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

Paul MaudDib: May 3, 2006; TEAM NVIDIA:
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PerrineClostermann posted:

Failures?

AIOs have a lot more failures than air coolers (i.e. "infrequent" is a lot more than "none") and custom loops have a lot of points of failure (every single component, joint, and tubing run).

The potential gains from CLCs are much greater, of course.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2016 08:09

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Paul MaudDib: May 3, 2006; TEAM NVIDIA:
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THE DOG HOUSE posted:

Yeah that thing looks sweet as hell but the waterblock alone practically costs as much as the whole setup I want. I'm going to jump on the first h55s I see that are on sale, hopefully for around $50 a pop, and a $30 G10, drill some holes and attach them to the side of the case. It's going to look funny.

If custom waterblocks are out of your budget the G10 is the obvious answer.

For the price of a custom loop you can get multiple 120/140mm AIOs and the components to hook them up. It's probably not as good overall but it's a pretty obvious trade-off if you have the case space available.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2016 08:12

Paul MaudDib: May 3, 2006; TEAM NVIDIA:
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PerrineClostermann posted:

I've had more air coolers fail than water coolers, actually. My arctic freezer pro 7 (iirc) failed; I had to replace the fan with one I harvested from a case fan and super glued on to the heat sink. I've had two coolers fail similarly on my xfx 6870s.

That said, it is true that water cooling failures could be much worse, if a leak is involved. And I have had a lot more air cooled devices than water cooled.

Yeah, I guess I should say that I mean "fail catastrophically" when I talk about liquid cooling. Modern CPUs will throttle right down if they die, and most motherboards are even smart enough to sense it. AIO fluid can be (but isn't always) corrosive, and CLCs pick up metals after a period of time in the loop. But fan failures (for either liquid or air) are simple, slap on a new fan and off they go.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2016 08:25

Paul MaudDib: May 3, 2006; TEAM NVIDIA:
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headlor posted:

Alright, so coolant question. I take it from gibbos weirdly hostile comment that buying off the shelf pre-mixed coolant is not the hip thing.

So what, deionised, distilled water?

Why not the sort of waterless coolant we use in cars. That stuff has insane operational ranges.

edit: oh wait, I answered my own question. The high performance coolant is useful because it doesn't turn to steam so it remains useful as a coolant longer. Hopefully a CPU will never push it up to the point where it's trying to boil away so it doesn't matter if it has a higher boiling point/lower freezing point.

Yeah, deionized or distilled, it really makes no difference since it will pick up metal ions from the inside of the loop anyway. Then you add some biocide to kill off anything that might start growing.

And yeah, water is perfectly fine within the range of 0-100C and hopefully you are not getting your loop outside that range. The fancy car antifreeze is there to keep the radiator from freezing if it drops below 0C outside. There's nothing wrong with using something like ethylene glycol in most situations - it's used in AIO loops - but it does you no good unless you expect to be running your rig below 0C or above 100C.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2016 01:28

Paul MaudDib: May 3, 2006; TEAM NVIDIA:
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I�m refilling an older (non-asetek) AIO. Is there anything cheap that I can use as a biocide? It will all be in the black tubing so there�s really no point to fancy colors/etc, I just need it to not breed mold.

Would dumping in a portion of isopropyl alcohol work, or something like that?

# ¿ Feb 8, 2022 01:41

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