need some help with my diy water cooler

i'm new to water cooling and i need some advice on how to build a water cooler. its only going to cool my geforce 4 TI 4200 and i have a very small budget £70 ($105).

Are you looking for a "kit" (the things you need to buy) or a full DIY on each part and how to get / make it like blocks, T-lines Res and Heater cores.
PS if your going H2O why not do your CPU as well?

A $105, thats going to be tuff. go to D-Tec look in their clearance
section. they have a radiator for $20. their gpu waterblock is $43.
they have a eheim submersible c-600 pump for $20. 3/8" for $1.25 per foot. that leaves you around $20. my 1st water rig i used a 2gal rubbermade container for $8. youll need the rest for
fittings & clamps. Good luck.

Get a cheap danner mag 1.9 pump, a waterblock from Mikeonatrike, and some tubing. Perhaps make your own reservior. This will allow you to expand later and go full system.

yeh you can check out what i'm doing in this section under "project Gutz" and i'm spending less than 100Bucks , maybey close to it..

edit and aslo in one of the pics you can see the part number of the heatercore i used from Autozone (where i work) at my store it was 25bucks (minus my discount )

i did have one other idea, instead of using a radiator, i thought i might be able to pick up an old freezer, and run the pipe through that. with alot of anti-freeze in the water.

how does that idea sound?

The only problem would be condensation. You would have to completly cover the card with liquid electrical tape. That would insulate the card, and the ram would get seriously hot. You would then need a wb for the ram...and so on and so forth....

why would condensation be a problem, i only want to put the water pipe through the freezer to cool it right down

GBH_101 said:

i did have one other idea, instead of using a radiator, i thought i might be able to pick up an old freezer, and run the pipe through that. with alot of anti-freeze in the water.

how does that idea sound?

Click to expand...

As Yuriman said you would need to insulate well to keep for getting condensation. If you still want to go this route look in the extreme cooling section. But if I where you I would first try my hand at water cooling before going to the extreme cooling way. You can build a good water cooling system for under $100 you just have to get crafty. Here is a quick guid I made for this reason. It's called "the K.I.S.S. water cooling kit" (minimum needed):
1) a pump of some sort - look for “Mag” drive types
a. A Mag drive is a pump that’s impeller is driven by a magnet and not a gear. These are sealed better and have less wear points to leak from. I recommend the maxi jet PH pumps for this reason and their cost)
2) A heater core or radiator (1986 Chevet H/C is very common, and dose a very good job you can find one at a local auto parts store for about $20)
3) Barbs or Fittings – barbs are the connectors for the hose you will need attach the heater core (easy with JB Weld). The fittings like a “T” for a fill point, a blocker / cap for the fill line so it doesn’t evaporate or spill out and a hose clamps. Another “T” type fitting that is good for small cases is the “Prestone radiator flush kit” it has a screw on cap with a seal and is about $4 in an auto part store
4) Hose / line – matched to the size of you barbs and fittings (heater core and water block) at about 3-4 feet in length may do but 10’ is good so you can make adjustments or correct mistakes
5) Fan 120mm and some tie raps or long thin screws (6-32) with nuts to hold the fan to the core and the core to the case
6) A water block homemade or store bought (Gemini cool blocks are only $20-30)

And that’s the simple list you can add to it later
** Remember to test the set-up in your sink before you strap it to your computer

thanks stedeman, thats a great help, im still a little unsure about the freezer, i dont think its a great idea to go from air to freezers.

but im only running a xp2000+ , i could put it through that, if that blows it wont cost me loads to replace.

GBH_101 said:

why would condensation be a problem, i only want to put the water pipe through the freezer to cool it right down

Click to expand...

The problem is the cold water inside the pipe is going to cool the pipe itself causing water (dew) to condense upon the pipe outside the freezer including inside the computer. Chilled water lines are normally well insulated all the way from the freezer to the CPU block. The cpu, cpu socket, and motherboard around the cpu socket have to be insulated/sealed from moisture also. Chilled water can cool very well, better than normal water cooling, but it isn't for a novice.

If that didn't make sense, think of a tall, cold glass of tea, lemonaid, etc. on a hot, humid summer day. You know the water that forms on the side of the cold glass? That is condensation aka dew.

Anytime an exposed surface is cooler than the "dew point", moisture in the air will condense onto it. The dew point is a temperature that is lower than the real air temperature and is measured by weather sites. The % humidity is defined by the difference between the real air temp and dew point. The higher the humidity, the closer the 2 temps.

thanks gungeek, i understand it better now

Also the freezer may not be able to handle the heat load, it depends on the freezer and all (and for just your video card it actualy might) but this has come up a lot and many times it hasn't worked the way people wanted it to simply because freezers and such aren't mean to cool somthing that is continually getting hotter, just cool somthing and then keep it cool.

You should be able to do just the video card for cheap though You might also wanna read all the watercooling stickies. I wouild just get a radiator since that will be more than enough to cool just your video card and it will be cheaper. Unless you already have a good enough freezer. Still you would need a good length of copper (or some metal that conducts heat well) tubing or somthing in the freezer so it cools it well, so you might as well get a radator and stick it in the freezer if you had one that was good enough, and you would have to worry about condensation. Besides you won't need a freezer or anything like that to get a good OC, unless you are going for soem crazy extreme, but even in taht case there are better ways.

Here is what I would get:
Pump: Danner mag or somthing pretty cheap ~40 bucks or so
WB: Used Dangden GeForce 4 or Dtek block if you can find it (or just buy a new one) ~25-45 depending on your luck- or you could make your own using some cheap materials form home depeote and spend like 10 bucks max.
Tubing: Cheap ~10 bucks max prolly (depending on how much you think you need)
T-line dealy and clamps and such: ~5-10 bucks (you could also use a waterbottle or somthing as a reservoir and save a buck or two lol)
Addative/Distilled water: Redline waterwetter or antifreeze Free-5 bucks (depeding on what you have/want)
Rad: ~15-50 Depending on where you get it.
Final Price: ~90-A lot more than 100.

the reason im doing this is to overclock my video card to something stupid. its a albatron geforce 4 ti 4200p turbo. it was asking to be overclocked the moment i got it. i havent touched a thing and it overclocks from 250/550 to 320/625. with the right cooling i would like to have it running stabily at 350-400 and 700-750. ive read about these things being clocked to 725 on the ram with the standard cooling. i think this would be great, because then i could run my games on 4x anti-aliasing and get the same framerate as i used to.

for a good inexpensive pump check out the via-aqua 1300 6'head max 370gph for 11.95 at drsfostersmith.com. only thing is that it is submersible only.

sanssheriff said:

for a good inexpensive pump check out the via-aqua 1300 6'head max 370gph for 11.95 at drsfostersmith.com. only thing is that it is submersible only.

Click to expand...

Ya... its gotta be submersed, but you couild use a gallon jug for that or somthing

ok, ive had a little while to think about it and i think i need a higher budget, so i think ill have a budget of around $250, ill post again when i have it. it might be a while (im still at school)