Watercooling Dropping ice cubes in reservoir, discuss!

The thought just struck me! As long as I avoid blocking the water flow and use distilled water ice cubes, what is there to lose? Might be kinda interesting to see how far I can drive down temperatures!

 

Probably more effective to drop a rad into a bucket of chilled water/ice cubes unless it's a massive res.

 

Easier to move an ice cube!

 

Is that not the idea of the Hybrid titan chiller? Uses water cooling but has a phase changer which cools the water. It is possible, but it isn't sustainable.

 

Only thng I'd be concerned about would be condensation but I'm not sure if ice cubes would lower the water temperature down low enough to cause that or not.

 

This I have done more than once and it works!

 

I'll be draining the loop tomorrow anyway and might drop a couple of ice cubes in during a stress test before I do!

Be quite interesting.

 

If you chill the water below ambient temps, then pass it through one or more rads, the rads will help to increase the temp. That's why those of us who use chillers don't use rads (in the short to medium term that justifies the cost of a chiller, at least it did for me)

 

For a short while when I was benching I used to have just a pump, block and bucket filled with water and ice cubes

Helped cool things down nicely, definitely worth a shot for the humour factor alone.

 

My GTX 680 dropped to 19c last night on idle.

Water-cooled hard disk dropped to 15c.

Been down to 7c just using ordinary water loop with rad sucking in outside air.

 

Condensation could be an issue but if it's just one or two I don't think it could do much damage. If your testing it anyway when draining your loop record your results.

 

Water cooled hard drive? And I thought specifically air cooling them was overkill!

 

The ice cube trick dropped temperatures by a few degrees but the effect was only fleeting.

They melted too fast!

 

Lol

 

Nop. During the 2 weeks of hot summer in UK I like to keep my hard disks below 40c. Can do that with a fan but the reason I bough the hard disk waterblock was to get rid of as many fans as possible. That dint work out cos I have 5 case fans and soon to be 6 x rad fans but all mobo speed controlled.

The hard disk waterblock has another benefit though... it absorbs all vibration from the hard disk because of the squishy 3mm thermal pad.

 

Hahahaha don't lie. It's one week and wishful thinking.

 

I'm not keen on over-cooling hard-drives. Their intended operational temperature range is between 35C and 50C for most mechanical drives.
Google did a major study on hard-drive life & temperatures a while back and found that that their drives failed more often when cooled below 35-40C; and that high temperatures were a far smaller factor in drive life than other issues.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&...&sig=AHIEtbSGYFVw6UJ8vQCN9qlLw68zyvZ-NA&pli=1
Pages 5 & 6 in particular, for drives up to 3 months old. Failure rates of nearly 10% on drives cooled below 30C compared to 5% for the drives kept at 30-35C and less than 5% (as low as 2.5%) for the apparent sweet spot of 35-40C.
The same trend appears to continue with the same chart-shape for drives older than that but less than 3 years old; but with lower failure rates for drives that survived past 3 months.
(Google also found that there is a 3-month or so window in which drives are more likely to fail, a sort of 'infant mortality phase')

What I take from Google's study is that from a consumer point of view there's absolutely no benefit to cooling your hard drives unless they're continuously above 50C and you may actually be shortening their lives if over-cooling them (ie; consistently below 35-40C).

The noise benefit is understandable - The hard drives are by far the loudest part of my rig apart from the pump.

 

The watercooled hard disk has been running fine for years (probably because it's not a seagate). I chose samsung because a friend of mine still has his very old samsung hard disks running perfectly.

The samsungs can operate at quite low temps. The hard disk has been down to about 6c.

 

And we already had summer for that 1 week in March. Its time to prepare for Autumn already!

 

Blogins, I thought you were a bit mad in the 460 thread, very mad in the winter temp thread and now you have removed all doubt