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milling my northbridge block

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Nice job frostmeister.

Since you quoted £'s as the price you paid for your vice I guess you're in the UK. Where did you buy the vice from? Also, where do you get your copper stock from? I can't find anywhere that sells small quantities of copper stock in my area & nothing mail order either. Any info would be appreciated - cheers.
 
Sorry I haven't posted for a while on this, the block's just about finished. I've got to get a 10 / 12mm end mill, and finish off the in-and-out-lets. It looks kind of crooked in the pic, but I think that's just the rotation /angle of the block. I'm fairly pleased with it so far, except the mounting holes are not in the right place. I've milled out the block to fit 40mm x 40mm and the holes are offset, not diagonal. Small hitch, I'm just going to take the sides down with the 10mm end mill, and make a brass plate with lugs on it.
O yeah, Rakk, I am in the UK. I got the drill from B&Q (£39.99) the cross vice from Cromwell's engineering (£50) and my mill bits from Cromwells engineering as well. The copper bar stock I got from a company called Ace Metals. As they're a Norwich based company I don't know if that's any good to you. I just found them in the yellow pages under "metal stockists". You can also get the cross vice from RS electronic components (www.rswww.com) but it'll cost you more - £79.99 I think. Don't quote me on that though. I'm going to have to check out your post soon Ziah when you get one going :)
 
dude, that thing is amasing! never seen something that good on a simple drill press and cross vice! WOW
 
frostmeister said:
LOL, it's not to cool the computer in my signature - that's like just a joke. I did have an amd 486 - and do you remember the 386DX 40's they had? they rocked. Anyway, yeah, the block's coming along nicely, I'll post another pic tommorow when I get home.
Click to expand...

Be sure to leave thoose curved sides inside the channels, must be great at creating valuable turbulence !!!
 
seriously man, you should stick that on your cpu! thats gotta be such a good waterblock!
 
Thanks for the compliments people :) I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to doing something like this. I've finished the bottom of the channels with a cylindrical deburring tool, one of those dremmel tips with diamonds in. It's kind of rough enough to increase surface area a little bit, and I've managed to get the channels so that the base on them is only 1.5mm thick. Don't know if that's too thin, as the wall is 4mm wide over the central area, and I have read that it's a good thing to make the base as thick as the walls. Then again, the thinner you get it, the closer it is to diect die cooling. As long as there isn't going to be any heat differentiation on the chip - and bearing in mind, this is a northbridge it's going on, which has an aluminium heatspreader anyway. I suppose we'll see - in a week or two anyway, as I'm at work and in training for a while. seeyas round people :)
 
Just an update; got hold of a 10mm tri flute end mill and took the drill holes down to 1.5mm base thickness and have tidied the edges a little - a few scuffs on the block top to be sorted though. If you wanted to know a little about end mills, the basics I've found are that the less flutes (cutting edges) you have, the better swarf removal and faster cutting ability it has. The more flutes on a bit, the better finish you'll get. So it's logical to assume you'd mill it to about 0.5mm of tolerance with a two/ three flute mill, and face off / finish with a 4 or even 6 flute end mill. I've put a rough surface on my channels though, to increase surface area and turbulence a bit though. I'm going to use the 10mm end mill to take down the sides and get it roughly 40mm square overall, then make a brass top plate and copper pipe connects and solder it all together. More to come :)
 
I didn't see what you meant for a second - but yeah :D It also makes an N if you flip it 90... "22 series"? or "North-N type" maybe?... :p Wouldn't want to rip of Masked's/JFettig's naming convention though :)
 
name it whatever you want:) I really dont get why you want to use this block on a northbridge when Im sure itll perform awesome on a cpu!
 
Weeeeell, I've already got watercooling on my CPU's for the moment, and started doing this for the northbridge as I had a spare bit of copper kicking about. I was only playing with the design initially, but it's turned out better than expected. I think it'll be going on my northbridge in the next few weeks though. Once it's all on, I'm going to re-do the CPU waterblocks so they can take pelts at somepoint as they've got a bevel I can't remove due to base thickness that causes parasitic heat feedback because the edge of the pelt overhangs the WB.
I'm doing this one for the northbridge because the copper was also a tad to small for the CPU for my liking as well. I got 140MHz with my current WC setup and passive N/B cooling, but I think it was getting hot - hotter than I'd like safely for stability. I'll see anyway...
 
Well, I'll make a block for my GPU at a later date. I'm happy with the stock copper H/S that came with it - on the hercules radeon 9700 pro - so it's not a major concern right now, but I think that if the northbridge block allows me to push things a little bit further it'll be the next thing on the list. Thanks for the positive feedback as always people :)
As an update, I'm having a little trouble milling the sides down on the block, and have switched to a hacksaw to do the job. There's just too much wobble and jitter when I start pressing down with the 10mm mill bit in my present set up (cross vice on the drill table) so it's going to be a chore sawing through the copper and getting a good enough edge to file down and finish with the mill. anyway, back to the sawing for me, and I'll update when I'm getting there :)
 
Well, I soldered the top on the block, and it went better than expected. I cleaned the top and block sides that would be in contact with 1000 grit wetordry, and fluxed the pipe / top mountings and the top of the block. Soldered it together and started by soldering the pipes, and when I came to do the top / block join, found that the solder had already flowed into the gap from the pipe joins. Flowed very well infact, all round the block, so I was like "oh, ok then...". Suits me :) Good old capilliary action!
nbfluxed2.jpg

nbsoldered2.jpg

Just cleaning it up and got to file the edges flush now...
 
The final product looks great. How do you plan on mounting it though? Are you going to drill holes through the base plate sticking out on the sides?
 
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