Questions about tubing and possible odd loop configuration

Hello,

Well I am new around here, well sort of, I have been reading off and on for years but never made an account until now.

Anyway on to my questions.

What I would like to know is if any of you have attempted the use of coper tubing instead of the more traditional types. Does this work, what are some pros and cons of using copper instead of something like PVC.

I ask because I am wanting to build a custom W/C system for my new gaming rig and think the look of copper tubing would both be nice and give it more of an industrial look, you could say that it would really give it more of a "machine" look. I am no stranger to working with metal tubing and have all the tools needed to properly shape it, I will be using brass fittings to replace the barbs going into the blocks, rads and if the pump (or pumps) I choose do not have removable barbs I will probably need to run a very short PVC line to connect into my metal tubing.

I am looking to cool not only the CPU but also 2 8800GTs in SLI and if at all possible the NB. I feel that restriction may be a problem so I am thinking about running two loops, one being CPU and NB the other being my GPUs and turning each loop into their own rad.

I would like some suggestions on this, I have thought about running a single high flow/pressure pump using either 1/2 or 5/8 tubing from res and then again out of the pump and then splitting that down to either 3/8 or 1/2 depending on what I find to fit the case better and be most efficient. Running each loops after the split individually through their own rad and then on separate lines all the way back to the res where they will be collected by the single large line and sent back through the pump. This would be the preferred method for me because I am wanting to keep everything internal.

Have any of you done a system in such a configuration? If so what are your thoughts, experiences and advice.

If this proves to simply be to much for a single pump to handle then I will be forced to go with a dual pump configuration, I hope to avoid this but if it is needed then I will go this route.

The pumps that I have been looking at for this all have a GPH of 400+ and more then 10" of head, is a single pump like this capable of powering a split line configuration going across 4 blocks and through 2 rads (one rad is 240 mm the other is 120mm) with enough efficiency to keep everything nice and cool? (looking for temps to stay under 40C under load, low 30s would be great)

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions that any of you have on these matters. I hope that I am able to do this with little or no problems but as we all know research is key and what better way to find out then to ask people who may have done things like this before. I have done WC setups a few times in the past but always with traditional tubing and single loop so before I venture into uncharted territory (for me) I felt that it was time to make an account and ask the people who would know.

Thank you and good day.

P.S. I am sorry if this information is readily discussed in a sticky or some such thing, I did not do a great deal of searching for it. I have only recently came back to reading these forums and have not nearly caught up on all of what has been done so if this is thoroughly discussed then please by all means toss me a link.

Copper pipes...Nice! Practical? Dunno. Getting them made within ohh .2 mm of perfect length and alignment could be tough. Any torque on any fitting can be a leak waiting to happen, even weeks/months after you build it. I see that happen with copper used in water systems for industrial water systems. Many times they have to mod it later with flex lines going to diff peices of equipment. Costly and causes downtime.

Big pumps get hot and add heat to the loop. Go with the basics and buy good stuff like blocks, recommended pumps, hoses, rads etc.

Yahira said:

the use of coper tubing instead of the more traditional types.

...I am thinking about running two loops, one being CPU and NB the other being my GPUs and turning each loop into their own rad.

... have a GPH of 400+ and more then 10" of head,
.

Click to expand...

A good read:http://www.overclockers.com/articles1088/

Copper tubing is not the way to go. It has been done though, it's just not the best way to plumb a loop. Unnecessary flow restrictions in the ells. If you have to use ells though, copper is good (http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=165383&highlight=copper+elbows)

If you run two loops off of one pump, you have no way to control how much water goes into each loop. If you use two pumps, the added heat dump from the second pump will negate most, if not all, gains. All the dual loop nonsense is based on the false assumption that water coming out of a block is hot and that water coming out of a rad is cool. In truth the temperature of water anywhere in a loop varies by less than 0.5*C, usually around 0.25*C.

That's 400gph OR 10' if head, not both. At 400gph the pump will have no head, and at 10" head the pump will have no flow. See: http://www.procooling.com/index.php?func=articles&disp=38&pg=1

There are two ways to choose WC components:
1.) Post questions on a forum about which parts to use. Somewhere burried in the responses containing opinions, half truths and just plain wrong information there may be something usefull.
2/) Calculate the amount of heat you need to cool, find the flow rates and air flows for the parts you want to use that will remove that amount of heat. Ypu may find that the parts won;t do the job, or require other parts to be of higher performance than you planned.

Here's two excellent places to start. They will answer a lot of your questions
http://www.over-clock.com/ivb/index.php?showtopic=20277
http://www.overclock.net/water-cooling/212118-flow-rate-estimator-spreadsheet-v1-7-a.html


You would also do well to read everything you can find by Carhar, Marci, and BillA, the father, son, and holy ghost of watercooling.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=147767

Thank you for the replies. I have been doing a good deal of reading, amazing how much things have changed over the years with what people know about this stuff, quite a bit of good reads on these forums.

I have pretty much given up on the idea of using copper tubing for this due to the difficulty of bending it to such a high degree of accuracy inside a case and the fact that making such bends will restrict flow much more then I would like.

I have come up with another option however. Instead of copper tubing use copper pipe, it is much less restrictive because you do not need to bend it into sharp turns (sharp meaning anything close to a 90 degree angle). To achieve a 90 you can use two 45s which according to what I have read will restrict flow much less.

I have mostly only dealt with metal piping/tubing in home and farm applications so while I am quite comfortable with using them this will be a first for me on a computer. I just don't see how that will be more restrictive then regular tubing because I will not be making any more total "bends" then I would have to otherwise. As I said before I have only used more traditional forms of tubing up until now.

Anyway, I think I will give that a shot, if it still doesn't produce the desired results then I will change to regular tubing. I figure it is worth the the whole $15 to try it.

I have also been reading and found out what you have just said about multi looping. I have changed my plans to be a single loop.

I will continue reading around and work on my plans a bit more. It might work or it might not, half the fun is in trying.

Thank you once again for the replies, I have some reading to do.

If you can bend the pipe, then you can make a pretty nifty setup. Otherwise you will have excessive use of Ls, and that may cause a dip in your flow rate.

It can be done though, and doen nicely. Voigts just did a nice setup that way!

I am looking to try a few things with metal piping/tubing in the near future. I want to get my gaming rig done and will only be trying a few different pipe/tube types on it.

I am thinking of using my old 939 and socket A comps to try out a few more things that may or may not work. Those are cheap so if something dies then it isn't a big deal.

My gaming rig will have two 8800 GTs (they are in the box and sitting on the shelf right now waiting for me to get the rest of the items) water cooled and I want to keep things leak free, the water should be non conductive but I do not think I really want to test that out on them, a cheap $20 older card I don't mind so much if I learn something but those are a bit more pricey.

I am not worried about my soldering or coupling of piping/tubing in a comp because I have put lines together that run everything from pressure washers and showers to air compressors that charge the lines to well over 100 PSI (did steel pipe once that hooked to a compressor that charged at 300 PSI though that was threaded) and put more strain on the areas where the pipes are joined then anything a pump that you would put on a computer could ever hope to do.

The reason that I originally thought of copper tubing was because it would go through the comp much more like plastic tubes do, the problem came when I was thinking about the clearance between the side of the case and the SLIed GPUs. I just don't think that I can bend the tubing in that area without making it rather tight. However looking at copper piping I found that with the proper use of fittings and given how I wish to rout things I should be able to avoid any extreme angles (like a direct 90) and widen any turns out a good deal more to keep better flow.

I will still run a test on my 939 just to see how well it works before I put it into use on my gaming rig but I think that will work out well for me.

The one thing I don't like is after reading around I was looking at getting an MCP665 pump, it has solid mounted barbs. It looks like I will have to run plastic from the pump to my line and I am worried about it slipping. The one solution I have thought of so far is to buy a slightly thicker walled piece of pipe and then run it through a die to put threads on it and then worm clamp it tightly. I will see how all this works out on my old comp though and then apply the same thing to my gaming rig or change what needs to be changed.

Should be an interesting little project for me to do, will probably make my wife wonder if I have lost my mind though (she thinks I do to much just by building my own computers instead of buying a premade one, something about it coming with a warranty and customer support if needed, oh well).

Yahira said:

the problem came when I was thinking about the clearance between the side of the case and the SLIed GPUs.

Click to expand...

Here ya go:http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=469114

As jas mentioned, I did just redo my loop in copper last month. I have been needing to post this in a separate thread. I had been mulling this over for a while. There are three advantages that i can think of using copper over all vinyl. One, less evaporation through the tubing. Two, copper allows you to route your tubing exactly where you want it to go in the shape you want it to go in. Third, if the tubing is bent correctly, there is zero pressure on the barbs or blocks, unlike vinyl which can really put quite a bit of pressure on barbs and blocks when it comes to tight bends. Of course, copper takes a lot more work to do, and any major changes are going to require remaking tubing.

I used regular barbs on everything and just mated the copper to the barbs with black 1/2"ID 5/8"OD tubing. Trying to use brass fittings and screw the copper into blocks and such is simply a nightmare I don't want to deal with.

For bends, I have for years recommended using copper long sweep elbows (such as Mcmaster.com #5520K603 or street elbow #5520K184) as they are very nonrestrictive and really work well. So using these in a few places, I don't see that I've added hardly any more restriction over using vinyl as I had a couple of tight turns anyway with my setup.

I would recommend using soft bendable copper. My local Ace hardware has it for about $2.30 a foot or so sold by the foot, so it isn't any more expensive than Tygon or such. Forget Lowe's or Home Depot as they only sell by the 25' roll. I used a 1/2" copper pipe bender that I picked up from Harbor Freight for $5 to make tight bends.

I didn't want to use a bunch if fittings as I didn't want the industrial look, so I did a lot of pipe bending to give things a curved look.

One thing I did have to go back and change though was that in using copper lines in and out of the pump, the vibrations from the pump transferred directly into the case and made it about 5 times louder than it should be. I had to go back and change out the lines coming in and out of the pump to vinyl. Since I used glossy black 5/8"OD vinyl (and 1/2" copper is 5/8"OD), it still looks exactly the same as pictured with a addition of a couple of clamps.

All said and done I am pleased with the look. And of course I primed and painted all of the copper in gloss black. You could go with any color here. I wish I could figure out a way to paint it to look like wood. That would be neat.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^
One of the best looking setups ever.

All I can say is "WOW", that has got to be one of the best custom cases I have ever seen.

Very clean, rather pleasing to look at in my opinion. You have done wonderful work there, I have seen a few nice custom cases but never one so well done with wood.


For me I am going for a very old machine look. More like something you would see in a 1940s boiler room. Metal that looks rusted, old and worn, copper for my WC tubes and rads (stripped the black paint off of them so now they are back to the copper color). Sort of a mixing of the old and the new with the very old machine looking case and WC set up but of course the new high tech computer parts in the middle of it all.

At first glance it should look like something you would fix with a hammer and brute force instead of the small screwdrivers and gentle touch used with computers.

I guess I will see how it turns out, should be a fun project to get to work on anyway and produce something that I need (a better gaming computer).

Yahira said:

All I can say is "WOW", that has got to be one of the best custom cases I have ever seen.

Very clean, rather pleasing to look at in my opinion. You have done wonderful work there, I have seen a few nice custom cases but never one so well done with wood.

For me I am going for a very old machine look. More like something you would see in a 1940s boiler room. Metal that looks rusted, old and worn, copper for my WC tubes and rads (stripped the black paint off of them so now they are back to the copper color). Sort of a mixing of the old and the new with the very old machine looking case and WC set up but of course the new high tech computer parts in the middle of it all.

At first glance it should look like something you would fix with a hammer and brute force instead of the small screwdrivers and gentle touch used with computers.

I guess I will see how it turns out, should be a fun project to get to work on anyway and produce something that I need (a better gaming computer).

Click to expand...

Thank you very much. It was a lot of work, needless to say, but I still am pleased with the results 1 1/4 years later (man does time fly- it seems like yesterday I built this thing). I've already gone through a number of hardware changes and several watercooling changes, but the case keeps going. Of course there are things that I would probably change, but those are very minor and relate more to the woodworking than anything. It is a curse to be a perfectionist because I see all of the little mistakes and things that aren't perfectly even.

Eventually I'll probably be stupid enough to create another just for the sake of change, but it won't be any time soon. What still pleases me is that my design for this case works. Everything is easily accessible, the layout offers a lot of flexibility, the watercooling is not that hard to work with (easy to fill/bleed), its not that heavy, the wiring is well hidden, and I still like the V. And, most importantly, my wife still likes it, and if momma ain't happy, well, you know the saying...

Your concept sounds really neat. You have a lot of details to figure out on how to get the look you want.

I think I'm going to take my old case, clena it out, and see if I can turn it into a self contained WC rig using copper pipe. Should be fun!

1/2" tubing and good screw clamps are fine going directly to 1/2" copper pipe. I have several such connections in my loop and have had for the last 18 months with no issues and no threading is needed. I've also used good spring clamps and been very happy with those connections as well - and they might look better for your "old machine" look. I like using copper wherever I can instead of barbs - it's just silly to add restriction where it's not required. All my Ts and couplings are copper and my heater core in/outs are just cut off to the 1/2" straight area; no added barbs as I see no good reason to restrict the loop. The blocks still use barbs but that's a matter of the block threads - they aren't big enough for anything better.

When I get to adding my second GPU and rebuilding my loop I'll be using even more copper, similar to your idea, but I think I'll stick with attaching the pipe to the blocks using barbs and small lengths of tubing. 1/2" vinyl to 1/2" copper (and back) has virtually no restriction and if the copper is close enough to the barb (but not too close!) the tubing probably doesn't add any restriction at all and provides a little "slack" for both length and angle ...

However, my most recent leak was w/ unbarbed connections. I just cranked down the pipe clamps (metal screw wheel ones not those lame plastic ones) and the leak was gone.

I haven't had any issues either with 1/2"Id tubing stretched over 1/2"Id copper (5/8"OD). I even went with Mcmaster double plastic clamps for the look of it and they hold very well.