A thought just occurred to me while reading MrBean’s thread. Would it be possible to use a refrigerant based (or peltier) cooling system to cool the reservoir in a watercooling system? Perhaps, you could even fill the res with alcohol instead of water to lower the freezing point. That way, you could cool the CPU, graphics card, north chip, etc. with below 0c coolant instead of just having below 0 cooling on just the CPU. Is this conceivable? Has anyone done this? It seems like if you could just avoid freezing and condensation, this would work really well. Any ideas? Any responses? (MrBean – You inspired this post, but I didn’t want to hijack your thread, so I put it here.)
Yes its possible and I'm sure it's been done, but I'm almost positive that unless you have a huge reservoir where the water will sit for a long time it's far less effective than a pelt directly on the thing being cooled.
oh, it's quite possible, but then you run into a massive issue. Severe condensation. With tubes filled with subzero water, the tubes will develop condensation. So will the blocks. That's why i abandoned my design for a two bay, 226 watt chiller... if you want, i do have renderings of it though.
well what about a not so powerful peltier? just one that cools the water quite a bit, but still above the freezing point, this will keep the water much cooler than a radiator but prevents any condensation
That doesn't prevent condensation. If the water is below the dew point it'll condense. And that DP could be quite a range. So unless you wanna try dynamically adjusting the power of your pelts relative to the dew point it's no good. Of course insulating the lines couldn't hurt anything but the eyes. Save the money you'd spend on pelts and extra power supplies and put it towards a better radiator.
i dont think the dew point is going to be that high because how humid can house/room/work area be? and you can always get a dehumidifier
lol look at this i was planing to do this but o didn't get the pelt! dam! http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=61104&page=2&pp=20&highlight=extreme+cooling this is the thread were we discussed it
So - Foam insulation covering: cpu socket waterblock underside of mobo under cpu gpu (front and back...) north chip all hoses resevior......... would look ugly - you're right. Would be pretty cool (Pun intended) for a stable overclock though. Maybe there would even be a way to pass coolant over the heat spreaders of the ram...... Hm- well, watercooling intimidates me anyway, so I probably wouldn't even try to go down this route. But, still an interesting idea. (I still want to do an entire computer immersed in non-conductive mineral oil. Remove all fans from PSU, cpu, vpu, northchip, etc. The only things that would need to be outside would be the drives. Put big passive heatsinks on everything and figure out a way to keep the liquid moving - would be silent and cool.)
Sorry - had to double post - Just noticed I was on 68, and had to get one more. Just spamming my own thread, so no big deal.......
I have seen some guy use some cooking oil and a small submerged pump and rad to cool the oild and what he did was that he submerged everything inside the oil with heatsinks and fans still atached. It ran fine with no problems. But that system was a p1 133ocd to 225mhz or so. The dude just wanted to see if the system could handle it. The results were that the pc worked while int he oil but after he pulled the pc out and dryded it off it didnt work anymore. I suspect the ph of the oil was acidic and when it contacted air it started eating away at the aluminum and copper and solder traces on the components. Btw most dont know but cooking oils are almost always acidic and they get more and more acidic as time pases. Synthetic oil would be best for this type of experiment as it dosent shift ph. I actualy think the automotive oil used to coold down turbo bearings would do very well or transmission fluid made for heavy duty trucks that have transmission oil coolers. Just remember you need a decently viscous oil to do this efectively. And if you want to spice it up you could use pelts to cool the oil to subzero temps withought worrying about condensation on those components. And before some one says oil will turn to jelly at sub zero temps, this may be tru for most oils but automotive oils are formulated to be just as viscous at -20c as they would be at +40c Dam see what you guys have started? I may try this experiment myself. Ok gnite its 5am and I am typing at bit-tech.
That's the idea, it does look great. I wanted to be the first one... Oh well. I want to do one with a p4. I was thinking of doing it in an aquarium with a divider between the front half and the back half - put water with real fish in the front half and the computer in the back half. Would be fun. Cooking oil was a bad idea for this for lots of reasons..... Mineral oil would probably be best. also, if it was sub-zero and you took out all of the fans, it wouldn't matter if it turned to jelly - it would still be sub-zero. At that point, it wouldn't matter if it could move or not.
Which is exactly what I used. Medical Grade Mineral Oil...works like a charm. Flash-Point is 225*F, but a CPU would self-destruct before it hit that.
great idea wish the fishes, b carefull or ure pc will b swimming with fishes. Even if ure not the first, it will still be cool to own a pc like that, just dont feed the wrong side if ure going with aquarium idea.
I was totally set on the whole fishes idea, but now I've started thinking of supercooling the mineral oil..... Would be very overclockable..... (But, the fishes wouldn't like it as much ) Don't know - I'm not really into overclocking much. The fishes would look cooler for people coming over to see it. I guess I will still stick to that idea. Someone else should try a computer submerged in supercooled mineral oil and see what kind of overclocks they got. If you could get the oil down to -5c or something like that, your ram, vid card, chipset, proc, and everything else would all be chilled.
Ok, just so everyone is clear on this. You will NOT get better temps with Oil Submersion than with a good/efficient WaterCooling system. Water can carry/disapate heat much faster and more efficiently than any oil. Oil submersion will do a decent job, even more so with a well thought out cooling system, but it is mostly a 'Cool Factor' mod. You want performance, then get wet.
Of course not - the only reason I was suggesting this is because it would be capable of cooling EVERY component. Water cooling almost always does some combonation of cpu, gpu, and northchip, but not much else. Supercooling an immersed system would eliminate the danger of water condensation and would also cool your ram, southchip, voltage regulators, vid card ram, etc... The most important part of that (after cpu, gpu, and northbridge,) in my opinion would be the RAM. I know that they have water blocks for RAM, but I haven't seen any that make a lot of sense. This would be a way that you could cool EVERYTHING, even though it would all be warmer than your CPU would be with a condenser/evaporator cooler bolted to it. That's all I was trying to say.
That makes good sense. My gut tells me you wouldn't be able to overclock higher than a WC system, BUT, since the oil IS cooling everything like you said - then maybe it will be more stable at higher-clocks.
use a pelt to cool the oil down!!! http://www.only4pro.com/sivupohja.php?toiminto=tuotteet&esite=23989 pelt
So - If I do this, I'm sticking to the fishtank theme (with real fish!!) - I've been wanting to do this for years. But - I think there is pretty cool overclock potential with a tank full of sub-zero mineral oil. Anybody interested in taking up the challenge? Just for proof of concept, you could over clock the hell out of a pentium III - I'm thinking - put cd-rom and hard drive outside the tank; take the fan off the video card, cpu, northbridge, and PSU and submerse it all. Then, cool the mineral oil with a refrigerant cooler or peltiers till the whole thing was sub-zero. Just for added safety, you could put big passive heatsinks on all the important stuff to make sure.... If anybody's going to do this, let me know. I would be very interested to see how things went. Hell - Maybe if work slows down, I will do it for a practice piece to get ready for the aquarium. I have a crappy 1.3g duron (un-stable with the factory cooler without overclocking....) on an abit board that I'm not even using. But, if I do, it won't be for a while. Good luck to anyone willing to try it, and if you do - Please post and send me a message.
