[O/C]Water-Cooled Router Mod Tutorial

Water-Cooled Router Mod. Tutorial
by djcjrobb

If you have installed Linux (ie: DD-WRT, Tomato) and water cooling, you can now overclock the router’s processor worry free. Overclocking your router’s processor will increase the speed at which your router makes connections. This is beneficial for applications like BitTorrent. These router modifications proved to be a great learning experience and I wish everyone great luck with their router modifying endeavors.

Click to expand...

... Return to the article to continue reading.

Discuss this article below. If you are interested in contributing to the front page (www.overclockers.com), please feel free to contact splat, mdcomp, or hokiealumnus. For the latest updates, follow Overclockers.com on Twitter (@Overclockerscom).

Excellent write up and procedure!!!

But this leaves me with a question... why? Why would one want to do this? Can it be overclocked to improve bandwidth or something along those lines? What will the end user get out of doing this?

It's not going to help much, if at all - I suppose this partially depends on how processor limited the equipment is and how much heat is a factor. I'd question the claim of improvements with bitorrent, as that would be very challenging to substantiate - I'd think bitorrent would face mostly memory related limits on consumer hardware based upon when the routing table fills up with obscene numbers of connections.

To really answer your question though we'd need to do a side-by-side test at stock and overclocked setting to see if there are any real performance gains - designing a benchmark environment to reproduce reliable results could be challenging. That environment would need to focus on processing intensive tasks to identify the benefit this offers if any exists, and not simply bandwidth or number of connections which are limited by factors other than the processing ability of the router.

I think all that distracts from the "cool factor" though - I find it interesting more from a hardware modification standpoint - clearly, this is throwing sensibility and "what you need" out the window, but it highlights whats possible if you like to screw around with hardware and tweak the way things work. To me, that hits pretty close to the core of what overclocking is about... Cool article!

I think some real world testing would be an excellent follow up article as far as IF you can overclock without it, and see how far it goes, then with the water and see how far it goes and the improvements each step makes.

Let me not take ANYTHING from the scope of the article as it is cool, no doubt. You know me, I like to see what benefits that has over the bling factor (which stands on its own merit).

Neat. Could you of fit the radiator inside the case some how as well? At least then its 1 combined unit. Maybe fitting multiple items inside the case to consolidate as well.

Wow, this totally destroys my old Smoothwall box. I'm sure there are people out there to benefit from this, but this is way too much power for me.

Neat tutorial!!

Definitely overkill but thats pretty friggin awesome!

As far as overclocking and better throughput its possible... ur likely to run into a lack of memory before cpu.. but even then it really depends on the firmware. I know on my WRT54GL, if i run DD-WRT i get about 1/3rd the throughput compared to Tomato firmware as far as the number of connection and torrents goes. DD-WRT tends to be the vista of router firmwares IMO... aka a hog, but with tons of bells and whistles.

For testing routers - the below is probably a good starting point.
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/lanwan-howto/31103-how-we-test-hardware-routers-revision-3

I guess the idea is to then throw a bunch of different conditions at it, etc. I guess the following would be a practical example:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/lanwan-features/30437-can-dd-wrt-or-tomato-fix-bad-routing

Nice find, I'll have to take a look at those references. Thanks.

I see how american's would see this as not very useful. i used to live in the US and i never EVER had a router issue. however after moving to australia 1.5 years ago ive gone through 4.
Modems and Routers in 240V regions have a major heat issue I have learned after research. I currently am using frozen pees to keep this one alive as it is constantly overheating and failing XD. I think this is an excellent idea just for the cooling factor!

too much trouble to watercool a router! and costs too much too!

Probably the lamest device I've ever seen watercooled.. Why would you waste the money on something like this? I mean if your going to water cool a router at least get something cool like a cisco 1841??




I mean if your in a country that it gets that hot then put a fan on it but water is just stupid.

^ I recommended that the router be replaced with a mini itx box... if the OP has the skills to do this kind of work, doing it somewhere where the benefit would be clear would be nice. With the money and effort involved, a full computer based router could have been made. I doubt that the water loop yields any OC benefit over that of a large fanless heat sink being attached.

If you don't get this mod, you don't get overclocking.

You could always go buy more power and not need to bother overclocking. Its a lot of trouble and work to tweak something to run the way you want it to.

Why do it? Because you can, and its a lot of fun taking. Part in the diy spirit. That's the stuff this site was built on - it doesn't make sense to run 10 fans in your computer, mill your own waterblocks, wor use liquid nitrogen to see how fast you can run it for a couple hours... But that's what we do here, because its fun, because we can, and because a little excess and what you learn along the way is pretty cool.

I agree with you IMOG, this is getting a bit off topic though I suppose.

My point was that a regular heatsink on that router would do just as much good as the water loop it was given. This isn't like going from a heatsink in a PC to a water loop, or liquid nitrogen, because the temp difference is much less between methods in this case. It would have been one thing if the router's CPU was cooled below room temp via a peltier or another method, but just to get the chip to at or close to room temp, this was crazy overkill and therefore as an overclocker I don't give it the same props as a WC'd PC. In a normal PC, cooling a hot CPU, water does make a difference over a heatsink. With a tiny router CPU that barely makes any heat, I think a heatsink would have equal performance. See where I'm coming from? So, I don't feel that this is in the same spirit as real overclocking and is more about good looks. Anyway, this is off topic, just wanted to clarify my view.

While I applaud your ingenuity and creativity I am left thinking, "why?".

I am into overclocking just about everything on my computer because I want the performance boost. I can't see that this will boost anything.

Once again I do clap my hands for the effort and very cool mod while having a puzzled face. You have a drive to do something no one else has done and may not ever be done again.

edit: and $288 to do this? YIKES my high end home router cost much less than half of that.

I agree it's kinda pointless but definitely cool.

nice. very good looking too. good work

Nice job! Rule #1 of computing, if it has a processor, it should be overclocked. I killed a WRT54G back in the day by running it ~25% above stock for too long.

Any guides on router overclocking, anyone?