i am the infamous water cooler. my processor was fried because i (stupidly) neglected to attach the watercooling gear to the waterblock well enough (it wasnt touching the processor...). unfortunately the athlon temperature sensors are not set up to deal with this kind of thing, and a burning smell filled the room. next time i will be more careful (i made the attachment scheme better) the new processor was not working because i have a oldish motherboared and it does not suport the "thoroughbred a" core athlon xps without a bios upgrade, and you can not upgrade the bios without having a working processor... i am building anothe rcomputer though soon so i will use the athlon xp in that and i bought a 1.3ghz duron for this computer. should be here any day now.

leaking is just not a problem. the tubes i use have 1/8" thick walls so there is no way they are going to burst, and all of the connections are sealed very well. most people who reck things with watercooling do so because they forget to turn on the pump when they turn on the computer.

its cool! really! it coool much better than even the best air coolers. another thing people do is get a peltier (tec - therma electic cooler) and put that on the processor and have the watercooling cool that. that works even better, you can get a heavily overclocked athlon cpu down to ~ 5 C with this and it is very localized so condensation is not really a problem.

liquid nitrogen cooling is also very cool. someone said something about electrons stoping to move when things get very cold. whaaaA??? copper (which is what the wires in most cpus are made from) becomes a super-conductor if it gets cold enough... i think that there are other problems with making parts of your computer -200 C, like things get brittile, condensation, warping/cracking from so much fast cooling. also i think that some parts of the cpu are not equiped to get this cold, like some batteries somewhere might freeze or something. my friend pointed me to a screensavers (techtv.com) about liquid nitrogen cooling. i think it didnt work for them, they killed their chip.

another idea some people have had is to emurse thier computer in something that does not conduct electricity and then float dry ice in that. this seems to work quite well, actually. its a little scary, though.

i think that the guy in goldeneye was pretty damn dead when he got all of that liquid nitrogen on him. blood freezes => cells rupture => you die. atleast it was pretty quick and painless (or quick and veeeeery painful)


Edited by - antimatter on 29-01-2003 06:57:20

Welcome Antimater
Good tips on water cooling. it's nice to see someone got over the fear of water and try it out for themselves. (i know i sure as heck wasn't gunna try it )
a question for ya though. with todays processors as fast as they are, do you think water cooling is going to be neccesary in the future? or will cooling fans be able to hack it?

...Just a random thought from a random mind

Water cooling is best for extreme overclockers, servers, or those that live in extremely hot climates. Or maybe for someone who just has to try it. Otherwise such a venture can be quite foolish.

I came. I saw. I conquered. And sometimes get conquered.

emphasize the FOOLISH part :0

I have a liquid cooled system. It's one of the ones from Koolance. Works really great. The main reason for me getting it was because my old system had bit of a noise problem. The CPU had one of the biggest and loudest fans on it and I was deafened every time I turned the blighter on. But that was me just being overkill. I only had a 1.3 GHz Athlon. Kept it nice and cool though.

Since then I upgraded to an Athlon 1800+ and decided to *splash out* on a more efficent cooling method. I can overclock this chip to a 2200+ speed and it doesn't go above 43 degrees C. Which is pretty darn good. You just have to make sure you keep the sides on. Otherwise you get algae growing in your reservoir Had fix that problem with some fish tank algae killer. Took about a month to get rid of it, but all good now.

One of the other benefits of having liquid cooling is the ability to cool your motherboard chipset and hard drives. Doing so will increase the overall temperature though as it is all acumulative. You can also cool your graphics card. However GeForce cards seem to be unable to support that. The memory heat sinks get in the way of the water block so you can't attach it. Unless you overclock the card as well you shouldn't have a problem and they are not really loud. Unless you have a GeForce FX. They are bl**dy loud!!

Heh, you should have put those fish in there that eat algae. Stupid thought.

good idea Tach, you could keep tropical fish in there! No need to buy a heater to keep the water warm, youve got your computer to do that!

Was reading somewhere, that they could actually detach the the cooling system off the GFX and sorta attach your own on, more on that later!

lol, yeah, I'm sure they would love the anti-freeze thats in the water