Mini-Fridge, try taking this on!

[accessoriesguy]

After being enlightened of the works of getting a mini fridge as your cooler.

Can we use a car radiator as a cooler? I mean yeah it would take up a lot of space and need its own power source...But how awesome wouldn't that be?

any idea how that could be done...really big tubing to really little tubing around the Motherboard?

would this even be a great way to cool your computer? Screw water cooling, use car anti-freeze/coolant!


I'm pretty sure others have had this idea but thug life.
Extreme Overkill for Extreme Bragging Rights!

 

[psionic98]

its been done before, from what I remember.. total waste of time/enery/$$ plus i think antifreeze doesn't mesh well with cpu cooling plates

 

[Bobnova]

I've done it, works great.
Bulky though.

With a single quiet 120mm fan on a nissan truck radiator the system held a 130w load to around 7*c over ambient.
With a 4.7ghz 980x on lots of volts, and a house fan ducted through the radiator, core temps maxed out at 20-30*c over ambient on 100% load, quite good really.
That's running ~30% ethylene glycol antifreeze.

Unless you're dealing with a truly staggering heatload it may well not be worth it, but if you're contemplating a 3x360 radiator setup a single car radiator will cost far less and cool better.

 

[ps2cho]

Well since cars, even with the radiator run at 80-100c, you can expect that its gonna do very, very well....albeit at a messy, large-size setup.

Maybe consider using a heater-core since they are a lot smaller?

 

[accessoriesguy]

I've done it, works great.
Bulky though.

With a single quiet 120mm fan on a nissan truck radiator the system held a 130w load to around 7*c over ambient.
With a 4.7ghz 980x on lots of volts, and a house fan ducted through the radiator, core temps maxed out at 20-30*c over ambient on 100% load, quite good really.
That's running ~30% ethylene glycol antifreeze.

Unless you're dealing with a truly staggering heatload it may well not be worth it, but if you're contemplating a 3x360 radiator setup a single car radiator will cost far less and cool better.

you are awesome, i guess with that much work and budgeting it really isn't cost effective, but more like awesomeness effective.

for your great accomplishment. That is all I wanted to hear, that somebody has done it

any pics?

 

[Bobnova]

Yup! http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6775882&postcount=64

 

[accessoriesguy]

DUDE CHECK THIS OUT

http://www.wimp.com/hugeidea/

Get that car radiator back out, submerge your PC in this stuff and get it pumping! A whole new level of supercooling!

 

[ssjwizard]

Nothing new there. Mineral oil cooling is more for the coolness factor than anything else.

 

[accessoriesguy]

yeah it doesn't seemt hat practical, especially for like repairs and stuff it would be difficult. Also you would need a strong fan and some sort of cooling on top of that. So big and wasteful.

But if you had gotten a radiator working on a regular computer before this would probably be a better alternative.

 

[Dooms101]

Like said earlier... you can use a car's heater core for a rad. I bought a '77 bonneville heater core for $8 shipped on eBay motors. Took about 5 minutes with a hacksaw to cut the tubes to length and paint it black and it looks pretty cool. It can hold 2 140mm's perfectly. The only problem with heater cores is that they like high cfm fans and static pressure makes little difference, so adding more cooling power also means significantly more noise. However, it's pretty easy to run to a Pull-a-Part and get a copper/bronze core car radiator cheap.

 

[accessoriesguy]

dude your profile picture is the album cover of brand new i believe, so chill.

that's pretty crazy but cool, I am so tempted to try it, but I'm pretty sure ill mess up

what other crazy cooling can we do?

 

[Devil_Dog]

Like said earlier... you can use a car's heater core for a rad. I bought a '77 bonneville heater core for $8 shipped on eBay motors. Took about 5 minutes with a hacksaw to cut the tubes to length and paint it black and it looks pretty cool. It can hold 2 140mm's perfectly. The only problem with heater cores is that they like high cfm fans and static pressure makes little difference, so adding more cooling power also means significantly more noise. However, it's pretty easy to run to a Pull-a-Part and get a copper/bronze core car radiator cheap.

Going back in time now. I have not seen a Bonnie in use for long time. I used a couple of them, but that's going way back for me. LOL.

 

[muddocktor]

I just bought one recently to replace an old used one I had bought a long time ago and was using in my loop that sprung a leak. I had also made myself a shroud for it out of aluminum fascia material from my house (left over) and that improves the performance of your fans on the heater core quite a bit. And you don't have to use high rpm fans with a heater core unless you are going for a max overclock. I'm using Yate Loon Medium fans on mine.

 

[Dooms101]

dude your profile picture is the album cover of brand new i believe, so chill.

that's pretty crazy but cool, I am so tempted to try it, but I'm pretty sure ill mess up

what other crazy cooling can we do?

Yes my avatar is the album artwork for "The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me" by the band Brand New.

Well using a heater core isn't really that crazy. When people first started water cooling their computers they had to find parts that they could modify to work to cool their system in a small space. There was no such thing as brands catering to water coolers (like swiftech, DD, EK, etc) so one way of making a good water to air heat exchanger was using a heater core from a car. Of course now we have purpose built PC water cooling radiators, but heater cores still work well and are cheap.

Going back in time now. I have not seen a Bonnie in use for long time. I used a couple of them, but that's going way back for me. LOL.

Well its actually a very generic part that fits MANY GM cars. I just happen to know it as the '77 bonny heater core.

 

[Devil_Dog]

Yeah, I know it's a generic part. The Bonnie was the choice to use for WC'ing at the time. Brings back some memories. I have to see if I can dig up some pics.

 

[ssjwizard]

I too had one of those back in the day. Not a bad radiator for the money. Eventually sold mine off here on the forums.

 

[Dooms101]

I am actually just about to put one up I painted white in the classies xD

 

[ADKdakota]

Sorry for bumping an old thread but maybe a Transmission Cooler would work better. They usually have a fan already mounted on them and they're much smaller than a car radiator. You'd have to figure out a way to provide it with power but it'd be a standalone fan/radiator setup and much more manageable inside than a full size radiator.