Zalman fanless water cooling tower

Hey all,

I have this old socket 478 ready Zalman fanless water tower cooler here and I was playing around with the idea of overclocking some old cpu and mobos (if I find them). The thing is, I was wondering how much of a difference it would make if I were to fill it up with water halfway, and then put ice cubes in also to cool the water even more.. Anyone have any success with this?

I apologize if anyone thought this was about hardware that isn't so old! I believe I read somewhere on here that older stuff is worth a lot of points on hwbot and if I could round up some old stuff I would not be too worried about killing it..

I suppose you could put ice cubes in the loop. I forsee a few problems though.
1) Loop contamination.
2) Condensation (assuming you manage to get sub ambient)
3) End of the world.

HAH!

Yes I guess the main thing I forgot to mention is that I am not too concerned with ruining any of the hardware.. Thanks for the response though!

If you aren't to concerned with damaging the old components, I don't see a reason why you couldn't put in ice cubes.

A couple of notes though: make your ice cubes out of distilled water to avoid contamination. Add cubes slowly over time and keep a thermometer in the res to keep an eye on temperatures. Last, keep an ice out for condensation forming on your tubes, they will drip onto your board and wreck it. This can be fixed with the proper application of papertowels and ducktape (in fact, its what I'm doing in the lab right now to avoid condensation).

Nice! Yes its a fairly tall unit (about 2 feet tall) so I envisioned just filling it up like 2/3rds with cold water and then adding ice cubes for the remaining portion for that extra cooling effect. I doubt the pump has enough power to pull an ice cube down to the bottom of the res.

I will most likely use regular tap water for this as I am not concerned with harming the unit. Its more of a hack attempt at cooling I guess.. I might even try to use it on some 775 stuff when I find some.

So you just plan to bench with this setup, right? You aren't going for any longer term running? If so, you should be ok. But I would put a couple of those stainless steel scrubbing pads at your pump intake in the cooling tower to keep ice slivers from being sucked into the pump. Once the ice gets very small, you might have a chance of sucking the slivers into the pump.

I don't see the pump sucking it in since ice floats.

[AK]Zip said:

I don't see the pump sucking it in since ice floats.

Click to expand...

indeeed.... I think it will be a neat thing to try..