Ken’s Watercooling Project

I am a reader of your site for about two years and along the way have learned a great deal on overclocking from your site. I am 34 years old and an engineering tech for an oil navigation electronics firm.

InWin Q500 Front

Lurking inside this mild mannered InWin Q500…

Full Interior

…water is surging to cool the AMD Beast!

In February of this year, I purchased an Athlon 500 and an Asus K7M. As I was tipped to from you guys, the CPU turned out to be a 650 core with 3.3nS L2 chips. I quickly constructed a GFD and began to experiment with overclocking. With air-cooling, this ran up to a reliable 800. I wanted more, so with the help of a friend at my work who is a machinist, we constructed a cold plate waterblock assembly out of aluminum.

Waterblock

Unfortunately I ended up ruining this CPU, so I rushed out and bought a 700MHz “Classic”. We redesigned the cooler and settled on a copper coldplate .25″ thick with L2 risers machined on the surface. The latest waterblock I’m using has the interior machined out, leaving several square pins rising from the CPU side.

Back

These pins come close to the cover of the block but do not touch it. The original plan was to use two 78 watt Peltiers between the waterblock and coldplate as I was seeking 1GHz out of this CPU. I was able to obtain this speed without the Pelts but at what I (and AMD) consider to be a high voltage of 2.05V. I didn’t feel comfortable with running it constantly at this voltage so I took the included screenshot and reduced speed/voltage.

Running 1008

Running 927

Currently I am running at 9×103 at 1.85V and it is totally stable and sits at 32C on the die. I am using one of Lytron’s radiators that Gabe at Swiftech sold me along with a Beckett G150a5 pump.

Interior 2

Note that Ken removed the lower drive cage and is mounting all the drives in the upper slots.

Back

On the back of the InWin Q500, I have 12V out to my surge protector strip to relay all components on/off via case power button. You can also see switched 110v coming in for pump/exhaust Muffin fan (soon to be replaced by 12VDC unit). I will also be adding an additional 120mm fan over the video card (intake).

In the system I am running distilled water/water wetter mix. Next purchase will be GeForce 2 Ultra and it will be thrown into the H2O loop as well.

Thanks for the help and great tips!

Ken Chevalier


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