Liquid Cooled Systems?!!

[Erik Lund]

Hey guys,

Has anyone here heard of a liquid cooled system?

Only 1 fan and does a better job than 20 fans!!!

Here is the website: www.sharkacorp.com

 

This liquid cooling system is very quiet and more efficient than fans or heatsinks. It easily installs in to most mid to full sized cases. There are also adapters avalible for VGA/GPU procs and HDDs. The base system is priced at $199-239 U.S. This is an ideal cooling solution for those of you who like to overclock your procs.

There is also a link on the site to a downloadable video tutorial on how simple the cooling system is to install. They also have a wide selection of other (cheaper) CPU/GPU cooling sytems on their website.

I havn't tried this system yet, "yet" But I will soon!

Hope this helps!

[Greg Hess]

Erik,

 

Water cooled systems are not new. They've been around almost 2-3 years now.

 

The fundamental advantage with water cooled systems is the fact they use water to transfer a majority of the heat off the central processors.

 

The fundamental disadvantage with water cooled systems is the fact they use water to transfer a majority of the heat off the central processors.

 

Huh you might say?

 

With an aircooled system, you have to worry about the fan's dying, or dropping in performance. This is usually accompied by a reduction in noise, or some horrible buzzing sounds. Needless to say, the system will usually crash, lockup, or at least shutoff when this happens.

 

With water cooling systems you have...

 

The fans for the radiators (Yes you still need fans), The Pump, all the clamps for the various hoses, the resevoir, and of course the water itself to worry about.

 

Starting with the water. If you don't use distilled water with some sort of antibacterial/antifreeze in it, it'll get crap growing in it. This of course gums everything up reducing water flow.

 

Air bubbles. If you get air in the hose line, it screws up flow something serious, not to mention forgetting to use water wetter to reduce the cohesion of the h20 particles.

 

The Pump. If this baby fails, your in deep @!#$!. You must MAKE SURE that the system has some sort of cutoff point in case the pump fails. Remember water is a very good conductor of heat...in both directions.

 

Clamps...make sure to use some sort of backup clamp system, instead of the lame little plastic clips most of the people sell you. Water on hardware = electric fireworks.

 

The Resevoir. Because water evaperates, you'll need a resevoir to maintain a good level, and some way of monitoring that level of water.

 

All in all?

 

Water cooling requires maintance and the willingness and skill to troubleshoot and oversee a cooling system. It is not simple, not matter how many pr pages and websites tell you it is. I wouldn't recommend watercooling to anyone who isn't proficent at working with machines, nor anyone who doesn't want to spend the time and energy getting the system running at 100%.

 

Suurland recently purchased a koolance water cooling system, and we've been troubleshooting it for days. Surprisingly enough...what was the problem? The Athlon system was OVERHEATING. CPU1 was getting over 60C and causing errors, causing the system to seize and crash. The fundamental problem? CPU2's water line would go into CPU1, instead of splitting off back to the radiator to cool off first. He's current experimenting adding a variety of case fans to try and exhaust the excess heat. (He installed and setup the system perfectly, so thats not the problem).

 

He was not overclocking, nor doing anything crazy. Just two 2000+ MP's.

 

Just wanted to drop a few lines about this, before everyone went out and bought themselves a water cooling system. Realize it may not always be the "superior" solution, but that its there as an alternative solution to aircooled pc's.

 

[ July 05, 2002, 06:04 AM: Message edited by: Greg Hess ]

[Dave Buchhofer]

I've got a Koolance system at home, its been working without any problems for about 2 months. its not stellar, but its stable, and quiet.

 

With a single athlon it holds the temp down to ~36c. You're right, its not a superior solution, but its nice, and its different..

 

(Aside from the fact that its got enough room to expand for the next millenium!)

[Guest ghraben]

i use a homebrew water cooling system on my duallie p3 rig at home. my thoughts:

 

- with a reservoir, air bubbles are not a problem: any excess air just ends up at the top of the reservoir.

 

- waterblock mounting can be a pain. you not only have a big chunk of metal like a heatsink, but a big chunk of metal with barbs and tubes coming out of it.

 

- consider big (120mm) fans. bigger fans move more air with less noise, especially useful for cooling radiators.

 

- get flexible tubing. silicone is good, the polyvinyl crap at the hardware store is too stiff to make tight bends without kinking. also, vinyl tubing will harden over time.

 

- stability, stability, stability.

 

my $.02 on the koolance units: nice idea; study it and make one better. without even testing one, my suspicion is that the waterblocks are less than stellar and the pump is probably too weak for a dual cpu system. you can get by with looping the water through both cpus (serial) if your pump pushes the water fast enough. otherwise, you would need to add another radiator between the cpus to cool the water before it hits the second cpu.

 

[edit]

www.overclockers.com has lots of info (some dated) on watercooling

 

[ July 08, 2002, 10:46 AM: Message edited by: ghraben ]

[Greg Hess]

One thing to watch with the koolance systems is the temp monitor. The koolance temp gauge is NOT accurate. It reports up to a 10C lower temp then the cpu's are actually recieving. This is the problem suurland ran into. Though the koolance unit was showing absolutely stellar cooling, the cpu's were still reaching almost 60C.

 

(The koolance temp guage uses a thermal resistor, which depending on its placement is either a semi accurate, or a completely inaccurate temp reading).

 

If you do experience freezes or lockups, do try adding some rear exhaust to the koolance system, it helps alot.

 

I agree on all the points about the large 120 mm fans and such. Thanks for the note about the resevoir, I haven't gotten my water cooled rig running yet (don't have the time) so not 100% on some of the features/benefits/disadvantages.

[Dave Buchhofer]

Yea, i also added an 80mm rear fan, mainly because my goofy Voodoo5 board heats up like an oven.

 

The manual of the koolance case showed several ways to install the temp probe that were better then the default (Probably what tom has.. same as i do) but they all seemed to require some extensive (Or so it felt to me!) modifications of the block, or feeding it under the socket to get the probe under the CPU itself.

 

I thought it safer to skip that part myself.

 

Btw, How are you taking the temps then? I pulled mine out of the BIOS after it had been running for a few weeks (Months? hehe)

 

Have an Abit kg7-raid board here if that makes a difference.

[Greg Hess]

Btw, How are you taking the temps then? I pulled mine out of the BIOS after it had been running for a few weeks (Months? hehe)

 

I take the temps from the bios because I know what type of temps it should be reporting (from the old under the socket thermoresistors) as opposed to the type of temps reported by a 3rd party thermoresistor.

 

On newer boards you can't really follow the same system, cause they use the built in thermoresistor on the XP and MP's (Like the Asus A7V333) which reports a 5-7C higher temp then the old under the socket thermo's.