So I've been reading a lot about all the different types of cooling...everything from air - water - phase change - dry ice - LN...peltiers and combinations of all the above. A lot of it is all about making suicide runs for benchmarking purposes only. What I'm interested in though is a 24/7 cooling setup.
It seems like the main problem is condensation. Water is great, and very widely used but you're still hitting the ambient temp wall. I've read some people create chillers to cool the water in their system (not really water anymore or else it would just freeze) and then use their existing water cooling setup to push the super-cooled water around. Still, with this setup you're battling condensation and is it likely to be a 24/7 setup? Something that you can leave alone?
I've got mixed feelings with peltiers. I could build a system with water and peltier, one hot loop, one cold loop but like many have said, not only do you have to dissipate the heat from the peltier but also from the cpu which makes this less efficient. Coupled with the fact that a peltier pulls so much wattage to run and pretty soon you'll be known for being the neighbor that sucks so much energy when overclocking, you dim the entire neighborhood at full loads! Ok maybe not but this has got to hurt the budget more than the AC unit.
Speaking of AC, could you build an AC unit into the computer? This would actually be pretty neat. Considering the air setup I have right now gives me a delta of about 25c between ambient and cpu temp. If ambient were 4c my cpu would be at 29c instead of 50c. That would be pretty nice. Of course there is the dew point issue. You'd have to pull the air in though something like a smoke stack so that all the air condenses out of it by the time it reaches the top. Then dump that cool air into your case. The case would have to be insulated so that all the cold air won't just collect at the bottom of the case, and create hot pockets above, and water droplets in between. It would have to be pressurized too, by the intake fan/fans. Something that plastic fans don't really seem to do well at.
The only way I see you could beat the condensation bug would be to insulate the entire system. A long time ago I remember seeing the vegetable passive cooling PC. I think it was only a p2 but still...this thing was submerged in vegetable oil and ran. Kinda cool idea, not very practical as it was purely passive cooling.
These days you've got non-conductive fluids though to use. If the entire unit was submerged in non-conductive fluid, no air would get to it in order to create conductive condensation.
Google led me to this.
http://www.hardcorecomputer.com/ProductCategoryDetail_catDesktop_productReactor1.aspx
My Idea is this:
For a 24/7 OC box, make a submerged box housing everything except the PS, and drives. Connect a water block to the CPU and GPU. Fluid would be pumped out of the box and through a heat exchanger before being pumped back into the box, directly to the CPU and GPU blocks. These blocks would be open to the environment and dumping used fluid back. The heat exchanger would cool the liquid to sub zero temperatures (or whatever the fluid filling the box would be rated too) through a chiller/refrigeration cycle and would be rated to remove enough watts to bring the entire system down to sub zero temps, in other words...as the fluid is being discharged from the CPU block it is still low enough to chill the case fluid to a certain desired degree. In this way your main components are super cooled, and all the other chipsets, capacitors, etc are cooled also.
I don't know what the temp range of capacitors and pcb's are but even if you kept the water at 10c it would be better than ambient.
Aside from the commentary, what do you all think is the best 24/7 OC cooling setup? Is it realistic to request hardware to run at high overclocks for long periods of time without burnouts? I mean, if the cooling system was good, could you run a 3ghz proc at 5ghz for a year or so?
It seems like the main problem is condensation. Water is great, and very widely used but you're still hitting the ambient temp wall. I've read some people create chillers to cool the water in their system (not really water anymore or else it would just freeze) and then use their existing water cooling setup to push the super-cooled water around. Still, with this setup you're battling condensation and is it likely to be a 24/7 setup? Something that you can leave alone?
I've got mixed feelings with peltiers. I could build a system with water and peltier, one hot loop, one cold loop but like many have said, not only do you have to dissipate the heat from the peltier but also from the cpu which makes this less efficient. Coupled with the fact that a peltier pulls so much wattage to run and pretty soon you'll be known for being the neighbor that sucks so much energy when overclocking, you dim the entire neighborhood at full loads! Ok maybe not but this has got to hurt the budget more than the AC unit.
Speaking of AC, could you build an AC unit into the computer? This would actually be pretty neat. Considering the air setup I have right now gives me a delta of about 25c between ambient and cpu temp. If ambient were 4c my cpu would be at 29c instead of 50c. That would be pretty nice. Of course there is the dew point issue. You'd have to pull the air in though something like a smoke stack so that all the air condenses out of it by the time it reaches the top. Then dump that cool air into your case. The case would have to be insulated so that all the cold air won't just collect at the bottom of the case, and create hot pockets above, and water droplets in between. It would have to be pressurized too, by the intake fan/fans. Something that plastic fans don't really seem to do well at.
The only way I see you could beat the condensation bug would be to insulate the entire system. A long time ago I remember seeing the vegetable passive cooling PC. I think it was only a p2 but still...this thing was submerged in vegetable oil and ran. Kinda cool idea, not very practical as it was purely passive cooling.
These days you've got non-conductive fluids though to use. If the entire unit was submerged in non-conductive fluid, no air would get to it in order to create conductive condensation.
Google led me to this.
http://www.hardcorecomputer.com/ProductCategoryDetail_catDesktop_productReactor1.aspx
My Idea is this:
For a 24/7 OC box, make a submerged box housing everything except the PS, and drives. Connect a water block to the CPU and GPU. Fluid would be pumped out of the box and through a heat exchanger before being pumped back into the box, directly to the CPU and GPU blocks. These blocks would be open to the environment and dumping used fluid back. The heat exchanger would cool the liquid to sub zero temperatures (or whatever the fluid filling the box would be rated too) through a chiller/refrigeration cycle and would be rated to remove enough watts to bring the entire system down to sub zero temps, in other words...as the fluid is being discharged from the CPU block it is still low enough to chill the case fluid to a certain desired degree. In this way your main components are super cooled, and all the other chipsets, capacitors, etc are cooled also.
I don't know what the temp range of capacitors and pcb's are but even if you kept the water at 10c it would be better than ambient.
Aside from the commentary, what do you all think is the best 24/7 OC cooling setup? Is it realistic to request hardware to run at high overclocks for long periods of time without burnouts? I mean, if the cooling system was good, could you run a 3ghz proc at 5ghz for a year or so?
