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Using a car radiator for passive watercooling?

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Makaijin

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Joined
Jan 28, 2002
I was browsing on ebay and I saw a brand new rover 214 radiator for sale. It measures at about 50cm x 40 cm x 5 cm. The type of fins are the heatercore style, it's basically a big heatercore if you know what i mean.

I was wondering, will it be good enough for passive cooling if i bolted it on the side of a full tower case? Will it be good enough for a dual amd (barton with L5 mod) as well as a 9800 non pro. I do plan on some moderate overclocking (both cpu and gpu). Since I am building this as a mainly Audio Workstation (as well as the odd fragging) so the quieter the better.
 
make sure you get the cooling fan that goes with it - for passive watercooling I don't think having it upright will create nearly enough airflow to cool 150W of heat.

For no-noise cooling you could look at some Zalman products - quiet fans and GPU heatpipes.
 
I actually thought about having the cooling fan for it, but the fans are really massive and probably a little dangerous.

This isn't my first watercooling project. I just sold my previous watercooling system so i am building a new one. I thought since i'm starting from scratch then why not go passive?
 
I don't think that you'd be able to stabily run a heat load that high without some form of active cooling on the rad, a L337 M33P said. If you can find a fan big enough to cover yours, it would be close to silent anyways.
 
I can personally vouche for the need of at least some flow.
In my current system I've a car radiator about the size mentioned in the first post, and though it will run passively for a while, it will just get hotter and hotter until things crash.

I've two 120mm fans on it with shrouds and I run them on the 5 volt line at about half speed (with a rheostat) and it's almost silent. My power supply fan is louder infact and I've got that running at 5 volts, so it's pretty damn quiet.

If you run anything passively, it just gets hot as the speed of the air rising from convection just isn't enough to draw enough 'new' air through the radiator. Adding even the meekest fan makes a world of difference.
 
Personaly i would try and find a brass/copper radiator out of a MG/MGA or smaller british sports car-
We own a MGA, and the core is INCY! Mabey 20x20 inchs and the engine stays nice and cool- plus one of those comair rotron 200mm 12v fans at like 5v would be SILENT!
 
I forgot to mention, the radiator is made of copper not aluminium, as I've been browsing for days and i finally found one thats made of copper. I did try searching for them a while back, but many will know, most new radiators are made of aluminium, so i dropped the idea back then.
 
I just thought that I would add that many years ago there were some tractors built that used convection cooling and a radiator to cool the engine. They did not have water pumps, but did have a fan. This system worked surprisingly well. I know a computer is not a tractor, but a tractor engine generates more heat than a computer.
 
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