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Heat exchanger in loop?

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Sam__

Sam__

Member
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Joined
Mar 12, 2007
Location
UK
I was thinking about how to lower the water temps of my loop. Would it be plausable to put a heat exchanger in and attach it to another loop with a tub of icy water for a res.
e442_1.JPG
It would be a bit more permanent than just putting my res into a bucket of ice water.
A crude pic:
heatxchange1.jpg

How well do heat exchangers exchange heat?

The loop order can easily be changed so any suggestions for that are welcome.

It would be usefull if i ever do an air con mod to cool the water in the tub.

What dyu guys recon?
 
only prob i see is that the ice will eventually melt and the temp would equalize to the loop temp. so with an infinitely long time scale youd accomplish nothing. unless you constanly added ice to the heat exchanger secondary loop. would be better to just use a TEC to cool your water and not have to deal with using ice water. the TEC will remain constant, the ice wont. i think i got that right.
 
gsrcrxsi said:
only prob i see is that the ice will eventually melt and the temp would equalize to the loop temp. so with an infinitely long time scale youd accomplish nothing. unless you constanly added ice to the heat exchanger secondary loop. would be better to just use a TEC to cool your water and not have to deal with using ice water. the TEC will remain constant, the ice wont. i think i got that right.
Click to expand...

Thats why i mentioned later on that i may be modding a small air con to cool the water. The ice water would be for before I mod the air con and for just benching and stuff. It just saves me from having to mess with the main loop enery time I wanna do some benching. I can just chuck some Ice in the tub.

If I can get the water cold enough I may be using TECs on the chips anyway. I dont see any point in using a TEC to cool the water as its more efficient to put a TEC on the chip.
 
just use the TEC to cool the water. dont bother putting it on the chip. the cold water will cool better than the TEC on the chip. at least from what ive seen. to get decent cooling with just a TEC directly on the chip, youd need a pretty powerful TEC and itll suck LOTS of power, might even need its own PSU. just use a lower power tec to cool the water.
 
gsrcrxsi said:
just use the TEC to cool the water. dont bother putting it on the chip. the cold water will cool better than the TEC on the chip. at least from what ive seen. to get decent cooling with just a TEC directly on the chip, youd need a pretty powerful TEC and itll suck LOTS of power, might even need its own PSU. just use a lower power tec to cool the water.
Click to expand...

how did you do it? what wattage? dont you need a decent heatsink on the hot side?
 
i air cool haha. from what ive read, its not wise to use just air cooling to cool the hot side. pretty much everyone cools the hot side with water. air coolers dont seem to be able to handle the heatload of the TEC+ heatload of CPU. using a lower power TEC to cool the water than usin that chilled water to cool the CPU directly seems like a better solution and less power hungy. im still reading and finding info about all this, but some people might have a different opinion thats based on more experience
 
gsrcrxsi said:
i air cool haha. from what ive read, its not wise to use just air cooling to cool the hot side. pretty much everyone cools the hot side with water. air coolers dont seem to be able to handle the heatload of the TEC+ heatload of CPU. using a lower power TEC to cool the water than usin that chilled water to cool the CPU directly seems like a better solution and less power hungy. im still reading and finding info about all this, but some people might have a different opinion thats based on more experience
Click to expand...

I was talking bout air cooling the TEC cooling the water. This is kinda going off topic anyways...

would like to get some more peoples opinions on if a heat exchanger would work. The rad in the main loop would allow me to use the tub whenever I wanted lower temps. and also i just found out that i may be able to get hold of a cheap AC unit :D.
 
oh, yea then yes you could cool a lower power TEC (which is cooling the water) with air. say a 50w TEC shouldnt need anything crazy

sorry for going off topic. i dont think theres any question whether the heat exchanger will work, it WILL work, i just dont think it will be a viable long term solution. if you only use it for benching like you said, it would probably work fine.

edit again, and if you were just going to use it fr benching, then why not use the icy water in your main loop? like just shove the tubes from the res into the tube of ice water? lol. this is benching lol.

just some thoughts.
 
Last edited:
GSR.



Putting the TEC against the res/water will not make a difference, the water will just reach an equilibrium temperature.
 
yes, an equillibrium temp LOWER than if it wasnt there in the first place. obviously youd use the TEC with the cold side on the water.
 
gsrcrxsi said:
yes, an equillibrium temp LOWER than if it wasnt there in the first place. obviously youd use the TEC with the cold side on the water.
Click to expand...

how many deg C diff would it make though? could i have some examples of wattages to deg C diff in temp.
 
without doing the calcs, and without having anything like a water loop or a TEC on hand to test, i really couldnt tell you. i mean if i had some numbers (like heat transfer from the chip, average loop temps, power of the TEC, mass flow rate, volume of loop, efficiency of the rad, etc) im sure i could crack open my heat transfer book and figure it out, but im sure its faster for someone whos actually done it to chime in.
 
Just had an idea... how would two waterblocks transfer heat? anywhere near close to a heat exchanger?
 
Sam__ said:
I was thinking about how to lower the water temps of my loop. Would it be plausable to put a heat exchanger in and attach it to another loop with a tub of icy water for a res.

The loop order can easily be changed so any suggestions for that are welcome.
Click to expand...
Either of these would yield better cooling.
 

Attachments

  • Image13.jpg
    Image13.jpg
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I would get a better pump than that if it were me, as for sub zero water, plenty of options to use, 30/70 water/antifreeze will give you down to about -70ish but your gonna need a lot of insulation wrapped around those lines and at the water blocks, rad wise you won't need one nor would you need a res. Gonna also need at least dual pumps, myself I would hit about 3 or 4 of em. Been there done that fried a slot a, btw you would be best to put this over on the extreme side instead of water
 
Sam__ said:
Is an eheim 1048 any good at shifting sub zero liquid?
Click to expand...
Wait a minute. How'd we get to sub zero temps? I thought this was an ice bath? Do you have a MOBO that will put enough Vcore into a CPU that will make this reasonable? A good WC setup will let you go to the max Vcore most MOBOs will supply.

Or is this just "messin' around"?

And yes, an Ehein will work at sub zero temps.
 
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