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Hardware

Tom's Guide to Water Cooling 205

Posted by CmdrTaco from the bring-your-umbrella dept.
Aaron Cherrington writes "Tom's Hardware Guide has a pretty impressive rundown on how to setup a fairly sophisticated water-cooling system for your ever-growing heat problem in your proc/foundry. The guide even includes a movie! Funny how computers are beginning to develop like the early automobile industry."
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Tom's Guide to Water Cooling More

Tom's Guide to Water Cooling

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  • I understand the need to be on the cutting edge of technology, and to puch your hardware right to the edge of the envelope... But isn't a water cooling system in a PC going just a *little* overboard for that extra 5% performance boost? Especially today when 2ghz processors are the norm. How fast does it really need to be?

    But hey, to each his own. Or her own, I suppose.
    • The advantage is a very quiet and very cool system. Personally, I don't like my computer sounding like it's about to lift off.
    • Sure it's overboard. But I don't think that's the point. The point is to experiment with ways to push the existing technology past it's engineering specifications.

      What could be the result? Some hardcore overclocker may stumble upon the next Big Thing in cooling technology. If we're all just laying dormant and letting the "people who know best" at Intel/AMD take care of us, a lot of innovation may be lost.

      -StealthyBurrito-
    • Well, I just saw an old apple magazine in my basement while I was looking for something and it had the primary article "8 bits is plenty". Anyway, I would have to say that 2 Ghz is fast now, and for a regular person using email and typing up simple documents a 386 would suffice (if not for their need to have a recent copy of ms windows) but for gaming, science, big servers, and many other applications, the more processing power the better. Although I agree that a 5% performance boost isn't really significant, maybe as this stuff evolves we'll be able to see much more than 5%, to a point where lots of geeks would think it essential to have a good water (or other liquid) cooling system.
    • Assuming one is doing this to create a silent PC you could spend hours to run water safely through your PC, or

      ...you could just move it out of the room or into a big closet ... all you need is a long keyboard/mouse/etc. cord and a long video cord.

      ...you could throw the whole thing in a silencer box.

      Now, true that makes media access a little more difficult, and is far too simple to be technologically interesting.... but surely figuring out a long (5 meteres? 10?) video out solution is inherently simpler.

      And while we're on the subject of absurdly simple approaches to cooling, for 300 bucks you could also buy a room air conditioner and pipe cold air directly into a case and have just the most simple of heatsink fan setups.... a good window unit is a lot quieter than a fully blown overclocked case... Anyone ever tried that?

      Condensation?
  • Um, dude, in case you haven't noticed, computers have been around since the mid-1940s.

    - A.P. (liquid-cooled computing has been around for decades, too.)
  • Much like automobiles, computers are a fad and will soon fade away. They will be replaced by something else a good American invents.

  • Pre-made water cooled cases (Score:4, Informative)

    by outz ( 448278 ) on Monday July 01, 2002 @05:51PM (#3803893)
    Heres a site where you can purchase some pretty nice water cooled cases.
    http://www.overclockershideout.com/
    CompU SA also has some.. atleast the ones here do.
    • For a minute I misread the URL as overclocker shit out.com

      Somepeople really need some help with domain names. It's like the license plates, COLGUY could mean "cool guy" or it could be something the goatse guy would get.

  • good lord this an economical disaster! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lingqi ( 577227 ) on Monday July 01, 2002 @05:53PM (#3803905) Journal
    for the time and effort spent on this -- get some flourinert [mmm.com] and just full-submerge your PC. a gallon is ~500 bux, cheaper if you buy more. Or hook up with somebody with access to some and buy used liquid for cheap ;-) -- it's used in all sorts of high precision equipment(s)
    • Or just substitute any clean oil, like mineral oil, which is very cheap for 5 gallons at a chemical supply place.
      • yeah but mineral oil has fairly high viscocity compared with flourinert (granted -- flourinert gets sloshy at ~-60 deg, but that's a lot lower than most of you guys are willing to go anyway) besides, it's easier to clean up (flourinert) when you need to change out parts, etc

        further more, the specific heat for mineral oil was something like 1/3 as much? can't remember the numbers so clearly anymore; point being -- there are some real good reasons why people do not put mineral oil through their semiconductor manufacturing equiment's cooling systems.
  • Now if only, I could link my dual Athlon to the aquarium housing my tropical fish collection...
    • I've seen a page where a guy did just that. Used his fish tank as the reservoir for his water cooling system. Wish I had the link to it. More work than I want to put into cooling, but I'm still fascinated by it. I have a peltier unit to keep my cpu cool, but I'm not hardcore enough for water.
    • That's all fine and dandy until your fish die because the water picked up toxic substances from the metal heat exchangers or your computer fries because algae growth clogged the tubes.

  • Since someone is going to say something about... (Score:3, Informative)

    by buffer-overflowed ( 588867 ) on Monday July 01, 2002 @05:54PM (#3803913) Journal
    Since someone is going to say something about running water through your system and how you don't trust it, etc. etc. etc.. There are alternatives out there such as flourinert that have similar thermal properties but don't carry charges well. More expensive then water + wetting solution, but gives MUCH more peace of mind if you happen to be a paranoid person. Here's a link [hackinthebox.org] to an OC forum with a story or two on how the product behaves as well. A better article on watercooling (to the insane extreme) can be found here [octools.com].

    • flourinert does not solve everything (Score:4, Insightful)

      by lingqi ( 577227 ) on Monday July 01, 2002 @06:05PM (#3803983) Journal
      flourinert can build up static charges running through the tubing; and whet the charges get high enough, ZAP and there is a hole in your tube. (yes i speak from experience)

      now, if you say "oh well at least it does not conduct electricity / short out my board" -- well, there is two problems with that: 1) thermally, your CPU will die, fast. 2) flourinert is damn expensive (~500 US / gal last i checked) -- having it leaking out of a hole onto the floor is not a good idea; 3) it is environmentally hazardous -- not that you might care -- but i'd figue i would mention it instead of having people wonder why there are locallized holes in the ozone layer above their neighborhood.
    • If you are worried about water, then get some actual deionized H2O.

      Won't carry charges even if you submerge the computer in it, as long as you don't dump salt or any other material that will ionize.

      -- Tino Didriksen / Project JJ
      • One simple problem with this: dust. All sorts of stuff flies around in the air, and as anyone who's left a system running for three months and opened it knows, it collects in the system. And any skin oils or other deposits left in the system might compromise the non-conductivity of the water.
  • When you can boil fresh eggs for free?
  • I'm a geek. I like fast cars, fast women and fast computers. However, I'm also concerned about the proliferation of pollution and greenhouse gasses.

    Let's take watercooling as an example. Heating water breaks the molecules apart. This is OK (up to a point) for pure water, but nobody actually uses pure water. Instead we use tap water, full of lead, acidophilus and other harmful toxins. When the heat from the overclocked PC causes those toxins to be released into the air--whoa nellie, we have ourselves an EPA Superfund site in a bottle.

    Of course, anybody who's even slightly concerned about the environment knows all the above already. The trouble is self-centered morons like this guy who think the rules don't apply to him or that "just one more overclocked PC won't hurt anything". So please, Slashdot, quit glorifying this destructive pasttime and instead advocate the right solution: a new PC every six months.

    • ???
      Unless you have somekind of leak the water should stay in the tubes, kind of like your car. The only time you have to add water is when some has leaked out. Also, if you read the guide, it explains if you do not use distilled (pure) water you're taking your computer's life in your hands if a leak does develop. Pure water does not conduct, where as tap water can.
      • Unless you have somekind of leak the water should stay in the tubes, kind of like your car

        Unfortunately most flexible plastic tubing will pass water through the plastic. Some water will seep into the plastic. When it reaches the outside, it evaporates. Soda Pop is put into a special poly bottle (PET plastic) because high pressure gasses migrate faster through most conventional plastics causing flat sodas in a short time. To see this first hand, fill a plastic (HDPE) milk jug with water. Glue the cap on. Make sure it's sealed. Mark the water line with a marker or put it on a scale and record the weight. Stick it in a dark corner for a couple years and check it again.
        Your joints may not leak, but that doesn't mean it will not loose water. It will.
    • I thought that most places suggested using bottled "mostly" pure water in a watercooling system, to keep from gumming up the pipes, and that furthermore, the water resides in a closed system, so that no harmful chemicals (or even H2O) is released into the atmosphere...

      I seem to remember another water cooling guide on TH that has the water in a radiator at the top of the loop, with a big fan blowing room temp air through it to cool down the water, then it was pumped back over the processor (which shouldn't be running hot enough to boil water in the first place).

      In effect, you *should* be able to run antifreeze through the pipes, and be perfectly fine as far as the environment is concerned.
    • This is beautiful. All you wannabe slashtrolls out there - this is it. This is what trolling was meant to be. Subtle, Plausible and reasonable enough to leave you in doubt. PhysicsGenius, my hat is off to you.
      • Definitely loss of points at the end there. He "tipped his hand" in the lingo. Granted, there are many slashbots who think nothing of buying a new PC every 6 months and wouldn't even notice this, but most people would recognize this as "hyperbole"--a sure sign of a troll.

        On the other hand, the results speak for themselves.
    • <sarcasm>yes. and boiling that same water on your stove will also emit much more in a shorter span of time. EVERYONE, STOP BOILING TAP WATER!</sarcasm>

    • Heating tap water releases toxins? Holy crap, I'm going to have to buy a bunch of biohazard stickers for the old Mr. Coffee.

    • That's right! If you want to overclock while being friendly to the environment, buy:

      Evian Natural OVERCLOCKING Water

      Just imagine the niche market. Especially considering how close Silicon Valley is to Haight & Ashbury in San Francisco. This is it. This is finally a way to get those damn hippies happy.

      Evian Natural OVERCLOCKING Water

      By the makers of Nuts and Gum [westegg.com] and BeerNuts Gum [halfbakery.com]

      Coming soon:

      Evian VITAMIN ENHANCED OVERCLOCKING water
      Let your processor go the extra mile with this slick, new overclocking sports water.

      • What about the Ron Popeil EasyCool. Not only do you get the EasyCool, but if you call now we'll give you a second EasyCool FREE, but that's not all; you also get the Super Shammy, with 20% better absorption to clean up the mess left behind by the EasyCool. "You might fry that chip, but you won't make a mess!" CALL NOW!

  • Oh great... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Zen Mastuh ( 456254 ) on Monday July 01, 2002 @06:02PM (#3803970)
    Funny how computers are beginning to develop like the early automobile industry

    Great. I guess we'll all be anxiously awaiting the arrival of Ralph Nader's new book, Uncoolable at Any Clock Speed.

  • Why do people even submit the stories? The Slashdot editors will probably post them anyways. Not to critize TH; it just seems that whenever they post a new article, it shows up a few hours later on the Slashdot front page. Maybe Slashdot needs a special "Tom's Hardware" topic or even it's own section (th.slashdot.org).
  • good guide on hardware for watercooling, but the video has the most atrocious trance as the background music that's been heard since 1999!
    • I found that odd myself. Here is a whole article claiming that the computer system is "nearly silent", and that the movie is available in "three languages".

      It turns out that you never get a chance to "hear" the silence of the computer, and the only words are written descriptions of what the components are. IMNSHO the video is a complete waste of bandwidth for anyone who has put together their own computer. I was hoping for something along the lines of a documentary, or (dare I say it?) an infomercial at the worst. What I got was a waste of my time. Bleh.
  • Another solution is to blow cool air over the hot parts, cooling them naturally and safely. No, you don't need to use the computer in a wind tunnel, just several fans / cold air guns / natives waving bannana leaves.
  • Seems to offset the actual value / use of having a system that runs 50 mhz faster.

  • Dishwashing liquid?! (Score:3, Informative)

    by Skreech ( 131543 ) on Monday July 01, 2002 @06:10PM (#3804010)

    After the tubing has been installed and the cooling circuit has been closed, turn the pump on, then pour the distilled water into the header tank until the entire system is filled with water. In order to break the surface tension of the water and prevent air bubbles from forming, add a drop of dishwashing liquid.

    original page [tomshardware.com]

    I can think of something better to use than dishwashing liquid. Red Line Oil makes something called Water Wetter which does the same thing; Its primary function is to lessen water's surface tension in cooling systems in cars. From Red Line's webpage on the product (with advantages relating only to vehicles removed):

    BENEFIT SUMMARY

    • Doubles the wetting ability of water
    • Improves heat transfer
    • Reduces rust, corrosion and electrolysis of all metals
    • Provides long term corrosion protection
    • Cleans and lubricates water pump seals
    • Prevents foaming
    • Complexes with hard water to reduce scale

    You can get a bottle of this, put a little bit in with your tiny computer cooling system, the rest in your car's, and you'll have better cooling all around. And this stuff prevents foaming, rather than promoting it like dishwasher liquid.

    • first google the link [redlineoil.com].

      Lets see, what more advantages are there.

      -Makes your car go faster.
      -Makes your pc go faster.
      -Is a perfect Glycol replacement....
      -Prevents your pc from freezing.

      Wait.. yes this is a replacement for glycol anti-freeze. I would not just add it to the water, no way to tell what this will do to your waterpump.

      I think you watch too much tv at 4AM. Or you just made one small troll.
    • You can get a bottle of this, put a little bit in with your tiny computer cooling system, the rest in your car's, and you'll have better cooling all around. And this stuff prevents foaming, rather than promoting it like dishwasher liquid.

      Another option that could easily be found in any household would be laundry detergent. It should also lower the surface tension of the water, and laundry detergent is typically formulated to foam very little.
    • Water Wetter is powerful stuff!

      Once, I was talking to another engineer who told me about his discovery of this product. Apparently, a couple of german engineers were paying him a visit, and one had a bottle of this stuff.

      There was a small pond (about 60 foot in diameter) beside his company's office that had a few ducks calmly swimming on the water. The german engineer poured half of the bottle in to the edge of the pond, and the surface tension broke across the entire surface. The ducks sunk into the pond and drowned before they had a chance to try to fly away!

      I know this is hearsay, but I don't doubt this guy.

      -- Len
  • Sometimes you gotta be careful with this cooling business. Had a friend who hooked up a peltier to his computer, but got it *too cold*, and ended up condensating on his board and corroded all his little sensistive surface mount components! I keep asking him why he does it, I think it's an addiction or something. He never did anything past seeing how many thousands of frames per second he could get in Quake.
    • That's something you don't have to worry about with water cooled systems though. Unless you use peltiers or refrigeration of some sort, the water will stay at a couple degrees above room temperature at the most. With only radiator cooling it's nearly impossible for the temp to fall below room temperature which is required for condensation to occur.
    • I did some experimenting with peltier junctions...essentially they're difficult to manage. Many of them will destroy themselves if just turned on and left to die. One made for processor cooling may be different, but as I remember from my work with them, you had to have one helluva heat sink to draw heat away from them in order to keep them from getting hot on both sides and blowing up...In practice for cooling a cpu they may behave differently, but i remember them being very easy to kill (And having to build a special power supply to convert 120VAC to 16VDC@12 amps (to run four of them at capacity)...)

      Brian

  • To think that IBM spent millions to get rid of it (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SysKoll ( 48967 ) on Monday July 01, 2002 @06:33PM (#3804141)

    It's rather ironic that IBM and other large systems makers have spent millions of $$ to get rid of water cooling in their systems. The good old water-cooled TCM (Thermal Conduction Module) of IBM's 1990 mainframes was a very impressive piece of mechanical and thermal engineering. If you worry about the heat generated by a single CPU, imaging what it was like to cool one of these babies [ibm.com].

    TCMs included spring-loaded copper pistons to maintain good thermal contacts on the chips. The thing was a plumber's nightmare. I remember an IBM field engineer who had to improvise a pipe soldering the night before a computer show because 1) there was no water cooling at the stands (geez, what an oversight), 2) IBM had to require a fire permit to let the plumber light a soldering torch, 3) by the time the fire permit came in, the unionized plumber was home while the on-salary, no-family-life engineer was getting ready for a looong night. Those were the days, when computers were freakin' huge and had to be watered like thirsty dinosaurs.

    As a side note, the need for TCM was considered a nuisance. Customers released a collective sigh of relief when IBM dropped their fast but power-hungry bipolar technology in favor of cheaper, easier to cool CMOS chips. It's a shame that Intel's sloppy designs force an entire industry to go back to watering the dinos.

    -- SysKoll
    • Its not Intel's "sloppy designs" which have caused water cooling to come back into style. Actually a big reason most people do it, such as myself, is because we get sick of the noise, which is not entirely the processor's fault. Its beautiful to have a PC that's like any other applience, you don't notice it unless you need to use it.

      On the engineering front, every modern good performing processor needs cooling. The number of transisters per cubic cm is enormous and increasing, so we're getting bigger chips using more energy and thus producing more heat. This is where a new technology must come and replace it, just like CMOS did with bipolar. Circuit engineers only pay attention to heat during the design phase if its a criteria (which isn't so much on processors) and is mostly left to those in the fabrication stage to optimize and fix. Only in the last few years has any decent energy saving technology started to become popular and important to designers, but in essence until heat is a limitting factor designs will focus on higher performance through novel techniques and providing developers with better tools (instruction sets).

      • True, it's not just Intel's fault.

        I am fully aware of the constant progression of power density within processors. It's a problem in PowerPC and graphical chipsets, too.

        But Intel is in a unique position to tackle the PC cooling problem from a system-wide point of view. Consider this: Intel is one of the largest motherboard suppliers in the world. They sell chipsets, mobos and assemblies. And they never started designing a system-wide cooling solution, in spite of owning many of the critical parts (CPU, bridges, minority stake in DRAM makers). No other actor is in such a position to set standards. Not Dell, not Compaq, not AMD.

        That's why I believe Intel's relunctance to tackle this problem is plaguing the whole industry.

        Thanks for your answer,

        -- SysKoll

  • Wonderful (Score:2, Funny)

    by vsprintf ( 579676 )
    I can see it coming. Every 30,000 teraflops I'll have to haul the computer to Bendover's Quick-lube and have the coolant flushed or the warranty will be void.

  • Koolance... (Score:3, Informative)

    by RandomCoil ( 88441 ) on Monday July 01, 2002 @06:53PM (#3804279)
    Koolance [koolance.com] has been building this type of system for quite a while now. The parts are almost identical except Koolance incorporates the radiator at the top of the case with with 'blowhole' fans moving the air and a digital temperature readout. Their more recent designs are modified Antec/Chieftec/Alienware tower cases (you can even get them with a window... geez...). The original cases were somewhat more impressive as they incorporated a liquid-cooled power supply as well. One amusing 'coming soon' product on their website is a liquid-cooled 1U case. I keep imagining a whole rack of these units and one word springs to mind: waterfall.
  • Maybe I missed something, but this picture [tomshardware.com] suggeste the heat of the processor is used to warm up the harddisk (or the other way around). Either way I think this is not what you want.

    Still, it looks VERY cool.
  • Funny how computers are beginning to develop like the early automobile industry.


    They even have cup holders. And I thought that was a CD tray - doh!

  • The watercooling looked pretty neat. However, I didn't see any benchmarks for how much faster you could overclock your CPU if you went the water route. Anyone have any links for overclocked P4s & AMDs comparing and contrasting water cooling vs tradional fan coolage?
  • I read a lot of claims about it being a silent cooling solution, and yet the parts consist of a pump and a large fan attached to the radiator. Not to mention the already existing HD and power supply fan. These things aren't exactly quiet in my experience.

    Then again, I'm guessing that because of the watercooling, airflow isn't of as much importance so it can be stored away in a closed compartment, with perhaps only the radiator sitting outside your window or something. It would be nice to see a hack which cooled the power supply too, though perhaps its not real wise to have water running through such a high voltage component.
    • Contrast it against large heat sinks with huge blower fans.. very noisy.

      COmpared to your average PC, this is no quieter.. even a bit louder.

      In the overclocking world, it'll be relatively quiet.
      • The best method I have found is to blow air on the heat sink from outside the box while sucking that same air out of the box as quickly as possible. That requires a tight seal on the box(and fans) and some quiet fans doing the blowing and sucking. Hmmm...Sounds more like a brothel than a PC case.

        CPU fans tend to be the loudest but experimenting with cones over the fans can quiet them somewhat. But you have to keep air moving around in the box. If you have it done right, you can thump the box and dust will blow out of the outtake fan.

        Remember, tight seals. Control the flow.
  • Has anyone out there overclocked and/or water-cooled a Mac? This article has got me interested to try it, but I'm pretty afraid I'll screw it up, especially since all the articles on it seem to be PC oriented. I was mostly interested in getting rid of the fan, so it'd be quieter, but the article mentioned successfully overclocking a pentium 4 to 3000 mhz (apparently 3100 is the limit), and that got me drooling. I wonder how much a g4 can be overclocked?
    • Much, much less.

      In general, any RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing device, such as those in Mac and Sun boxen) CPU has fewer stages of logic between registers than a CISC (Complex ISC) CPU (such as x86's). Fewer stages of logic means a higher ratio of wire (metal) to logic gates (silicon) in any given path. Signal propagation delay time in modern semiconductor processes are dominated by wire delays -- silicon gate delays are almost negligible. Also, signal propagation delay time varies with temperature strongly in silicon, but weakly in metal. So temperature effects make a bigger difference to max clock rate on a CISC vs. a RISC. Said differently: there's a smaller window of min/max conditions (PVT = manufacturing Process, Voltage, and Temperature) under which the a RISC CPU will work as intended vs. a CISC CPU.

      Note to zealots: this should not be construed as (or used for) taking sides in the inane Mac vs. PC vs. whatever thing. It's about CPU design philosophy and implementation.

      The reason Intel (or AMD) sells a CPU as a '1.7GHz' model instead of as a more profitable '2.0GHz' model is that some path of logic between registers in the chip won't work at 2.0GHz under the warranted PVT conditions (for commercial products usually: published MIN-MAX process, +/- 5%, and 0-100 degrees C transistor junction temperature - with a case and built-in cooling that usually allow for -10 to 50 deg C ambient temperature). Cooling (or increasing the volatage -- you can't control the process after the chip is made), is more likely to improve a CISC path than a RISC path (because of the wire to silicon ratio).

      So the manufacturer can more easily certify the RISC device for operation at higher clock rates. But that also leaves the user with less room to tinker around, should s/he/it be so inclined.

      Sorry for the long post (I've been thinking about this sort of thing in a roundabout and thinly related way for quite some time). Your question fell right in front of my hypno-train.
  • Does anybody take Physics anymore?

    Alcohol is much better than water for cooling and has other nice properties (ie no bacteria or algae).

    Yeah. Back in the day, my dad (true story) cooled his Model A hot rod with alcohol.

    -=>Funk Master=-
    • Actually going back and back, the original cars were cooled with simply water, which then moved onto alcohol(not that type) :), but moving farther along we get into the ethylene glycol(still alcohol) with older cars(green stuff), and a newer type of antifreeze(orange stuff), is NOT the same as the old green stuff, chemicaly it is diffrent and mixing the two gets you something along the lines of a paste consistancy, that is if it doesn't cause your plastic rad to be eaten alive or disolve your aluminum engine block.

      In anycase, the only draw back I can see using the green stuff is it might eat the tubes and pump, the orange stuff might work better since it's designed for aluminum and plastic(modern cars), and isopropyl alcohol will most definatly eat the plastic/rubberish tubes and micro pump your using.

      And remeber the golden rule of auto-body and engine building. Do Not Mix STEEL and ALUMINUM together even with a fluid. The aluminum will break down into a powder called aluminum sulfate. And the steel will start to grow aluminum sulfate crystals. So watch the connectors, and watch what the cooling block is made from. And what is used inside the pump for parts.

  • Is to find a surplus Liebert chiller. And a raised floor to hide the pipes. And under floor smoke detectors. And a Halon system. And some hardware to make a man trap for the basement stairs. And 2 or 3 CE's standing around drinking coffee....

    I miss those 1980's data centers

  • I know, nobody actually grounds themselves with a static strap when putting together a PC. But in this movie they handle the CPU with about as much care as your car keys. Either they are lucky or did the video with a dead CPU. I try to use a little more care to prevent frying a new CPU and losing a few hundred bucks.

  • From the article: A note from the THG lab: because the pump runs in a closed water circuit, the pressure head has no influence.

    Nice try, but no cigar. When the manufacturer specifies the amount of flow for a given "pressure head", they are telling you how much flow you will get when pushing the water a certain distance uphill. While it is true that your water goes in a circle, and thus not really uphill, the resistance from those skinny hoses, pipes, elbows, and other fittings will have (for a given flow rate) the same effect as some amount of pressure head.

    If you could choose, you would choose piping that would have as little resistance to flow as possible. Less resistance to flow lets you use a smaller pump. A smaller pump generates less heat. And that would be that much less heat to remove from the case and dump in your room.

  • Ok, I just watched the video. It was pretty interesting, although the Euro-trash music kinda gave me a headache...

    Anyhoo, I noticed that some of the tubes were connected to the nipples with plastic zip-ties. Zip-ties!!! Are you guys INSANE?

    Let's see: I spent ~$800 for the parts, hours of planning, and hours of time assembling the parts, but I'm gonna use 10-cent plastic zip-ties??!

    What's wrong with these people??

    2 words: HOSE CLAMPS. They're metal, and they are a hell of a lot more reliable than those little pieces of plastic you're using.

    Sigh...
  • The off-the-shelf system that Tom's Hardware demoed is looks great... too bad I can't afford it! :P
  • Using a refrigerant cooling system for a PC, like a modified air conditioner, tends to work pretty well.
    The coolant is at a much lower temperature, so it takes longer for it to warm up to the point where your PC fries if the compressor fails.
    Secondly, it can be used to lower the temperature even more.
    Unfortunately, there is a very serious problem with it. The temperatures are below the dew point, and cause condensation. This will eventually short out/damage the boards.
    I've though of one way around that problem though, what if you basically freeze dried the computer? You build a case that is airtight, and won't crush under a vacuum. Then pump out most of the air/moisture with a vacuum pump. Lastly, you fill the case with CO2 or something. You get rid of the moisture, and with it the condensation problem. Its also a whole lot cheaper than Flourinert. The only problems I can see are during the vacuum stage. I'm not sure if there would be any problems with the chips exploding or components leaking in a vacuum?
    I might try that sometime and see if it would work. I think the biggest problem would be making the airtight case.
    • You wouldn't need a vacuum - all you do is make it air-tight with a vent at the top - fill it with CO2 and the heavier-than-air CO2 will displace all the air out of the box. Seal the vent, and you're done.

      We used to do a similar thing with nitrogen when welding on truck fuel tanks, but we kept a constant flow of gas going in. You made damn sure that the tank was full of inert gas before striking an arc on the tank, that's for certain.

      Oh , you might want to put some silica gel in the bottom of the case to adsorb any residual moisture....

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