Water Cooling With A Car Radiator 282
sH4RD writes "Why go out and buy a water cooling system when you can do it with an old car radiator? That's exactly what One of The Twelve figured when he used the radiator from his brother's 1979 Toyota Corolla to cool his system. His Athlon64 3000+ can hit 2.5GHz smoothly now. Check out the original forum post complete with benchmarks."
Re:The reason I don't use a car radiator (Score:3, Interesting)
Beats using the radiator for moonshine... (Score:4, Interesting)
Moonshiners occasionally used radiators to make cheap stills instead of doing the work of winding copper pipe. It was a really spectacularly bad idea, because they tended to have lead solder in them and other compounds that were really unwise to drink after they'd leached out into your distillate.
Not sure if there's any relationship to the safety of using this for your computer cooler, though. And a 1979 Toyota seems about right for recycling by now - we just got rid of our 1985, which was still running after ~190K miles, albeit pretty roughly.
Apple did it already (Score:5, Interesting)
I was considering this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Those old car radiators can be found in different sizes, and they're dirt cheap if bought as replacements for old models - or free if found lying arround as junk.
The tricky part is to make it look good though...
Re:Antifreeze (Score:5, Interesting)
That probably won't be necessary. Assuming that the original car had a 130hp engine with 30% thermal efficiency, and making a wild-ass-guess that 10% of the waste heat of the car actually goes through the radiator (rather than exhaust or other means), my calculations indicate that in the car the radiator would have a peak thermal throughput of over 22 kilowatts. A 100W CPU doesn't need to get rid of even 0.5% of that amount of heat. A fan would just seem to supply even more pointless overkill.
Re:And? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Antifreeze (Score:2, Interesting)
Not at all. There are water conditioners in antifreeze to prevent the formation of scale.
Regular tap water or even distilled water can cause a radiator to develop deposits when the metal inside oxidizes.
Since there is no heater core to worry about, the total volume of liquid needed would be smaller. I'd consider using pure antifreeze.
LK
Give the man a cigar! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Antifreeze (Score:2, Interesting)
And if the antifreeze boils over, you're going to have one heck of a mess on your carpet (not to mention one fried processor)....
Hmmm.... I don't think AMD has had a problem with their chips being as hot as a running car motor for awhile now.
Amusingly, I note that he actually did use glycol. Unless he plans on running his system outside in the winter, however, I'm not sure what the point was. The only thing it seems to be doing is bringing a toxic substance into his living quarters. Hope he doesn't have any pets, or he may not have them much longer :/
Re:Antifreeze (Score:1, Interesting)
That's just what I was thinking: this whole setup is probably pretty quiet.
Re:And? (Score:1, Interesting)
If you take a look in the www.sweclockers.com forums (swedish
http://www.sweclockers.com/html/artikel/art_04092
Result of Carblaster:
http://www.sweclockers.com/html/artikel/art_04092
just hook it to the tap. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Antifreeze (Score:5, Interesting)
Ideally, it would be good to keep as much heat inside the engine as possible. We could actually run much more efficient engines (by running them hotter) if it weren't for materials and emissions (damn that N2 all to hell!) and fuel (gasoline likes to go poof spontaneously when it's hot and compressed) Too bad, that.
Re:And? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Antifreeze (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone have bandwidth big enough to hold a picture or two because I'd get slashdotted instantly..
Upscale radiator... (Score:3, Interesting)
hunt around for a curved radiator like those starting to appear
on recent motorcycles...
for example:
http://www.motorcycle.com/mo/mccagiva/mcphotos/mv
Re:wife or girlfriend (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Power Supply (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I was considering this... (Score:2, Interesting)
The tricky part is to make it look good though...
Not for me, I build aluminium radiators for a living. I've been thinking about making one specially for watercooling. I was thinking about getting a tall thin core so that the air rises up thru the rad creating a chimney like effect, so that the hot air rising would pull cool air in the bottom, making a fan unnecessary. It would be silent and I could make it seriously beautiful.
Re:Here's an even better cooling idea. (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.zilog.com/products/family.asp?