Water Cooling

JohnnyRoy wrote on 1/29/2006, 5:10 PM

One thing to check before you try water cooling is a better air cooled solution. I’m using a ZALMAN CNPS9500 92mm Fan w/Heatsink. It was rated as good as some water cooled solutions so it may be worth a try. It is huge but it works great. The nice thing about it is that the fan is facing the same direction as the rear fan on the chassis. This make the air flow very efficient.

~jr

Coursedesign wrote on 1/29/2006, 6:20 PM

Amen to that. Water cooling is very expensive, it's risky for the obvious reason, and 99% of the kits you can buy are no better than the best aftermarket heatsinks such as the Zalman JR suggested. The remaining 1% is meant for "near-extreme overclockers."

What about the "actually extreme overclockers?"

They use liquid nitrogen, etc. :O)

Be careful when ordering to make sure that what you get fits a) your motherboard, and b) your computer case.

farss wrote on 1/30/2006, 12:03 AM

I've found a much better solution, air conditioning. If the room is getting the CPU in a sweat then it can't be doing much for your thought processes either.
Bob.

wolfbass wrote on 1/30/2006, 12:45 AM

Bob,

the room I'm in is tolerable with a fan, so the airconditioning, while it would be nice, isn't really the issue. The type of stuff I'm doing at the moment are no brainers, so aren't really troubling my thought processes Bob! :)

Thanks for the tips so far, any more ideas out there guys?

Andy

B.Verlik wrote on 1/30/2006, 1:56 AM

I would love to have a nice quiet liquid system. A big wish for me.

FuTz wrote on 1/30/2006, 3:36 AM

I've been considering liquid cool lately too but changed my mind since I like to cool my hard drives too and I didn't find any alternative to use liquid cooling on these.
So I still get some fans in my case that will make noise.
What I'm considering now is networking: putting my tower in another room. But the problem then is the DVD drive I need from time to time. I don't feel like going into this other room just to play some DVD. Can I run a 30 foot long firewire or USB cable? I don't know...

Chienworks wrote on 1/30/2006, 3:52 AM

Firewire can go about 15 to 18 feet (5 to 6m). You can get very cheap repeaters too. We've done a 60 foot (19m) run with 3 repeaters. I think we've run USB over 30 feet with no issues.

farss wrote on 1/30/2006, 4:22 AM

One thing worth checking is how well the heat is being transferred from the actual CPU chip to the heatsink, the overclockers seem to swear by something called "Artic Silver", could be a gimmick or not but either way anything that reduces the thermal resistance between the chip and the heatsink is good. We used to use berylium paste but they banned it, damn it, why do they ban everything that works well?
The other obvious thing is getting good airflow through the case, not just having air going around and around. You need some fans sucking and some blowing, if the air inside of the case is more than a few degress warmer than ambient then I'd think getting more air flowing through the case is also going to help. You could test this theory by opening the case and using a fan to blow a little air in there. If the CPU temp drops then it shows that pumping more air through there is going to help.
And as someone above said, don't forget your disk drives, I'd suspect they're more at risk from heat than the CPU itself. I have several fans just to push outside air over them.

Bob.

JohnnyRoy wrote on 1/30/2006, 6:09 AM

> Farss said: I've found a much better solution, air conditioning.

Yes, then the next question he will post is, “My processor is running nice and cool but now I have the constant sound of rushing wind in all of my voice overs... very strange!” ;-)

> FuTz said: So I still get some fans in my case that will make noise.

Check out my PC specs. I specifically built this system to be quiet. My selection of case, cooling, and video card were all made so that the fans had variable speed so that they only kick in during a long render. I do voice overs with the tower sitting 12 inches from my mic without any appreciable noise being picked up. You don’t need to put the PC in another room, you just need to build a quiet PC.

> Farss said: the overclockers seem to swear by something called "Artic Silver", could be a gimmick or not but either way anything that reduces the thermal resistance between the chip and the heatsink is good.

Arctic Silver is no gimmick. On my previous PC I needed to clean the dust off the heatsink and fan. The only way was to remove it from the processor because dust was imbedded deep within the heatsink fins. When I replaced the heat sink, I used Arctic Silver and my temps were from 5-10 degrees cooler than they had ever been before!

How well you are transferring the heat is just as important as how well you are dissipating it. The Zalman cooler in my previous post uses heat pipes to quickly transfer the heat away from the processor and up into the fins where the fan blows it directly out the back of the chassis. Combine this with some Arctic Silver and you will get a very efficient (and quiet) cooling solution.

~jr

ScottW wrote on 1/30/2006, 7:52 AM

Surf on over to www.koolance.com - they make a wide variety of water cooling components at a reasonable price (imo). I've had a water cooled system running for the last 2+ years and not a single problem. I'm cooling my CPU, Northbridge chip, GPU and 5 disk drives. The coolent temp typically stays around 33 to 35C regardless of what the CPU is doing. If I start to do something intensive and the heat picks up, the fans automatically speed up to keep the coolent temp down.

--Scott

Frenchy wrote on 1/30/2006, 10:30 AM

JR:

Did you install the internal Antec ductwork (I don't remember what it's "real" name is) with your Zalman fan? As you know, I modeled by newly assembled PC after yours, and installed a Zalman CNPS7000B-CU fan, rather than the 9500. The round Zalman fan is much larger than the square opening (92mm?) in the Antec ductwork. I installed the ductwork, which is adjustable in all directions, and adjusted so that the opening is up against the fins on the Zalman fan. is this how your's is installed, or did you do something different?

Sorry - don't mean to hijack thread, but I thought my issue was related...

Thanks

Frenchy

JJKizak wrote on 1/30/2006, 10:53 AM

Good thing they banned Berylium as it's hazardous to your health. Many lawsuits happening now. Although we used it a lot in our high power klystron transmitters and for sealing doors in metal rooms to reduce interference. It does work well.

JJK

B.Verlik wrote on 1/30/2006, 2:04 PM

Has anybody built a PC inside one or two of those cheap Automobile Coolers that run off a 12 volt supply? Or is there way too much heat for that?

Coursedesign wrote on 1/30/2006, 2:59 PM

Way too much heat. Just look at the power consumption of those, a couple of amps x 12 volts. Could be OK for a mobile Celeron :O).

There are peltier element cooling solutions for PCs already, no need to hack one.

JJKizak wrote on 1/30/2006, 4:47 PM

Having had a ton of experience with water cooled high power klystron transmitters I would be very carefull about things like pressure, leaks, corrosion, pump failure and processor roast?, pump failure and pressure pop the cooler and computer ruined? fan cooling the radiator?, surge tank in line to allow for coolant expansion when hot?
hot spots?

JJK

FrankLP* wrote on 1/30/2006, 5:37 PM

I've been using a Koolance system for the better portion of three years now and love it. Due to poor planning on the part of myself and my carpenter when we built my home studio, air flow in my control room is minimal. So prior to the koolance, i had all kinds of problems. After I went with the koolance, I was able to upgrade to faster CPU, and have never had any problems.

I will however still upgrade my air handling...it gets a bit hot in the winter time...and it's pretty sad to have to run the AC in the winter just to cool the control room in my basement!

ScottW wrote on 1/30/2006, 6:47 PM

JJK, if the heat output of a PC type computer ever approaches that of a high power klystron xmitter, then we are really in a world of hurt. we're talking about 300 watts (maybe), not 50,000.

The koolance system has 2 pumps, and the coolant never gets near the kind of temps or pressure where you'de have to start worrying about things like expansion.

The koolance system I have has been one of the most stable and reliable systems I've ever built, and I've never had a single leak. I will admit it is a bit of a pain to put additional coolant in it, but luckily it only needs that type of service about every 1.5 years.

It also looks really kewl with the tubes running from one component to another.

I love the fact that I can touch the hard drives in this box and they are warm, but not hot to the touch. Drives in another system I have could fry eggs.

--Scott

JohnnyRoy wrote on 1/30/2006, 8:40 PM

> JR: Did you install the internal Antec ductwork

No. The ductwork assumes you are using a fan that blows down onto the heatsink and processor. The Zalman I have blows across the heatsink/heat pipes and out the back of the chassis. The duct work wouldn’t fit with the large Zalman heatsink anyway so I just left it off.

~jr

JJKizak wrote on 1/31/2006, 7:00 AM

Scottw:
Just wondered how they handled stuff on the minature end of things.

JJK

ScottW wrote on 1/31/2006, 7:37 AM

The best info how they do things in the small world would be the koolance web site, where they have pictures of the various components involved along with some video.

VOGuy wrote on 1/31/2006, 8:46 AM

Working on a revolutionary water cooling system - I'll have more info when I get it working. Let's just say for now that it'll remove the heat from the computer and make it available for other applications, thereby saving energy and money. Biggest problem now is trying to figure out where the coffee filter goes.