PIV 2.4: What You Need To Know

The title says it all. — Ed

I’ve finally decided to submit some pictures and information about my water-block. I’ve been visiting your site for some time now, and I haven’t been too impressed with some of the water-block designs out there.

I made my water-block about a year ago, and was using it successfully for most of that time since. I was using a submersible outdoor fountain pump, which doesn’t have much power. It worked adequately, even though the flow was barely more than a trickle.

My CPU stayed steady at about 36C. It is an Athlon 950 on an A7V MB and I was running it at 1196 (11.5 X 104). I made one mistake though – my choice of coolant could have been better. I used water with some added bleach to try and control the critters, however this didn’t agree with the seals on the cheap pump.

I recently retired the pump as it couldn’t sustain an adequate flow. Since I had the unit out of my PC, I decided to get some photos of it.

First off, here’s a picture of the copper base:

I would have preferred a different design, but I was limited by the material I had available to me at work. We don’t usually have much copper around, and all I could find is round bar stock, so I had to come up with a design around that.

To maximize the little area I had to work with for the water channels, I had to create a ring with tapped holes so that I could screw down the lid. If I had put tapped holes in the copper slug, there would be little room for the channel and the O-ring groove.

Here’s a picture of the whole works disassembled – I used brass primarily for aesthetics:

Here it is all assembled:

As you can see, my soldering skills need some work. I utilized the 4 holes provided on my A7V motherboard for mounting my block. The four long screws enter from behind the board with springs and isolating rubber washers at the back.

On the CPU side of the board, the screws slide through the four holes on the retaining ring and screw into the S-clamp. The screw in the middle of the S-clamp pushes on the middle of the water-block directly over the CPU die (not exactly in the middle, it’s offset 0.045″).

I don’t have any technical figures on the performance of my block at the moment, but I will try to get some as soon as I get a good in-line pump. I’d imagine it will perform well because of the amount of turbulence that is created in the channels.

When you blow into one of the ports, it makes a whizzing sound. The harder you blow, the higher the pitch. It feels somewhat restricted and I assume that it’s from the turbulence.

I also included pictures of the water-block assembly which I created in SolidWorks before I machined any of the parts. As well I included a 3D rendered image of it that I created from the CAD assembly

Paul Vodrazka