Water Cooling
Water cooling advice.
Well, here I am, writing my first article and I decided to do it on watercooling. Yes, I know it has been done before, but most of the articles I found when getting into this relatively new topic, were either too commercial and relied on expensive kits, or were a little too extreme (i.e.. dual peltiers). So I decided to do the article in a D.I.Y. style, but not using peltiers. You could, of course add a peltier, but I'm probably going to explain that in a later article. Now I will have to say, that this article is meant to be used by people who have a decent degree of technical knowledge, and own and can operate various hand tools etc. Also, if you forget to connect one of the pipes, which in turn squirts water down your motherboard, which hoses (pun intended) your system, and soaks your new $2500 desk, which collapses, kills your cat and scares your gerbils to stupidity, I cant be held responsible.
Well, Off I go Most of the setup is really easy to make, but the water block is pretty hard to do, so I'll start with it, (Well, it all gets easier after it!)
First of all, you need a big hunk of metal, preferably copper, but aluminum work almost as well, and costs a lot less and is easier to work with, but the best block would have a 1/16th copper base on an aluminum block, as copper transfers heat well, but aluminum radiates it to the water better. A good place to get this from in the USA is onlinemetals.com
The block needs to be 2x2 inches for a socket processor, and I'd go for about 2x4 inches for a slot A or 1 processor. From now on there is 2 ways I can think of that you could go. The first is drilling holes across the block, like this:
and then plugging all the holes with grub screws, apart from the inlet and outlet holes. Now, I reckon this would work pretty well, but you will certainly need a drill press, and it would also be very hard to get right, so I opted for a different method.
I got the block, and drill many holes in to top, equally spaced (ish) down to about 1/16' from the bottom of the block. I used a pattern like this:
The Black areas are places I drilled, and the gray areas are the bits below the inlet and outlet connectors.
I reckon this design is pretty good, and has about 5x the surface area of most water blocks, which cant be a bad thing!
I then proceeded to drill holes of 3mm in each of the corners on top of the block, 3mm away from the edges.
I then went and bought a piece of 2'x2' 1/4' thick clear acrylic, and drilled 4 4mm holes in it, exactly in the same place as the 3mm holes in the block. I also drilled 2 10mm holes for the barbs I was using, just above the big holes in the top of the block.
I tapped the 3mm holes on the block, (put screw threads in them) so I could screw on a top to the block.
I then put a small bead of clear silicone sealant (stuff you put around your bathtub) on the outer edge of the top of the block, and screwed the acrylic top on.
After I left it to dry for a couple of hours I screwed in the barbs (pipe fittings) and the block was finished. I was lucky and got no leaks, first time.
I'm quite proud of my completed block, and it looks pretty neat.
Now onto the Pump!
The pump I use is one called a "Baby Otter 100" and is made by Trident I think. It pumps 200gph and has a head height of about 1.8 meters. I bought it from aquatics-warehouse.co.uk. It cost £23, about $35. Pumps can be bought in the USA from your local Home Depot, and are probably a lot cheaper! Just make sure it pumps at least 100 gph. An inline pump is a good idea, as you wont need a reservoir, like I did with my pump.
Yeah, now we can heat the water, how does it cool down?
The radiator I used is a heater core for a car. I got it free from a car spares place because they didn't know what car it fitted, so it was pretty worthless to them, they usually cost £20 ($30) and do an excellent job of cooling the water. I use a 120mm Sunon High output fan blowing through it for a little bit of airflow!
Overall, the system works VERY well, and does a damn good job of keeping my Athlon 600 (700 core) at 850 (1.7v) from melting down, and the temp sensor on my motherboard says the CPU temp is at 25c idle, and 27c on load. with a room temp of 22c, although I think these temps are reported a little low. The temps with a HUGE generic heat sink (better than a globalwin) with the 120mm fan ducted onto it was 30cidle and 34c load, and with the 2 40mm fans its came with on it would only just boot up but there would be registry errors and a BSOD.
I hope this article has helped you out in getting into water-cooling, and showed you how much better cooling with water is that with air. I also hoped it has taken some of the fear away from pumping water in and out of your PC!
As this is his first article email here if it blows and here if it rocks
