Water Cooling Idea

I've got an idea for water cooling my computer. I'm thinkin about using my dorm room refrigerator to hold my reservoir and radiator and drilling a couple holes in the side of it for the inlet/outlet of the water and power chords.

After looking at swiftechs water cooling kit (takes hot water from the CPU and puts it on the vid card) I was thinking instead t-ing off the cold water tube so the cpu and vid card both get cold water and then t-ing the hot water lines back together to go to the fridge.

Of course i would use a slightly larger pump and hose before the T and then using the regular diameter hose to go to/from the cpu and vid card then back into larger hose to go to the radiator and then the reservoir.

Oh and i've already checked, the sides of the fridge are just insulation, no wires or anything important run through them.

What do you guys think?

Check and see how much of a load your fridge can handle. Also, you're probably going to have to insulate all your tubing and the blocks so as not to have condensation.

As for splitting to the GPU and CPU, you probably wouldn't get an even flow. Your CPU block will most likely be more restrictive than your GPU block, causing the flow to favor the GPU. Splitting it like this is not really needed. Water coming out of the CPU isn't that much warmer than the water going into it. Your video card doesn't need as much cooling power as your CPU.

The BTUs/hr those mini fridges take out isnt very much, something like 150-300 probably. The compressor is pretty weak hence why its halfway quiet. Window A/C units take like 1500-5000 btus/hr.

You could try just putting your radiator and resevoir into a minifridge. I wouldnt worry about condenstation as you arent going to drop the water temp too much. If you got a good balance you could have a nice quiet solution. Others have done this but a little more extreme by just taking the coils from the compressor and placing it inside a tank and making that their radiator/resevoir. Probably would be more efficient that way.

Dont expect awesome temps. Just think about how long it takes for your fridge to cool down a warm can of coke and how fast your procs could heat that coke up...

With the money being spent on all that, why not just get a water chiller from an aquatic supply place and use that instead. usualy you can set the temperature to what you want with the good units.

joelb79 said:

With the money being spent on all that, why not just get a water chiller from an aquatic supply place and use that instead. usualy you can set the temperature to what you want with the good units.

Click to expand...

Waterchillers are very effective (Just make sure you get the real ones, not the ones that are just peltiers on a WB but the ones with a heatexchanger and compressor) but are very expensive. Avg minifridge is well under 100$. The avg waterchiller rated at 1500BTUs/HR is well over 500$...

expensive but interesting
http://www.marine-monsters.com/front/products/chiller-titan.html
can anyone take the info from this page and calculate what kind of water temp one of these units might be able to maintain in say a moderately overclocked system?

i'm very familiar with aquarium chillers as i have a 180 gallon sal****er aquarium that uses 3 250w Metal halide bulbs to illuminate it. It's getting VERY close to time to buy one, but it would be too far away from my computer to use.

BigIron said:

can anyone take the info from this page and calculate what kind of water temp one of these units might be able to maintain in say a moderately overclocked system?

Click to expand...

An avg 1/3hp chiller can regulate up to about 10*F of 180 gallons, do some simple calculations in your brain and you will quickly find out that they would be very efficient in chilling down the 1-2 gallons in your water cooling system

more like less than 1/2 gallon. its funny that it sensored your last post

LMAO that's hilarious. But that further emphasizes my point. The chillers regulate 10* of 180 gallons to keep the temps stable at around 75-82*F. So I'm SURE it would be able to super cool a small reservior for your water cooling needs (The coils are about 3" in diameter, and 5-6" wide).