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Hardware

Water Cooling a CPU 70

Posted by CmdrTaco from the beats-melting-it dept.
An anonymous reader sent a link to a site that has lots of nifty bits on how to build a water cooler to keep your CPU nice and cool while you clock the hell out of it. Nice intro page to the subject too.
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Water Cooling a CPU More

Water Cooling a CPU

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  • Be sur that I'll put a pump and a water tank near my computer.... What is more beautifull than a watertank on your desk!! :)

  • Yes there was. That person fabricated a water jacket from a copper sheet.

  • So here I am, building a water cooling system for my cluster, and what do I see? An article on slashdot telling how to water-cool your CPU. I've got a couple of boxes I just made and some tubing right here in my hands, as well as some fish who are about to live in a slightly warmer environment, and decided to check slashdot. Weird. Well, perhaps I should check out the site and see if he's ruined my planned web page telling how I decided to set it up...

    --Cloudmaster, who's still gonna put up a page describing the cluster.

  • Overclocking is evil. And, more important, I think it hurts software development, especially in OpenSource (mostly people that work at home, on their own boxes), because working on systems that might be instable once in a while leads to unneccessary bug-hunting.

  • I was intrigued by the Water-cooler story so I checked out the web address...or tried to.

    It appears that the water-cooling inventor has also created a fool-proof way of crashing IE 4.0 under NT.

    I attach no interpretation to this fact. You may think this a good thing or a bad thing, I simply say it is true (at least for my IE 4.0 under NT WS4 SP4).

    Ok. Go ahead, show your superior enlightenment by flaming me for mentioning IE and NT on /.
  • I have long thought that CPU cooling could be done using a "heat pipe" design. Essentially, you would put a reservoir on top of the CPU, along with an internal heat sink. From the top of the reservoir, you would run a copper tube to a working fluid-to-air heat exchanger. You pressurize the device with refrigerant (like R-134a) so that the critical (boiling) temperature is at the operating temperature for the CPU. Then, as the CPU temperature rises, it will boil the refrigerant which will naturally bubble up the exterior heat exchanger. The heat exchanger can remove the heat and the condensing liquid will trickle back down the pipe. This approach uses convective heat transfer just like the water approach, but has two advantages. First, it is buoyancy driven and, as such, needs no pump. Second, the latent heat of fusion of the evaporating gas provides a significantly higher rate of heat transfer than the sensible heat of the moving water. This is a common approach for HVAC air-to-air heat exchangers. I am surprised someone hasn't tried it on CPUs yet. Something for you undergrads to play with...I have to go finish my dissertation.
  • ...mix worse than Water and Oil. This is a numb idea guys. Stick with giant sized fans and heat sinks.
  • from the coolcpu web site

    >>The first and most obvious benefit is that
    >> the processor runs much cooler.

    And I care about this -- why?

    >>This allows us to run our computers at much
    >> higher speeds without having to pay big-bucks
    >> for the latest processors.

    Oh so it's to save money then?

    Let me just say I'm glad my time is worth
    more as a hacker than it is as a plumber.
    But who knows, this guy may be on to something.
    Don't humans love to "baby" their possessions,
    like putting extra octane gas in their cars,
    or using monster cables for their speakers?

    In other words, this might be a good garage
    experiment for a future Bell Labs researcher,
    but it's not gonna buy you much more than a
    "fun" project and a "conversation piece".

  • Fortunately its very simple to do using solder and a piece of particle board. See this site [marthastewart.com] for more information.
  • Is people to 'test' the waters (no pun intended) of putting FISH in there tank of water. Would the heat kill them? You need a pump in a fish tank anyways...just a thought :)

    SpamMan
    "I think the majority of wrong thinking people, are right"
  • Many of Seymour Cray's patents are in cooling systems. I believe the guts of his latest machine actually sat immersed in a fast moving bath of liquid coolant. Would not surprise me if some element of this landed on the desktop someday.

    To those who think this is a waste of time, recall that a hobby is something that you intentionally pay more attention to than it really deserves, simply for the joy of doing so.

    mahlen

    He spent half his money on wine, women, and song, and like a fool he squandered the rest.
    --Benny Hill
  • I don't get this "It's stupid to build a watercooling system when you can just buy a heatsink and fan" mentality. Don't people _do_ anything anymore? Why do I bother coding for Freeciv when I could just buy Civ2? Why cook myself dinner when I could order pizza?

    Maybe people build watercooling systems for their computer because it's an interesting project, and they _like_ building things and solving problems. There's more to life than slashdot and half-life you know.
  • I think he was suggesting the use of other refrigerants. (Specificaly, I think he said R-134A, which is what modern AC systems use.)
  • This is impressive. I think I will be looking into this desigh myself;)
    I'll start a post if I get anywhere!
  • I have two boxed pentium processors on my SMP machine, they have epoxied heatsinks and specialized fans that fit inside them. The fans are getting very noisy, but I can't buy new ones (special fans, remember?) and I can't replace the heatsinks (epoxy don't come off). Hell, I can't even buy new CPUs! I'm building my own watercooler now. Unlike the noisy CPU fans, the waterpump is completely silent. The watercooler also costs far less than two peltier devices (~$35 for parts+tools).

    Water cooling also takes the heat from the CPUs and moves it _outside_ the case. CPU fans just move heat from the CPU to the inside of the case. Peltier devices create a lot of additional heat in the process. Since my case will be cooler, my harddisk will last longer and I can get by with fewer/slower fans for airflow, resulting in even less noise.
  • The subject says it all. What kind of grout works best? Should I use the regular white kind, or can I use the kind with the little dark speckles in it which is easier to clean. I can't wait to see what my K6-2 can really do!

    Thanks,
    Steve
  • I'm waiting for ELKS to be bootable on my palmtop. *Really*. (HP 200LX) Why, because it would be cool to be able to do it.

    -Steve
  • Canola oil doesn't strike me as something that would transfer much heat... but then again, I'm a software guy -- what would I know?

    Any chemists out there care to comment?
  • Posted by jchaw:

    I believe he immersed the components in freon. Moreover someone later on used a faucet to direct fast flowing freon onto panels.

    We can all read abt in the book called 'Superman'. It talks abt Seymour Cray and his life dealing in Supercomputers.

    [JASON@CHAW]
  • Tell that to a sushi-lover! :)

    Actually, I suppose a balanced ecosystem would
    be pretty hygienic (if the fish stayed alive, that
    would be a good sign). Just need to make sure to
    have a good aquarium filter and direct the clean
    water output to the heat sink input.

    As far as conversation pieces go, I think that
    the fish tank adds a nice Rube Goldbergian touch.

  • What do you mean, fish aren't hygenic? They spend their entire lives taking baths. What could be more hygenic than that? :)
  • Hey, we were swapping processors and isa cards
    while they were fully submerged and saturated!

    Maybe canola oil is tommorrow's space-age
    material for keeping electrical contacts clean...

    You never know... (=

    - Chris the accomplice
  • It's a miracle that someone hasn't brought up the waterPOWERED computer in the New Hacker's Dictionary...
  • Aren't you supposed to used distilled water to make it last longer? That's just what I want, fish-shit plugging up my pentuim... :-P
  • I think using the CPU as on wall for the cooler
    is a pretty good idea. The problem with heatsinks
    is that they tend to fall off unnoticed. (except mine, which I glued on with SuperGlue...)
    Your CPU is outdated long before the metal plate corrodes enough to become a problem. Besides, you could paint it with some heat-conducting stuff...
  • Okay, so I have this car and I want to get better performance out of it. So, I buy a customized EPROM for it, that gives me 5 more miles to the gallon, and a more efficient air intake system that improves my gas milage even more and gives it a bit better responce on the peddal... but I shouldn't do that. I should just keep it like it was from the factory, because I should be a mindless robot like you. Never question, never wonder, never learn.
    Knowledge it power, power corrupts. Study hard, be evil!
  • No problem there. Just get an SMP system (provides more heat), a bigger aquarium and some electric eels. Some big condensators, some diodes, some voltage regulators (the eels give out about 500V) and you're set!

    HTH... ;-)
  • Yes, I saw one of those immersion cooled Cray's at Ft. Meade when I was in the Air Force. Pretty cool stuff, but it was a slightly modified design for "specific computing purposes". It had small windows on the side of it so you could see the circuit boards immersed in the coolant and bubbles going up along the board.

  • Actually, I suppose a balanced ecosystem would be pretty hygienic (if the fish stayed alive, that would be a good sign). Just need to make sure to have a good aquarium filter and direct the clean water output to the heat sink input.

    That's what I was intending to do; run the water through a filter before going to the processors. After reading the article, however, I'm actually considering having a seperate, closed system for cooling, and a radiator-type thing sitting under the gravel in the fish tank, so the cooler's water should be fine.
  • In a very similar circumstance. Intel announce yesterday that they will be selling the Pentium IV chip with an igloo attachment then hooks the processor directly into a block of ice.
    Way to go intel!!!
  • I actually developed a different technology that seems to be able to allow you to keep the heat down even better then a water cooling system. I have actuallyl developed a small freezer attachment for my processor. It is an even more simpkle attachment t make at home with spare parts that you may just have lying around. The first step is to make the actual freezer unit. for that all that you need is an old lunchbox thermos. Then you stick this onto the chip and seal with a thick layer of silicone. *note* I found that the thermos fit much easer when I cut a hole the circumference of the thermos in the side ofmy computer. The the next step is to cut a small hole in the side of the thermos. Find some good thermal tubing then you are almost set. The next and last stpe is the most simple of the whole setup. All that you need to do is hook these cables into the cables from a noraml everday Freezer. And there you have it. A CPU that will never overheat, and on the plus side, you won't have to leave your computer when you get thirsty. You will have a refrigerator right next to it. Now you weanna talk about a nice desktop . I would rather a refrigerator then a fish tank any day of the week!!!
  • Posted by RobReynolds:

    Tell that to Cray. :)

  • That was cool!

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