Water chiller - any experiences, thoughts, suggestions?

[Zka17]

Hello ROGers,

I just found this: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/coo...iller-review/1

At first reading, it does seems interesting...

Please, share any experiences, thoughts and suggestions you may have with such systems! Thanks!

[Dark]

ideously expensive systems (which cost £7,500 or more) struggled to keep the CPU temperature under control, peaking at 79˚C and 86˚C
some one should tell them that my pc temp is 50+ water cooled lool weird ppl thats only due to i have my water tube going into a coper heat sink with super fans on top yeah my pc sounds like a jet at times. as for the hc-500A sounds cool but looks massive just picture it next door to pc omg. if your wanting super cooled pc run the tubes inside a frige freezer

[Arne Saknussemm]

If you did run your loop to a fridge freezer you would kill it stone dead in a few hours. This may be a bit more hardcore but I doubt it would last very long either if you ran prime on your CPU for 24 hours. Also if it does send chilled water into your PC condensation is going to drip into your PSU within an hour!

[Zka17]

If you did run your loop to a fridge freezer you would kill it stone dead in a few hours. This may be a bit more hardcore but I doubt it would last very long either if you ran prime on your CPU for 24 hours.

I agree, the freezer is not a good idea! Even with a proper coolant (which would not freeze at those temps) the temp difference would be so big that definitely would cause condensation...

Also, agree with that prime95 could kill the system... - with such a cooling would use heavy OC... which means that heavy overvolting... and that also supposed to kill the chips regardless of temps (at least, that's what most people are saying)

Also if it does send chilled water into your PC condensation is going to drip into your PSU within an hour!

However, this may not be entirely true... it depends on the temp of "chilled water"... "chilled water" in this case is only meaning that it's temps are below the ambient - and you can adjust on this particular system, how much below ambient temp do you want... the trick is to not cool below the dew point...

Just an example... Let's take the temp I currently have in my house, it's 22.5C. For the relative humidity take 60% - humans are comfortable within 20-60%... (can not measure exactly, but here in SC is usually very high humidity) then we can calculate the dew point (the temp where the water vapors start condensating) - it's approx 14C. Now, if I would use that system adjusted to 15C, it would be no condensation and my coolant would go 7.5C below the ambient temp...

Not sure about that all temps would decrease linearly, but let just suppose it - then I would get 7.5C lower temps at my maximums... I think, that would mean 100-200MHz in plus... of course, I'm talking here about the top end of OCing, where further raising of voltages would cause exponential increase of temps... - so, that's why only 100-200MHz... but imagine, 5GHz vs 5.2GHz when you're getting competitive!

I think, it's interesting... unfortunately, I have only theoretical calculations here... that's why I'm hoping that someone had tried this or similar systems...

[Arne Saknussemm]

Actually I meant you would kill your freezer! The system would be fine. Fridges and freezers are designed to keep things cool. They have a very hard time when you load them up with a lot of food and drink working to get to temperature but once there they run ok. If you put the heat from a 6 core CPU into a fridge the cooling mechanism would never cope.

Similarly this device would be fine for short benching runs since a reservoir of water has some thermal inertia. But I suspect that if you connect it to a system in use for 24 hours or more and the chiller would die too. These things are not designed to run continuously. They are designed to get to a temperature and then maintain it.

[Zka17]

I see now... LOL! but either way, we excluded the freezer...

Regarding how long it would last, I've got it from that review that they were designed for cooling PCs (and aquariums)...

[HiVizMan]

Never took off beside for short burst say when benching. What we would do is have a big cooler box filled with Ice and pour a couple of pounds of salt ontop, then add just enough water to make sure the pump inlet was covered. CPU water block and the outlet spilling over the ice cubes.

Worked fine for a couple of hours. I used this method to cool a HD 2900 XT graphic card when they first came out. At that stage LN2 was not available and DryIce store had run out.

[Zka17]

Hm... nice idea, HiVizMan - thanks!

And yes, I'm thinking of benching... Do you think that the system I linked in my first post would be good for a while?

[HiVizMan]

The benching you can every do is with really old kit that heaps and heaps of people have benched. That way you really find out if you know your stuff or not.

Get a old 775 chipset board the ASUS commando or the P5B Deluxe spring to mind and buy a handful of cheap Celeron or netburst type processors. Some ddr2 ram and do some 2D benching. LOL humbling I can promise you. That was benching and tweaking at a whole different level.

What I am trying to say you can bench with any hardware. Regardless what it is or how old it is, you will always find that some one some where has benched it too. So you can compare or compete which ever way you want to look at it.

[Zka17]

I see... i think I've got what your were trying to say... - will take these in consideration!