water cooling without a radiator. is it possible?

My brother has almost finished his first rig. He only has to get enough money for a monitor, and buy a gpu waterblock. What he has in mind for water cooling is having a huge reservoir. We have a fishtank for that, since his turtle escaped into the woods a month ago. The fishtank is just like one of your standard regular size fishtanks except that it is 40-50% longer. We also have a standard regular size fishtank that we upgraded from. He was thinking that the water that returns from the comp dumps into the tank, and because it is big, it will be cool again to recirculate it. If need be he could use both tanks. Do you think the water has a good chance of staying ambient while cooling a 2.6Ghz duron at 1.8 volts and a 400mhz 9800 series core?

depending on the gallon size of the tank. It could work. I dont think a CPU can generate that much heat to warm a large amount of water.

i do...

i perosnally do not think any tank under 800 gallons could effectively cool an OC'd processor...unless it was oddly shaped. Say, large, massive shallow tank.

unless your fishtank is well over 55 gallons, you'll be runningwarm.

Then again, the warmer it gets the faster it will cool...

Someone with more experiance should help you out, sorry i dont know more about it...cant say i've heard any sucessful radless systems, other than a swimming pool and a 100,000 some odd gallon collection tank.

Eventually the water will slowly gain in temp unless its freezing in your house. The head produced from a CPU and GPU would be enough to heat it up. It would work but not perform as well would take a day or 2 but it will evtually rise and most likly stay at the higher temp unless he threw some icecubes(like a pound) into the tanks. Also mite wanna watch to make sure there isn't any bacteria that may form in the tanks. With that much still water and no way to keep it air tight it would happen within a few days.

It would DEFINATELY heat up, however, I have a better idea. Have you ever considered evaporative cooling? You can get temperatures that are pretty low, and for pretty cheap. Let me find a link to a nice evap tower and I'll post it here.

ooh, the nuclear towers...i forgot about those. definately a good idea...could even incorperate your fish tank if you really wanted to.

That's what I'm saying. You basically have the main part of that. All you need is some 1/2" irrigation tubing, elbows and Tees, a bunch of zip ties, and a few other things and you can be off and running with an awesome evaporative tower.

References here and here.

Works well

with my experiance (with aquarium heaters) 100watt of heat with about 50gals seems to reach equalibrium (heat dissapation = heat produced by cpu) at like 40c from a room temp of 20c. With that in mind you cpu will probably run 10-20c higher then the temp of the water which makes it cook at about 50-60c. So unless its really wide, i'd look into a tank thats atleast 80gal.

now remember, most of ur dissapation will be from the top of the tank. A turtle tank is usally wide for the little guy to swim in. Do u have the measurements of each tank? you can find the volume with the measurements

Yeah, I'm sure that if you have 2 of the tanks, you might be able to run without a radiator, but I wouldn't go and put out a ton of heat into the system.

Well, I measured the two tanks this morning. The larger is 2.5 cubic feet and the smaller is 2 cubic feet. If my brother just ran the cpu with those two tanks, it would definately work, right?

I'm currently running without a rad. My reservoir is about 4L and is "actively cooled". I've basically got a few heatsinks sitting in there with the fans on (above the water of course). This allows the heatsinks to absorb the heat from the water and then let the fans blow it off. I've also got a 120mm fan sucking air out of my reservoir also cooling it off.

My P4 3.0C @ 3.6 with vcore 1.6 puts out quite a bit of heat. I idle around 35C and dual prime loaded top out around 46C.

Yes, there is a kind of positive feedback cycle going on with the temps. The CPU dumps heat into the res, and then CPU is less efficiently cooled and more heat is retained in the system. This does not continue forever though. After a certain point you'll reach an equilibrium and the temps will be stable.

In my case immediately after loading the CPU, my temp rises to 43C over the next 8 Hrs the temps rise to 46 and stay there after that (tested over 24hrs). In your case it would take a very long time to reach that equilibrium because of the large size of your res.

I suggest you just try it out and see if it works. Keep it at idle for a while to see if the temps climb. If not, load it up and check the temps every few hours. Make sure you have some sort of hardware/software backup to shut down your computer if it overheats. If you run into problems with load temps, then you need to start cooling your res, whether that be with a rad or evap cooling etc.

Good luck.

man i suck at physics,

Trying to do a Specific heat calculation and i got a final Temp after 1 hour of 300C, that can't be right

Sums mark 2

Assuming 0 Heat loss from the water(cos i'm too lazy to work it out)
The water would go up 10C every 52 hours

Quailane said:

Well, I measured the two tanks this morning. The larger is 2.5 cubic feet and the smaller is 2 cubic feet. If my brother just ran the cpu with those two tanks, it would definately work, right?

Click to expand...

Nope. Just do evaporative cooling, or you could try sticking heatsink bases in the water with the fins exposed to the air and fans blowing on them like that other guy.

Hmm... I'm a air dude wandering over to the water cooling side... I'm intrested in those cooling towers....

A couple years ago I had a ghetto watercooling set up. I had a Tbird 1100, a waterblock, a couple lengths of tubing, a pond pump, and a small tub. CPU temps were in the 40s. The tub I used was probably 1 or 2 litres.

Was almost totally silent as well

Thanks David, that is what I wanted to hear!

Quailane said:

Thanks David, that is what I wanted to hear!

Click to expand...

Remember though, that your system will put out more heat. A good bit more heat. Also my PC wasnt on 24/7,it was 8-10hours at a time max.

*waves towards his post*
You'll only be able to keep the system on for like 2 days before it starts overheating.

Attuallu later on i'll work out the heat disipation to give you exact figures