Hrm.. extreme idea?

Ok, well.. I'm pretty new to water cooling, but apparently the concept is something that I'm pretty familiar with. I'm a total gearhead, and everything is more or less about performance -- and the key to performance, is cooling. So, taking some knowledge from my car and applying it my water cooling setup:

In my car, I use N2O (Nitrous Oxide) to the cool my intercooler to help achieve more efficiency with a cooler air charge from the turbo. Why couldn't I apply this towards my PC, using N2O to cool my radiator in bursts? Similiar to holding a can of compressed air upside down and hosing down a metal object. With the size of nitrous bottles, namely a "Sneaky Pete" system, one could easily incorporate this into a PC setup.. refills would really be the only maintenance, and I couldn't imagine using very much N2O..

Anyway, am I complete oddball or you think this might be a worthwhile try?

Sounds cool. I think there are some other ways, which may be better, if you want to go the extreme cooling route, namely, TECs or phase-change. But, hey. Whatever suits your fancy.

How long do you think those N2O canisters would last?

It is really up to you. Personally, after I build a system, I don't want to do ANY hardware maintenance on it.

I'm sure you will LOVE the smell of sulfur everytime you hit the button. Because whoever fills your bottles "supposed" to fill them with a sulfur tainted mix of nitrous to prevent human consumption.

well, it boils at -89c. You might be able to make a chiller of some kind that uses it but it will take a lot of that stuff depending apone how cold you want it of course. I wonder what it condenses at
So, Yes you can use it, but I donno how much it will take to get things cool. How much does that stuff cost?

On average, to fill a 20lb bottle it's around $20-$25, depending where you go.

As for the sulfur, that's not a concern, the shop I use get's their supply from a medical supply facility.. no sulfur.

I would need to experiment, to see how much is needed for a quick cooling.. it could easily be rigged to a temperature switch and activated whenever the temperature reaches the desired trigger range.. but, from experience, a quick mist, maybe 1-2 seconds will chill my intercooler rather quickly.. It's all aluminum though.

My other idea is getting an intercooler from a '93 WRX, it's dual channel. I can fill it with refridgerant to cool the water, and it's not too incredibly large.

using N2O for cooling is quite useless. i mean, just use compresed air.

compress some air, cool it down, the pass it thourgh your rad and there u go.

although i think a phase change system works that way, but way more efective.

Might as well use CO2...its the same thing they used before they used nitrous on intercoolers...especially since the NX Express N-Ter Cooler is dual purpose and can use both gasses.

Now exactly how much of a gain are you getting from your car setup? Cause I don't really see much use on a system running less than 10 PSI.

mfpmax said:

Now exactly how much of a gain are you getting from your car setup? Cause I don't really see much use on a system running less than 10 PSI.

Click to expand...

Well, I'm guestimating maybe 5-10HP.. it's definately a little "peppier" when the intercooler is chilled. When the car was last dyno'd, it pulled 437RWHP/451RWTQ w/o cooling the intercooler.

It's a 2000 Pontiac Trans Am w/ Turbo Tech Stage I (T-60-1 Intercooled) @ 3psi. It's a 6psi kit, however. I just had the kit lying around, and decided to make use of it.. otherwise, it probably never would have happened.

Better have pictures...

But back to the topic at hand, I personally think using CO2 would be a better choice...

But you would need to make sure any spray is kept away from other devices to make sure that the other devices in the area don't suffer from temperature shock.

But if I was thinking of doing this(and I have, sticking the radiator in water bucket)...i'd still go for a peltier setup...