort of thing and the ones that do are typically rather expensive- so we don't currently use water as a refrigerant.

Now, as to why water's used instead of refrigerants is that it's cheap (An R-134a system would set you back a solid 500 or so, a watercooling rig will set you back only $150-250 and does a better than adequate job (especially if you're looking for normal operation with less noise and less CPU heat...), and it has a heat capacity that makes for a very nice thermal transfer medium. It's why you water cool cars and trucks.

Turn it upside down

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok I'm not a hardware techie kind of girl, but if you guys are afraid of leaks why not have the CPU/GPU on top and the water pumping hazard below? Then if you have a leak it will only wet your desk?

Re:I'm past thinking about water-cooling

[DerekLyons]

So what? What kind of kink is in that? We are talking about water. Not salted water nor mineral water - just pure water (H2O). As pure as possible.

It won't stay pure very long unless your entire cooling systems is made entirely of inert materials. Pure H2O is a damm efficient solvent.

What corrosion? We are talking about water. Not salted water nor mineral water - just pure water (H2O). As pure as possible. This one is non-corrosive, non-electrolythic and as cheap as coke. If you chose tap water (which is far from being a pure H2O) as your coolant - it's your own choice, risk and kink.

Unless your water is produced, stored, and transferred with extreme care, and under inert conditions, you *will* have some atmospheric H2 and O2 in it.

I recently read of the failure of a large commercial cooling system... Al heatsinks and Cu radiators seperated by Tygon tubing, filled with deionzed water. Seems pretty straightforward right? Pure water, and the two metals electrically isolated....

Small amounts of contaminants in the copper dissolved in the water, along with a small amount of copper... Which then precipitated out on the walls of the Al tubes. *wham* Instant electrolytic corrosion.