Advice on cost effective Xtreme Cooling

I currently have a good OC'd CPU under water cooling. I'd like to take OC'ing up another few notches by making use of Phase cooling or TEC. Can some of the vets out there advise me on what setups would be effective keeping in mind cost and maintenance/installation efforts, thanks

well, so far TEC's have been out of fasion lately. everyone is switching to Phase change defiantly. one option here is to keep your w/c loop now and turn it into chilled water cooling system to get sub zero temps easily on both your CPU and SLI set-up. but then you need all copper blocks and braze the barbs onto the blocks.


or you can sell the w/c set-up and either.


A) buy a used Vapochill (one is in the classies now, if your ever going to do it, get that one)

B) buy a new or old A/C unit and mod it yourself

C) buy all the parts you need separately and build it from scratch


but before you do anything. you need to do a good bit of reading. http://www.refrigerationbasics.com/1024x768/rb1.htm

read that its a good site. helped me a lot.

The cheapest best performing cooling is dry ice, however it isn't very good in a case

No offence DarkCow, I actually have a degree in Chem Eng, so I kinda should know something about heat transfer and heat exchangers
Thanks for the info though

subambaint insulation efforts will be the same regardless of wich method you use to get subambaint temps, so your equal there.

It depends on the purpose of your overclocking efforts.. If your wanting to benchmark dry ice is fairly cheap (decent container can be gotten for as little as $70 and dry ice can be anywere in the .25-just over $1 a pound) your load temperatures are going to be as low as a ok two stage cascade (not a great one)
Next stage IMHO for benching is a solid cascade (-100C load), could be as cheap as a couple of AC units and DIY time (and effort ), but to buy even a rotary DIY cascade they run around 1.5K.. The petty two stage cascades run 2-3K.

If your wanting something to run 24/7 clocks.. I would advise a solid single stage direct die, and if your GFX is not going to be the bottleneck sub-zero you could go chiller (and convert your WC loop for that)

have you dropped the multiplier so you could see how much FSB is in your motherboard?
And if you plan on going DX10 GFX.. just run as powerfull subambaint as you can on the CPU, DX10 cards are going to be CPU bottlenecked if the cards go subambaint (It apears that way and I've asked people that know a little better then I.. thats the answer I got, and if someone knows better post )

you'll notice I kind of skipped TEC's.. if you want to utilize your WC loop a chiller would be more cost effective over time and much more effective temperature wise so I defalt to chiller when considering one or the other.

GreenMaji, it is clear you do not have as many stars for nothing, thanks for sharing your experience and the usefull advice

No problem Brolloks.

Ive found alot of guys find bottlenecks REAL fast with dry ice, be it the voltage availble to them (when hard modificaton is nessary), FSB limitation of the mobo, Ram or the CPU itself.. After studying hardwre these can be forseen to an extent.

How much cooling you aim to use could be based on hardware limitations (if your going to be willing to modify your hardware), and how much FSB you can reailstily get out of your motherboard.. (you dont need -100C if you just can't make it to 4.6ishGhz+)

from looking at your setup your ram will be the fist limit.. around 450FSB (unless you got lucky when buying them) they should be Elipia IC's from when you posted your initial results (unless you bought them used or they were old stock somewere)

If you have any questions just post

Also.. CPU based benchmarking (CPUz, superpi, pifast and the like) is going to be cheaper then the initial investement needed to get into benching big 3D (you can always bench the GFX you have to score well in that class however)

Thanks again GM, you say my RAM might be the OC limitation, I thought my relatively low cost mobo would be the limiting factor.

What RAM should give me a better OC opportunity?

well.. drop your mulitplier and see wich one gives out first.. Im not sure on our rev of the AB9.

cheapest 2gig kit of D9GMH is crutail ballistix DDR200 last time I checked
cheapest 2gig kit of D9GKX (if your going for the big time spi scores ) is GSkill DDR2-1000 HZ's (again last time I checked)

The 965P motherboard of choice for extream cooling is the Asus P5B-Deluxe (Vdimm and Vcore modified and possibly Vdroop to get more Vcore if your wild enough to want 1.9ish )

If you want to go phase, I recommend finding a used Vapo LS, or similar cooler. There are custom units available as well that look good, cool well, and offer all the control capabilities, and mounting solutions that are needed for reliable daily use.

Think hard about what you want out of your machine. If you decide to go DIY phase, there is a good chance you will remove the user friendly aspect of your PC, as well as possible cosmetic issues.

Building a phase cooler that has a proper mounting solution, insulation, cooling power, acceptable noise levels, controls, reliability, and still looks good is NOT something that can be done inexpensively. OTOH, if you are perfectly happy with PC components scattered accross a bench and a compressor humming away, maybe DIY phase is for you

Just some things to keep in mind.

Your most cost effective route would be a chiller as you already have the water gear. Pick up a cheap A/C unit and a cooler and build a chiller.

You can find a used Vapochill for around $400 and sometimes even cheaper. I got mime for $375 and there is nothing wrong with it and it runs like a champ. That to me appeared to be cheaper than building one from scratch.