Water Cooling: It's better down where it's wetter

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Water Cooling: It's better down where it's wetter

Numinous: May 20, 2001; College Slice

atomicthumbs posted:

http://www.electronics-cooling.com/2005/11/advances-in-high-performance-cooling-for-electronics/

Back in the day I had an 80W peltier cooler connected to a dangerden water block and radiator. Kept my CPU at a nice and cool 60 deg F all day long. Went the full monty with vaseline in the CPU connector and silicone sealant around the whole setup - custom water reservoir made from home depot components and brass barbs. Good stuff!

It was a fun ride but I went back to air cooling eventually.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2016 08:06

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 14:08

Numinous: May 20, 2001; College Slice

I don't. This was back in the day where I think I maybe had a 640x480 digital camera and definitely not a cell phone.

It was a cool build too - ran dual power supplies so I could turn on the peltier and water pump before booting the system. Had wired up a 'slam style' kill switch in the event that the peltier power supply died because I would only have like 60 seconds before I fried the CPU (way before internal temp monitors would throttle back power).

# ¿ Sep 3, 2016 08:30

Numinous: May 20, 2001; College Slice

Mofabio posted:

Oh man this thread brings me back. I spent summer after freshman year of high school trying to watercool my first PC, a 1.2Ghz AMD TBird. I'll never forget:

- Attempting to make a waterblock with junkyard copper, old wire, a dremel, JBWeld, and a soldering iron. Luckily the thing fell apart while lapping the base, would have been a timebomb.
- Attempting to make a giant evaporative cooler and trying to assure my parents that the humidity wouldn't rot my room from the inside-out
- The guy at Napa Auto Parts who was so incredibly down to help a strange child identify dimensionally-appropriate heater cores
- Learning that silicone tubing is water vapor permeable, trying to figure out why my water level kept dropping and why the pump would pull air after 3 months
- Slicing the gently caress out of my hands with a box cutter while building a reservoir out of junk to fix the above problem, starting my DIY scar collection
- Like so many future projects, doing a mediocre job and quitting at 90%

You kids today don't know how lucky you gots it, with your AIO's and your off-the-shelf phase change.

Wow, I totally forgot about cooling towers. They were all the rage for a good long time. I remember one guy had mounted his outside his house and piped water through his bedroom window.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2016 07:58

Numinous: May 20, 2001; College Slice

Collateral Damage posted:

Thought experiment, how viable would a water cooled system that trades a radiator for a large buffer tank be for a system that's only on for a couple of hours per day?

A Kaby Lake i7 has a listed Thermal Design Point of 91W and a GTX 1080 about 180W, so 271W for CPU+GPU. Let's say an even 300W of heat that needs dissipating, and that we want to shut off at 70C to be on the safe side.

Someone tell me if this math is correct.

Water has a specific heat capacity of 4.184 Joule per gram, meaning it takes 4.184 watt to heat one gram of water by one celsius in one second. A litre of water is 1000 grams, so to heat our buffer from an ambient of 24C to 70C it would take 46*4184/300 = 641 seconds per litre of water in the system. So you would need a buffer of about 5-6 litres per hour of run time, and that's assuming we have no natural convection of heat from water to air.

I think you should extend this thought experiment to heating a freshwater fish tank. Assume something moderately large like a 30 gallon. What kind of system can you run to achieve equilibrium with tropical freshwater fish requiring 73-78 deg F temperature.

Full hilarity indeed.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2017 06:41

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