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Basic water cooling info

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Peeved Kitten

Member
Joined
Jul 8, 2010
Location
San Luis Obispo, CA
SO there is a ton of info up on this page, but there are no stickies or anything about basic water cooling for newbies (Like me!)

I figured I would post a quick write up on a basic water cooling set up. If I miss anything or give bad info please tell me and I will fix it.

Please be extremely careful when Water cooling, mishandling or carelessness can result in damage to components or hardware. Building your loops outside of the system and testing it there before implementing it is HIGHLY recommended. Any time you water cool or work on your computer, you do so AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Research, Research, Research! There are probably 5,000-10,000 different parts for water cooling set ups. you MUST do your research! Don't be afraid to pick up the phone and call or write an email, the companies that sell WC equipment tend to specialize in it, they usually know their products. Forums are a good tool as well, but take anything you read with a grain of salt. It's no fun to spend $500 on a new WC set up only to find none of it matches and you'll need another $100 worth of fittings to make it all work.

What is water cooling? Water cooling is when you use a liquid to pull heat from something by circulating the liquid over the surface of the heated object. The water in turn is then cooled and recycled back for another pass.

Taking electronic components and cooling them with a liquid, sounds crazy right? Well it may be, but lots of people do it, and with some of the newer options out there many of them never even get their hands wet!

This is not just limited to CPU's/computers of course; water cooling is used in hundreds of thousands of applications all over the world. Literally everything from planes trains and automobiles!

We aren't here to learn about those things though, our specific application involves computers! Motherboards, Graphics cards, and processors can all be water cooled. It’s not as simple as picking up a 5 gallon bucket and pouring it in though, that would be bad...

A water cooling rig consists of a few different parts, a water block, a radiator, a pump, a reservoir, fittings and hose. (A few sealed systems do NOT have reservoirs, IE the Corsair H50 or ECO ALC) There are some familiar words in there, we all know what a radiator is, and they’ve been in our cars for 50+ years. Of course a pump is pretty simple as well, it just pumps the fluid. What about those other parts though?

Water blocks: First let's talk about cooling blocks, these are the blocks that water circulates in while cooling a device. Let's use a processor for example. Most processors have a heat-sink and fans at stock. The heat sink is attached to the processor with a thermal paste; this paste conducts heat from the processor to the heat sink. The heat sink is then cooled by fans which blow air across fins to disperse the heat. Water cooling is VERY similar, your water block attaches with thermal paste to the processor, just like a heat sink. Some use special back-plates which can be pain to install and can require removal of the board if your case doesn't have a CPU back-plate cut out.

Reservoirs: So we know what a water block is now, let’s talk about the reservoir next. A reservoir is pretty simple, it holds liquid. The reservoir is where we add more fluid, and view it for contaminants. As is any system with a pump and liquid, water cooling loops are susceptible to being gunked up and getting clogged. I highly recommend cleaning your loop at least once yearly to avoid possible clogs/build up. These can result in burst hoses and or fittings and massive amounts of component damage, Clogs are very serious.

Radiators: Let’s get into radiators now. A radiator works just like a heat-sink, air is blown over the fins (except these fins have hot-warm water in them) to disperses the heat. In a car air is forced through the radiator at super high-speeds by driving, as much as I would love to tell you to strap your PC to your VW bus and drive down the road at 50 mph trying to overclock, I won’t. What I will tell you is to use fans! Almost all water cooled set ups have fans pushing/pulling air through them. What I mean by this is one fan is sucking air from outside of the radiator and “pushing” it through, on the other side of the radiator is another fan. This fans job is to “pull” the air through from the other fan on the other side. This forces the air to travel much more quickly through the radiator and cools the water more efficiently.

Pumps: Pumps are very simple; they pump the water through the system. For a single loop system a 120gph would be sufficient. One thing to remember when you are building a system, it is possible to pump liquid fast enough that you put more heat into the water with the pump than you cool with the radiator. It’s a fine balancing act, getting enough pressure to move it all through the system, but not so fast that the pump heats the water more than the radiator can cool it. A good way to test this, is to use a thermometer inside the reservoir to check the liquid temperature, if your Reservoir liquid is almost as hot as the CPU you’re not cooling it enough. (note: By thermometer I mean a temperature probe contained WITHIN the reservoir NOT unscrewing it while running and trying to stick a thermometer in…. that would be VERY bad!)

Tubing and fittings: Now we’ve talked about all the hardware parts, let’s talk about the plastic tubing and fittings that tie it all together. In the water cooling world there are two SUPER important numbers ID (inside diameter) and OD (outside Diameter):
tubing_clamps_1.jpg

The chart I used was found at: http://www.frozencpu.com/cat/l2/g30/c99/list/p1/Liquid_Cooling-Tubing.html
The reason ID/OD are so important is really simple, something with an ID of ¼” and an OD of 3/8” will NOT fit in a fitting for ½” OD tubing. All of your fittings/tubing must match to avoid leaking. I’m sure if you wanted to have some fun you could mix and match for different tube Diameters, but I strongly recommend researching the sizes yourself and picking one size for everything.

Liquid: Last but certainly not least is the liquid we will use to cool our system. It is a common misconception that water is conductive. Pure H2O does NOT conduct electricity. All of the contaminants found in water are what conduct electricity (hence why saltwater is HIGHLY conductive.) There are a plethora of chemicals and mixes you can use in your system, however the recommended fluid is: Distilled water, with some Biocide to stop gunky Algae growth. If you are worried about colors etc. use colored or UV reactive tubing, these are great ways to add some major *POP* to your system without compromising your loop.

Setting up your loop: So you went out, spent a fortune and now it’s time to set up your new system. Let’s start with mounting your new hardware. Your new pump and reservoir NEED to be locked down. Almost every pump/res sold has some mounting system. If you don’t lock these down the liquid pressure inside can flop them around and cause major issues/leakage, so please cool responsibly! A loop is usually set up this way: Reservoir>Pump>Water block (CPU, GPU MoBo, whatever)>Radiator>Reservoir> these loops can be infinitely more varied, and a single system can hold as many loops as you want, but with more hardware comes more cost and maintenance. It’s much easier to maintain a single loop system than it is to maintain a tri-loop system with multiple components being cooled.

I hope this helps at least one person, If I have any bad info or have missed anything please let me know and I will fix it ASAP.
 
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All in all, a great guide to help some newbies get their feet wet :)rofl:). There is one part of it that's wrong though. It primarily manifests here:

Pumps: Pumps are very simple; they pump the water through the system. For a single loop system a 120gph would be sufficient. One thing to remember when you are building a system, if your pump is to powerful and you move your fluid too quickly through the loop it won’t actually cool the liquid. It’s a fine balancing act, getting enough pressure to move it all through the system, but not so fast that it moves through the radiator before it gets cooled down. A good way to test this, is to use a thermometer inside the reservoir to check the liquid temperature, if your Reservoir liquid is almost as hot as the CPU you’re not cooling it enough. (note: By thermometer I mean a temperature probe contained WITHIN the reservoir NOT unscrewing it while running and trying to stick a thermometer in…. that would be VERY bad!)

The fact is, the water doesn't carry heat as individual units but rather absorbs it as a body, so it's not like buckets carrying away the heat, but rather like filling a bathtub full of heat. The water act as a body to be heated. Thus, it is also a body to be cooled. Higher flow is universally better because (and I'm not going to get into too much fluid dynamics here because I've really go a limited knowledge on that end...just give you a couple of key words to google) higher flow increases the shear in the boundary layer. Put more simply, higher flow means greater turbulence where you want the turbulence. As support, this graph from skinneelabs:

FlowVTemp.png


You can clearly see the asymptotic behavior of this graph...and even if you argue otherwise, you won't find a pumping setup more powerful than skinnee's high power pumping setup (not as it's relevant to an introduction to watercooling at least).

Anyways, that should be enough for you to get a good rewrite of that section (and the other few places where you don't treat the water as a body of fluid)....I'm impressed :)
 
All in all, a great guide to help some newbies get their feet wet :)rofl:). There is one part of it that's wrong though. It primarily manifests here:



The fact is, the water doesn't carry heat as individual units but rather absorbs it as a body, so it's not like buckets carrying away the heat, but rather like filling a bathtub full of heat. The water act as a body to be heated. Thus, it is also a body to be cooled. Higher flow is universally better because (and I'm not going to get into too much fluid dynamics here because I've really go a limited knowledge on that end...just give you a couple of key words to google) higher flow increases the shear in the boundary layer. Put more simply, higher flow means greater turbulence where you want the turbulence. As support, this graph from skinneelabs:

Image

You can clearly see the asymptotic behavior of this graph...and even if you argue otherwise, you won't find a pumping setup more powerful than skinnee's high power pumping setup (not as it's relevant to an introduction to watercooling at least).

Anyways, that should be enough for you to get a good rewrite of that section (and the other few places where you don't treat the water as a body of fluid)....I'm impressed :)

I have been led to believe that if you have to much pressure and you move your liquid very quickly through the assembly, that you hit a point where you begin to lose efficiency. There is a point I think at which the liquid is moving to quickly through the radiator to be efficiently cooled. Please let me know if I'm mis-understanding that.

I'm trying to remember exactly where I heard this (I believe it was here somewhere)
 
No such thing as too high of flow rate to dissipate heat in a closed loop. What you are thinking of is heat dump from the pump. You reach a point where pumping power dumps more heat into the loop for the high flow rate thus nullifying the gains of the higher flow rate.
 
No such thing as too high of flow rate to dissipate heat in a closed loop. What you are thinking of is heat dump from the pump. You reach a point where pumping power dumps more heat into the loop for the high flow rate thus nullifying the gains of the higher flow rate.

That sounds dead on, thank you for clarifying. I will update my first post to reflect. Thanks for clearing that up!
 
I have been led to believe that if you have to much pressure and you move your liquid very quickly through the assembly, that you hit a point where you begin to lose efficiency. There is a point I think at which the liquid is moving to quickly through the radiator to be efficiently cooled. Please let me know if I'm mis-understanding that.

I'm trying to remember exactly where I heard this (I believe it was here somewhere)

this is true in automotive cooling systems but not pc,s...
that is why we use thermostats/restrictor plates....
kinda like apples and oranges.....
 
A very good writeup you have there , hat of for it :))
There is two things that i would like to see there too and that is :
# 1 the impotantnes ( sorry for bad spelling ) of reseaching and
# 2 to do some planning of what your goals are ( eg quiet , performance or a combination of both ) and planning out the loop and placement of the components . routing of tubing and so on
 
A very good writeup you have there , hat of for it :))
There is two things that i would like to see there too and that is :
# 1 the impotantnes ( sorry for bad spelling ) of reseaching and
# 2 to do some planning of what your goals are ( eg quiet , performance or a combination of both ) and planning out the loop and placement of the components . routing of tubing and so on

I JUST ordered parts today, Once I have them I intend to take tons of pictures and maybe some video as well. could you perhaps clarify #1 (not to be rude) I'm just not sure what you are asking me?
 
I JUST ordered parts today, Once I have them I intend to take tons of pictures and maybe some video as well. could you perhaps clarify #1 (not to be rude) I'm just not sure what you are asking me?

He wants you to emphasize the importance of doing a lot of research on water cooling before jumping into it. Every now and then someone buys a loop only to find out later that what they bought is sub-par for their needs, but if a little more research would've been done, then all of that could've been avoided.
 
Updating now, I just kind of took that one for granted. With how many thousands of parts combo's there are out there I assumed that was a no brainer. I will edit the top to reflect though.
 
The most frequent mistake would probably be not getting enough rad for the heat. Like getting a 2x120 rad for an overclocked i7 and high-end GPU. Another mistake that could easily be made would be getting a high density rad, but use low RPM fans for low noise. After one of those mistakes is made a thread pops up asking about high temps, then they find out that they should have done more research. The research isn't just find what parts are quality, but making sure they can dissipate the heat that's being generated.
 
The most frequent mistake would probably be not getting enough rad for the heat. Like getting a 2x120 rad for an overclocked i7 and high-end GPU. Another mistake that could easily be made would be getting a high density rad, but use low RPM fans for low noise. After one of those mistakes is made a thread pops up asking about high temps, then they find out that they should have done more research. The research isn't just find what parts are quality, but making sure they can dissipate the heat that's being generated.

Maybe I'm an odd duck, but when given the choice I take the Tool time approach and opt for more power. This guide was more to be an introduction to the parts and what they do. I'm not sure I have enough understanding to go really in depth, however if anyone wants to contribute I will gladly edit you into the front post in quotes, or however you want it done.
 
I didn't mean my post to look like I wanted you to go more in-depth. I was just giving some examples of typical mistakes when enough research isn't done, and showing why doing research should be stressed in your introduction :)
 
MattNo5ss nailed what i was thinking of 100% there
Yes i have done the mistake myselve some yrs ago and jumped in it a little to soon and therefor one big wish i have for ppl that wants to get into wc is to take theyr time and do the basic research before anything's done or bought and i think if it is in a writeup surch as your here it probably will get someone totally new to wc to do a little more than just go get some stuff and then be dissapointed
it is a hobby but it can very easily be a more expensive hobby than it needs to be
sorry about the late reply but i just got myselve a house that needs to be redone inside so i'm haveing some few hrs there every day

edit

i just saw that you already had gotten the reseaching part in there
hehe no worries it'll take much more than an honest question to get me to think someone is rude
i hope the mods here reads your writeup and gets it as a sticky or something similar so all new ppl here see it pretty much right away

cheers :soda: and :thup:
 
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I didn't mean my post to look like I wanted you to go more in-depth. I was just giving some examples of typical mistakes when enough research isn't done, and showing why doing research should be stressed in your introduction :)

Ah, I misunderstood. Very hard to convey tone etc. through text! :bday:
 
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