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Homemade Watercooling. Need some help!

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odranoel_sotnas

New Member
Joined
Nov 21, 2010
Hi everyone,

As the title says i'm trying to build a homemade watercooling system. That means i'm gonna build my own blocks to the CPU and GPU, but I have some questions I hope you can help me with.

1º) Can I use only one big radiator or should I use 2, one for my CPU and another to my GPU ? How will it afect my temps using just one ?

2º) How do I know how many litres/hour should my pump give ?

3º) I already have the copper to make my blocks and I skeched something on solidworks. But I'm not sure if my model is right in termos of water flow. I'm hopping you could say your opinion. I'll leave some pictures of it :








I hope you can help me! :)
 
How much do you know about watercooling atm? Have you looked at the big brands block designs? If you make a block like that, I believe you will get horrible performance compared to the blocks you can buy. There is way too little surface area.

The question about how many rads, depends on many things. What kind of hardware do you want to cool down? Do you want to overclock a lot? What temps do you expect? What kind of fans are you planning to use? You need to find out how many watts your system will through out, and with that number you can start looking at rad size.

You should be able to find the specs of you pump on the manufacturers homepage, which should also include how many L/h it can move.

I'm not saying this to discourage you, but to me it sounds like you dont know that much about watercooling. And even just buying factory made parts require that you gain a great deal of knowledge, to make the right decisions, and to make the parts yourself will require even more.

Have you read all the stickies here in the watercooling section? Otherwise that is a great place to start out, and then you could head over to Skinee's and check out how a lot of block designs and reviews, to give you an idea of what works and what doesn't in term of designs.

That said, I think it's really cool that you want to build the parts yourself, and I hope that you get the project going. Just do a lot of research before jumping into it :)

Gl!
 
Yes you're right, every big brand block has a biger area to dissipate the heat. I was just so eager to start working on the blocks that i just stepped over some bits. I'm gonna resketch the blocks to have a bigger area. I could just buy but I think it's more fun to build it. :)

About the hardware... I want to cool down a NVidia GeForce 8800GT and a Intel PentiumD 945 3.45Ghz. But about the rad and the pump i'll take your advice and read every sticky here.
I have just found the forum that's why I haven't look into it.

Thanks a lot for your help. Now some research awaits me! :p
 
Yes, my college has a workshop with a cnc and other machinery and I asked permission to use it. I have already used it in the past so I guess there's no problem.
 
Ok i made a sketch of my blocks based on the ones made by the big brands and considering the limitations I have with my machinery and I have this :




What do you guys think ?
 
still has TINY surface area...look at the microchannel/micropin designs of current watercooling, you need a LOT of surface area and you need to be generating turbulent flow, which means you need impingement cooling
 
I had to double check the date of the OP post, lol, I thought I was having a flashback to ~2000 when people were still making their own waterblocks out of solid chunks of copper, lol :) Coulda sworn I'd seen that Z-shape path before :p

Might want to consider using a dremel with a thin diamond wheel to cut more channels into the raised CNC channels for more surface area. Not sure how to professionally manufacture the tiny cuts in modern waterblocks, but that may be a way to DIY.
 
Yeah, on a design like that, you may even consider running the internal ridges the opposite direction to create more turbulence. (Vertical, instead of horizontal, as you're looking at the sketch)... or, to make it easier, just move the holes to the opposite sides... still not very turbulent, but you're getting the idea... that water needs to get pretty crazy inside the block and the more it does (without completely destroying your flow rate), the better.
 
I had to double check the date of the OP post, lol, I thought I was having a flashback to ~2000 when people were still making their own waterblocks out of solid chunks of copper, lol :) Coulda sworn I'd seen that Z-shape path before :p

What about the aluminum blocks with channels drilled through them, or even the pvc+epoxy blocks!!

IMO, no disrespect to the OP, but home-made blocks were good when you needed to cool 30w processors, but with the modern heat factories, there's a lot more technology and design required.
 
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