Watercooling Made Easy 181
Ronny writes: "'Overclockers are always looking for a better way to keep their processors cooler. If you've found the best heatsink and best fan, but that still isn't cooling your processor enough, you may want to look in to water cooling.' You can build your own water cooling system out of scrap parts such as a radiator from an ATV and a water block made out of a 4" PVC cap. However, if your like myself and have no creative skills whatsoever, then you may be interested in this new water cooling kit that is available on the Internet. The kit includes everything you need to start water cooling your CPU, at a very reasonable price. Full review of the water-cooling kit found at OverclockersClub"
Important question... (Score:4, Interesting)
Fit a Pizza-oven [dion.ne.jp] to it as well and we'll never need to go out again...
Re:Important question... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now on to the explanation: heat goes from a colder place to a hotter place. If you want to make coffee from the water, it needs to be at least 80-90C. Now, that's the max (read: if you reach that, pull the plug!!) temperature supported by the XPs, and I think Intel's are a bit lower (75C). If your cooling fluid is hotter than your CPU, it's not cooling anymore, so you have a big problem (actually, the temperature of the CPU will just raise until either it melts or it's hotter enough than your cooling fluid to create a new thermal equilibrium). So even if you wanted to have a coffee tap, all you would end up with is a fried chip.
Watercooling is getting interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
Once, small computers were totally silent. Think of the CBM64, the Mac and others. Even when they got harddrives, it was just a faint whirr in the background. Today, a modern desktop sounds like a passenger plane taking off next to you. In my machine I have five fans and two drives, and that's nothing unusual. At work it's bad enough that I sometimes wear earplugs just to get away from the noise.
Watercooling can help in two ways. First, with a larger, efficient radiator, you don't need a high-rpm fan - and elliminating just one fan does a lot to reduce noise pollution. Second, and for the future, I can envision a water-cooling system that can collect heat from several heat sources in the machine, and cool them all using one radiator and one fan. And when you have that, you could enclose the machine far better than today, getting rid of the noise from the drives as well.
/Janne
Re:Just an Ad (Score:5, Interesting)
Can we start having an option to moderate stories down? Rate them 0 to 10. That way you can browse at whatever you want (either get them all or get only the top)?
Oh wait, that would make sense.
Re:better solution ... (Score:2, Interesting)
This weekend I added a simple water cooling set.
- A common fountain pump
- 1 cooling block
- a reservoir
- a radiator
- 1 12cm fan
- Tubing
- Chemicals for the water
Oh and if you use this as a shopping list(don't ask people in the shop or look at plenty of sites) add some spring to keep the tubing from folding up. Anyway it came to about 300 euro's total.First I put the radiator inside the case. This cooled the cpu nicely for a while but the water kept getting hotter and hotter. Soon I was back at 70 celcius. I then drilled two big holes and mounted the radiator outside. With a single 12cm softly blowing on it I now have my cpu at 40 degrees after 3 hours of RTCW. Previous five minutes was about max. I am not sure how water cooling could possible make 3D games not crash to the desktop but my problem is solved.
Next weekend I will add a cooler for my graphics card and chipset and maybe even for the HD, 3 more fans on the radiator should take care of the extra heat and I will have a silent stable cool machine.
So the answer is why don't I just spend money on a faster chip? The XP 2300 or so isn't available yet and that thing is bound to be even hotter. Yeah I spend the same on the cooling as on the chip itself(pardon me if I got prices slightly off, I make enough money not to really have to take notice) but now the chip finally operates as it should. Of course I could now overclock the 2100 to 2300 and up, but how many more frames do I really need? Basiclly with chips (x86) running hotter and hotter people who want to run their machines without installing a windtunnel to cool it will have to go the watery way.
The cost is a big one but not more then say a big HD for all you're movies and half of a top vid card. When you have already got the latest cpu, lots of ram, a big HD and the latest vid card a simple water cooling set rounds it of nicely.
To those considering buying the kit advertised, don't. You are messing around with equipment that pumps water around INSIDE you're computer. Buy the best you can find, one fried motherboard and you will have made the money back.
Re:Whoa: Now every little watercooling kit posted? (Score:1, Interesting)
No, You can cind pumps for $20, tubes and fittings for about $10, and I got radiators from a junk yard for $6 each. A good block, though is still the catch.
Re:Just an Ad (Score:4, Interesting)
Can we start having an option to moderate stories down? Rate them 0 to 10. That way you can browse at whatever you want (either get them all or get only the top)?
If you want that, you know where to find it [kuro5hin.org]. In my opinion, that's a bug, not a feature. You only have to look at the moronic articles that moderated up to see what happens when the lunatics run the asylum.
I like Slashdot just the way it is, thanks, flaws and all. I don't want to see it turn into another socialist mutual masturbation society.
Re:Too Hot? (Score:3, Interesting)
To be a bit more accurate, it's the HALT instruction and not the NOP instruction that does this. NOP tells the CPU to 'do nothing and proceed to the next clock cycle' (note that the CPU remains fully on for this) while HALT tells the CPU to 'shut down, but be ready to spring back into action when you receive an interrupt'. HALT powers parts of the CPU down, NOP doesn't. This is where the cooling effect comes from.
Re:I have one!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Back in my days, (heh) CPU didn't need a fan. A reasonable sized heatsink was more than enough. 250 watt power supply was good and anything more was an overkill. Fan on video card was ridiculous and I would have laughed at you if you needed to have a fan on the motherboard.
Fast forward to today.
400 watt powersupply is standardish (exacerbated by that freakish AMD's "approved list") and _all_ video cards (reputable ones) have fans. Radeon 9700 Pro has a separate hookup directly to the power supply for more juice. The heatsink/fan included with retail AMD is not usuable and too wimpy (I know at least MSI officially recommends a new heatsink and fan). Some motherboards have fan on their chipsets (MSI KT3 pro or something at least), and a heatsink is standard.
Your "PC" (meaning "IBM compatible" PC) has turned into some kind of a monstrosity that started with AMD's "more heat, more power, more performance, ARR ARR ARR" trend. (said in Tim Allen voice) A stark contrast to my pentium 166Mhz with one fan only in power supply. Fitted with a quiet power supply, the only noise making component of the pentium is the hard drive. Don't get me started on that new Athlon XP I got.
The point is, water cooling alleviates the situation a little bit by making things quiter.