water cooling terminology

Private_Snoball

I was recently reading the watercooling thread by tmh and I noticed I didn't really understand what people were looking at. Right now my PC is completely air cooled but I am looking at moving to water cool my system to keep the noise down in case I get a fussy roommate when I go to college.

Anyway, what exactly does a water block do?

When I buy a watercooling kit, will it come with everything I need or will I need to buy a bunch of add on things.

My specs are in my sig, and I intend on running the tubing between my two GPU's and also cooling my CPU with it. If that isn't possible I wouldn't be upset over just cooling one of the cards (the top one preferably) and the CPU.

After seeing how much these things cost and watching my cousin have loads of trouble with his I want to make sure I am getting all the facts straight.

Anything else anyone can help me out with as far as good water cooling companies and such would be awesome too.

P.S. I overclock EVERYTHING

Thanks,
Alex

Thrax

If you buy a kit, your performance will be less than that of a watercooling system you assembled from various higher-quality pieces, however the kit will come with everything you need.

A waterblock is just like a heatsink, except water goes through it.

Essentially you need..

A pump
A CPU waterblock
2x GPU waterblocks
A radiator
A reservoir
Tubing
(Optional) Flow meter
(Optional) Bleed and fill kit

Do you need a chipset block on an Athlon 64?

Armo

www.dangerden.com and http://www.swiftnets.com/ are the primary places for custom water cooling components. www.koolance.com and http://www.zalmanusa.com/usa/usa_index.asp make "pre assembled cases and kits"They usually run anyware from about $175 - $250 depending on the complexity of the setup and the brands you use.

A water block is the aparatus that fits over your CPU and transfers water through it to pick up the heat and carry it away to the radiator.

heres a waterblock from dangerden

csimon

I bought this flowmaster xt kit as my first w/c setup from dtek a few weeks ago for $189.99 + shipping. I'm starting out w/ just the cpu block (whitewater w/ aluminum head) so I can get the feel for it. It comes with a USMA adapter so it'll fit your cpu but I have to remove it to fit my barton xp. The chipset and gpu will come later.
Basically it has everything I need and should perform well.

Mt_Goat

A64 systems run cool enough that you could possibly be quieter with a well executed ait cooled system. You will also have a hard time of it with the 2 vid cards next to each other in an SLI setup. That is a lot of why I dumped my water setup when I moved to A64 since I didn't want to complicate things. It will also be very spendy to do your system with water cooling and I seriously don't think you will get it much of any quieter than a good air cooled system unless you are very good at planning the H2O system, purchase a lot of expensive parts to make your own system and are real good at assembling it and routing your hoses.

Thrax wrote:

Do you need a chipset block on an Athlon 64?

Due to the location this can be very difficult. Especially if you are running an SLI rig because the vid cards will surround the chipset.

csimon

It can get quite complicated indeed as mtgoat says. That's why I chose to begin with cpu block only.
By doing so I will be eliminating a huge amount of heat from my case which in turn should help the other components keep cooler than they are now.
One thing to keep in mind when cooling these things is this.
When you use a heatsink or waterblock of one sort or another you're doing the job of removing heat from that particular component. The trick to this is to remove the heat from the chip and from the case itself. The cooler the interior of the case is the more efficient your cooling system will be.
This being the case ...it makes no sense to put a radiator at the lower front bottom of the case drawing cool air thru it because you're dissipating heat right over the rest of your system. Mofsets, gpu, hard disk, ram, chipset, etc will all suffer.
The layout of your system should become your main concern before you purchase anything IMO.

NiGHTS

So you're saying a radiator would do better for the rest of your goods if it were placed on the roof of your case or the rear exhaust, as to prevent from hindering the efforts of the "natural" flow of air you're making with the 2-4 case fans you've got running?

Mt_Goat

NiGHTS wrote:

So you're saying a radiator would do better for the rest of your goods if it were placed on the roof of your case or the rear exhaust, as to prevent from hindering the efforts of the "natural" flow of air you're making with the 2-4 case fans you've got running?

In theory that would be mostly correct. But in reality the 'head', or resistance placed on the flow of the system is hindered two fold. First, you would have the resistance of the liquid in the system pumping against gravity (unless your pump was mounted high, not always the best thing either, since pumping down requires the liquid to have to reurn back up to the level of the pump) which adds up fast. You should try to design a system so all or most of the componants; pump, blocks and radiator are all within a narrow plane so gravity doesn't hinder flow. The narrower this plane the better your system will pump the liquid and that is in turn better for removing the heat from where it is generated (ie the CPU block, etc) to where it can be removed from the system (the radiator). Second, by placing the radiator high you are seriously increasing the resistance of the component that already has the highest amount of resistance.

The best overall senario would be to use a very strong pump (not the highest Gallons per hour or GPH but one with the highest 'Head' or ability to pump a collumn of water higher than most pumps). Then you should have the radiator mounted outside of your case so it neither puts warm air into your case or uses warmed air from inside the case to cool the radiator. Things like your power supplu, mosfets on the motherboard, hard drives and the pump in your cooling system all produce fairly large amounts of heat that still need to be vented from your case that can and will increase the cooling demands of your system.

NiGHTS

Interesting. As an example then, I'm using the Cheiftec Dragon look-a-like. Where would I place the radiator, pump, and resevoir to provide for the best cooling solution?

Radiator on the outside of the higher of the 2 exhaust fans

Pump below the radiator on the inside of the case, bottom right corner

Resevoir in the lowest available 5.25'' drive bay

profdlp

For the record, I've never tried watercooling but it is definitely on my list of things to do someday. I've been following this thread with much interest.

After reading mtgoat's excellent summary of watercooling principles I had a thought: What if you laid the case on its side so everything was oriented like a desktop case layout? That would fit the description of a "narrow plane", correct?

csimon

Night:
Placement of the radiator is probably best in a detached or seperate enclosure drawing cool air from outside and expelling it out of it the enclosure. If within the case you can draw warm air thru it from the case and expell it outward as well just like mtgoat did. This isn't so bad since you're removing the cpu heat via the water anyway. The video can be exhausted with an arctic cooler or w/c and the rest of the interior cooled to suit. From there you can throttle down those 2-4 case fans and cut down on noise quite a bit.

Larry:
I agree with most of your theory larry but I think the gravity thing is just a myth when it pertains to a closed loop. In a closed loop for every effort you put into pumping upward you have that much less effort when it comes back down again. I'd be very surprised if someone could prove that a closed loop system pumping vertically was any more that 1 degree C cooler than horizontal.

You should benefit more from a simple setup and possibly short lengths of travel than the opposite I think.

As far as the head is concerned I have to aggree 100% on that one. I think that in a 1/2" ID system your resistance will be wherever you have reduction of flow. The more reduction you have the more resistance you'll have. I'm not sure about the elbows but I don't think they add any more resistance than any of the other couplings. But since the couplings do reduce ID I'd say the fewer the better.

csimon

NiGHTS wrote:

Interesting. As an example then, I'm using the Cheiftec Dragon look-a-like. Where would I place the radiator, pump, and resevoir to provide for the best cooling solution?

Radiator on the outside of the higher of the 2 exhaust fans

Pump below the radiator on the inside of the case, bottom right corner

Resevoir in the lowest available 5.25'' drive bay

http://www.hwlabs.com/products/blackicemicro2.html
you can put the radiatior on the inside and put the shroud and fan on the outside (if you need the space) this way you don't have to run extra route for your hoses.
Put the pump as close to the loop as possible for efficiency ...the order of the components will probably cost you 1 degree C at best.
The ideal place for the resevoir is the highest point in the loop so it can trap air.

For the 80mm outlets these mini radiators work well from the reviews I've read. Most people prefer the 120's because the larger fan at the same cfm doesn't produce as much noise.

Mt_Goat

Chris,
Don't remember where but for every 90 degree elbow you increase restriction to the equivilent of 1 foot of hose. That is almost roughly corresponding to the foggy recolection of mechanical principals I remember. So with that in mind a 45 would be better but a 3" curved section of hose would be even better.

The thing about the rad at the top of the loop is that since it has such a high degree of restriction the returning pressure will not equal the force it took to get the liquid up to that point. So the flow will therefore be diminished as opposed to a totally free flowing loop that has absolutely no restriction what so ever. You must also remeber that these pumps (even the largest in this class) do not have the ability to "pick up water" from a level lower than the pump itself in an "open" enviornment. For the pump to operate in this type of application it would certainly need to be below the suface of the water. That is why they are primarily sold as a pond sump and not a true pump. On the other hand most 12v DC pumps have a higher head per flow rate than most 120v AC pumps and are better for this type of application.

NiGHTS
I would envision a system where the radiator was mounted siedways on the rear of the case and afan blows fresh air that nither comes from or iblows into the case within that plane, level with the pump and blocks. Placing the radiator outside tha case alone helps as the heat being pumped into it never stays in the cae at all. A radiator will "radiate" accumulated heat back into the case if installed internally.

TheLostSwede

What's very important is to put the radiator as low as possible in the loop, and if you use a reservoir, put that as high as possible in the loop. You dont want air trapped in the radiator as it kills both performance and adds a nasty noise. Pump and radiator at the bottom and reservoir at the top. Remember that the reservoir IS NOT cooling down the water at all, so it doesn't matter if you have it in a hot-spot in the rig.

Personally, i don't like reservoirs, but i can understand people who use them. The be all, end all in a waterloop is the radiator and the pump. The difference between the blocks that are available is very little.

Private_Snoball

Thanks for the help, it's really starting to hit me how all this works and what I need to be looking for. I'm currently drawing up some sketches of some ideas I have based on the kits I'm looking at creating. I'll scan them when I am done, and see about getting some feedback. Y'all really have been helpful thanks a bunch.

Thanks,
Alex

madmat

Personally I prefer a reservoir in a system as it adds more water that has to be heated before it becomes saturated to the point it's shedding heat and helps to act as a damper of sorts.

If you think about it this way, if you've got a litre of water in a closed loop system it takes "X" number of calories to increase the temperature of that litre of water by 1*C whereas if you've got 2 litres of water in the same system it will take double the calories to increase the temp of the water by the same 1*C. The added water acts as a sponge for more heat and if your cooling units (rads, heatexchangers, however you wish to term them) are capable of transfering more than the number of calories your sytem will dump into the water under full load it means you'll have a longer time before your temps reach the point of saturation which is the point where the heat removed is equal to the heat added...or rather the maximum temp that system will ever see.

While the reservoir will help to lower the overall temps attained over short term bursts of heavy load they won't help to prevent overheating in systems that generate more calories than the system is capable of removing and they won't lower the overall temps attained during long term full load usage but they will help to lower temps in systems that see full load/no load swings where the no load times outweigh the full load times.

Just my 2 cents worth.