Cooling water cooling...homemade style

alright well after having to deal with crappy computers for the past 10 years i've decided that i'm going to build a computer that will actually work well hahah. So while i was at it i decided that i would water cool it as well. To just give you a little background on what i have going, i'm making my own water blocks out of pur aluminium block. which leads me to my first question, is 3/16" pipe to small for water cooling? what is the smallest pipe size that i could use that would not drasticly decrease water flow and reducing cooling abilities? aight and then next i had a question about a pump. I've been looking at "Computer Water Cooling" pumps...and i have to say they are ridiculously priced...so i was wondering if maybe there was a cheap one...not bad....but nothing extreme....like below $60usd though, that i might not have stumbled upon on yet. or maybe is there anyway that i could use an aquarium pump? The lowes near me has pond pumps...which would be pretty beastly...but the only problem is that they are meant to be submersed in the water so the intake isn't a tube, it's a massive opening with a filter....i was thinking maybe i could make a miniture resovoir that would connect directly to this portion of the pump and then have a fitting that is the same size as the rest of tubing on the other end of the mini "resovoir"? aight well that wraps up what i have going so far...thanks for the help to come!

 

When you say 3/16" pipe you mean tubing right? It really depends on what you want the system to do and the design of your waterblocks and pump. If all the parts are matched correctly it won't be the best performing WC system but it will keep the system cool.

What designs and fabrication methods are you considering for your waterblock? The key to getting the system to perform well with small tubing is a low flow and high pressure waterblock which means you'll want lots of turbulence.

As far as pumps go I'd say you haven't been looking very hard. There are many pumps sold for water cooling below $60. The problem with many of the pond pumps you see in stores is that the are high flow and low pressure, the kind of things you want for moving water in a pond but don't want when pushing a little bit of water through small tubes. Some of the best pumps are aquarium pumps but they're out of your price range (larger Eheim and Iwakis). Just offhand I'd look at the Eheim 1048 and DD CSP MAG pumps.

 

well i'm interning at this custom motorcycle place so i have access to basicly any machine i can think of, so i'm just using a milling machine to do the blocks. I was going to make them out of copper but after reading up on it i found that copper and aluminium don't differ in cooling abilities to that extreme of a degree.

As far as the 3/8" tubing, yeah i'll be running that throughout the entire case, i just bought this pump off ebay i'm hoping it will work...but if it doesn't i can always resell it.
Water Pump

But i did have another question as far as the resovoir. I thought of a really bad ass idea that i think might work. I want to make a waterfall as the resovoir, and have it visible through the front of the case when the lights are on (have LED's that light up water). I was a little worried about creating enough suction on the other end of the water pump because essentially it would just be sucking it in from a pool, would this work? and if not as is then is there some way that i could make it work?

I'll post some scans of conceptional drawings tomorrow sometime.

 

You may want to visit Procooling.com forums, where all the block builders hang out.

 

exact same pump I had, it can be quiet but It's fragile and in the end the threads on the outlet and inlet cracked and it would take on air.
as far as suction I'm having trouble picturing what your saying, but pumps like to have low pressure on the inlet side and then create high pressure on the outlet side. so it's never good to have one drawing water through blocks, but it's perfectly fine to have one connected to any sort of large reserviour