Hybrid air/water coolers?

[Dead_bot_1]

:D I have always wondered why I never see any Hybrid Coolers. It would be so simple to make a combo air/water cooler. Simply take a copper cpu cooler solder in a copper tube ( near the center to take advantage of the dead spot under the fan) .


http://www.ccsilver.com/silver/ssol.html#ssolder is a good spot to find high silver content solder.

for a little more cost you can end up with a water cooler with a back up built in. a side effect might also be lower case temps due to the cool air coming off the cpu cooler.

If you can find a way to use aluminum instead of copper then you could anodize tho whole thing black before lapping to help with the radiation of heat from the surface of the fins ( or absorbtion in cases where the cooler is lower temp than the ambient temp).

[Scottland]

people have done things sort of like that..

ive seen people take a waterblock with the inlet, outlet hoses on the side... then mount a HSF on top of the water block

its called piggy backing... it provides marginal temp decreases.. but does provide sort of a backup..

as far as your i dea goes... i couldn't see how it is possible to modify a heatsink to be a waterblock... the bases on heatsinks aren't thick enough.. even on the mighty switfech MC462.. i don't think you have a thick enough base..... + all the fins.....

good idea.. but it would be hard to implement

[Bender]

Welcome to the forums!

Check out Pepsi's hybrid air water cooled orb. This (http://forums.overclockers.ws/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=61293) is the post he has pictures in. I made something similar to his but I don't have the top half of the orb with the fan.

[Dissolved]

i thought of this the other day..
but my WB has the leads on the top, so it wouldnt work for me.. :(

[Dead_bot_1]

the picture that Pepsi had was the closest to what I'm trying to get at.

what I'm saying is to just solder a tube into a square block style air cooler. You may have to cut the center fin out. You'll definetly want to lap it after to make sure that it is flat. The heat of soldering may very well warp it. You end up with a water cooler surrounded by an air cooler. If your pump fails you still have air blowing on top of a copper cooler to prevent immediate burnup. If the temp of the water is below ambient inside the case then as long as the water is flowing you will also get a drop in case temps.

[William]

you can just bore into the base to get the water flowing. its not as good as a pure water block with a heatsink of somesort strapped on. Overkill IMO.

[Dead_bot_1]

well Jimmy that's true if the base of your cooler is thick enough. Overkill? Is there such a thing? Maybe. All I'm trying to do is create a low cost redundant system to lower the temp of my cpu. While drilling isn't hard to do, Soldering is much more forgiving. You can always undo any damage by reheating the solder. Removing it or changing things becomes easy. Also there is the fact that you are not limited to a fitting and then going to plastic tube. You can solder in a long chunk of copper tube and arrange to have the potential leak spot well away from that precious chip.

[William]

But by attaching to the fins you are far away from the heat. If you drill through the base right to where the core is you will get much better results. I would think an ideal heatsink for this would the vertical ones like the Thermoengine and Dr. Thermal where you can drill through any place in the core.

[Dead_bot_1]

I took a look at the two coolers you mentioned Jimmy. Both were interesting designs but drilling them for a water jacket in the ceter would be problematical. with all the fins surrounding the center like that sealing it would be very difficult IMO. Not that it couldn't be done. Take a look at any speeze or similar copper cooler. The base is faily thin. As stated earlier, you may have to cut out a fin to make room for 1/4 inch copper tube. you will lose some performance from this, but hey, It's not a perfect world. I like the Idea you have. The Dr. Thermal with the copper core would make an intersting hybrid since you would lose very little fin area. Do tou think there is a way to remove the center to do some work on it? How about making a center that is basically a coil of copper tube to maximize the time that the water would stay in the center?

As far as being away from the heat, that's why I suggest high silver (75-85%) content solder. On a thin base Copper cooler you would actually improve things a bit. By adding thermal mass and using water instead of air as the primary cooling fluid. you would hurt it by cutting down on surface area for the air side of it to work with.

I don't think I would use the thermoengine due to it's all aluminum design. Aluminum supposedly gets rid of heat better, but the thermal mass plays a factor here too. Getting rid of heat faster isn't the challenge. Getting rid of heat steadily and reliably is.