cooling the water while it's in the res

I'm correct in thinking that hotter water rises to the top right? if you have an open res and put a fan blowing into the water, what will that do for your temps around the system? or, say if you put some copper tubing or copper metal fins through the sides of your res and have a fan blowin through them, would that help much?

thanks,
froz

well you're basically talking about a 2nd radiator, so I imagine it would help about as much as a second heater core would

Just think of the zalman reserator. It doesnt do much, and with a fan blowing on it and leaving it open will allow dust and other nasties to collect and will let water evaporate, making you fill it up daily.

Having a large tank with internal and external cooling structures would work fine thought.

you'd be better to just add a second core

thanks. I am doing a second core setup. 1 BIX (yeah, b4 i knew to buy a HC) an hopefully one of those for sale on here. BIX for the gpu and larger one for the cpu. Good point about the nasties getting into the water, forgot about that. Currently the size of the res is goign to be about 9longx6tallx4wide, so plenty of water in there. If adding a few "sticks" or cylinders of copper to it and putting them in my "fan zone" will act like a *third* radaitor w/o the restriction, sounds good to me.

thanks much,
Froz

A second core might help more than that, but it's actually not a bad idea. That would work mostly on the basis of evaporative cooling. The water wouldn't be cooled because the air from the fan is cooling it, it would be cooled because the energy is evaporating off. Of course, you'd have to fill it up occasionally, and just a fan over a res wouldn't make much of a difference at all.

If you're interested in evap though, search around for bong-type systems. It's cool stuff.

Ill guess this is your first time using a res. nothing wrong with that, not like Im a long time WCer lol. but as I learned, the flow in the res is EXTREMELY turbulent, no chance of hot water rising. also in liquids, the cooler sections are not too much denser than the hot ones(unlike gasses, where the difference can be dramatic)

there are just easier ways to cool the water. such as a radiator.

I've used a typhoon 5.25 res b4. It's split down the middle to keep the hot water in the res as lon as possible to allow the heat to dissapate. I know there is a lot of waterflow in there and my system will have 2 pumps, so I'm sure it'll be pretty strong currant. I'm just thinkin of extra things I can do.

_______________
|PSU|P1/2|res___|
<--Fan C C C Fan <--
|Rad1__Radx2____|
fan fan fan
^ \/ ^

That's kind of what i'm building. I'magin the C's as copper fins or so. the P1/2 is pump 1 and pump 2 sittin on top of each other. Rad1 is a BIX single 120, Rad 2 is 2x120. The arrow show fan air flow.

Froz

there is not enough surface arera of the water to be effective as using the res as a cooler

If you were to build a custom aluminum , copper or brass res with external fins you would probably see a improvement. but not a large one I think

yeah, the divider seems to keep more of the water in the loop to give you a bit more of a buffer, more volume of water to heat if something failed like the radiator fan turned off, more water would heat up slower. but other than that; prolly not much.

maybe if you ran copper tubes through the radiator, and blasted air through them... but the obstruction of flow would probably outweigh whatever cooling it provided.