Thinking of using chillers; please help

[hanlin]

I'm planning to use chillers to cool my cpu. I don't want to spend more than $250 on it though. I saw this one for $200. http://www.drsfostersmith.com/product/prod_display.cfm?pcatid=8173&N=2004+22787. I know very little about chillers so please help me and tell me if it will do much good. I'd like to cool my cpu down to about ambient temps under load (20C). Right now, it's water cooled and is 50C under load. Also, if I buy a chiller, do I need pelts for my waterblocks or will what I have be fine. I have TDX and Maze4 for my video card.

[illmatik]

That chiller probably wont get you much performance. You'd be better off with something that uses a compressor. You'll also need to bypass the thermostat to run it at full blast.

[hanlin]

Any suggestions on what chiller would be good?

[illmatik]

I would check ebay for something w/ a 1/3 to 1/2hp recirculating chiller, unless you want to rig a bath chiller (to use as your res). Laser or lab chillers would probably work best by allowing you to set it to cool to the max. Some good names are Neslab, Lytron, and Haskris. Also many have pumps built in which should ease the burden on the pump you try to use. I've actually seen several neslabs that have been refitted with pretty powerful iwaki pumps. If you can find a deal like that, you may be able to run without a pump you would otherwise use in the loop.

[hanlin]

Chillers seem too expensive. I think I'll just forget about the idea. It would be nice if I could get some help on how to get my temps down a few degrees. I'll start a new thread about lowering my temps down a little.

[Prometheus]

Heres what I did. I first bought a small 5080btu AC unit for $75. I then took the face off of it, pulled out the front blower assembly, and put the chiller unit inside a tool chest. I placed insulation around the outside areas of the tool box, placed my pump inside the box, positioned on one side of the chiller, so as to draw fluid through it, sealed the outer edges of the chiller to help force the flow, and sealed the tool box up.

I then insulated my water lines inside the computer. This is super important because as soon as your water temps drop below ambient, you have the possibility of forming condensation. This particular event cost me much mula before I got it under control, so take my advice, insulate, insulate, insulate!!!

Now, I set the AC on the floor, connected the line from the pump to the CPU inlet line, routed the return to the chiller box(tool box), fired it up, and ended up with temps of -8 to -28C, depending on what the CPU speed was set to.

To get a better idea of what this is capable of, let me explain my setup, and the speeds reached via this type cooling.

First, I run a Prescott 3.0ghz CPU. Temps normally on these run approx 12-13c hotter than previous chips(Northwood, Canterwood) so it was a task to get things stable when I slammed it to 3.9ghz, with a vcore of 1.68.

The end result was fairly astounding. Temperatures of -8c at idle, 17c under full load.

Now if you want a chiller like mine, Its gonna take some modding. If you want something half :mad2::mad2::mad2:, go with another setup.

If I'm not mistaken, my rig set the record for not only the lowest water cooled temps on a Pressy 3.0, but it also set the Pressy 3.0 overclock record, that is, as far as I have read, no one on any other forum has reported, and been able to prove otherwise.

If I can help with anything else, please feel free to contact me. I also have a chiller setup identical to the one I just described, which I dont need anymore. Its not pretty because I never finished the unit by putting it in a wooded case, but it does work, and work just as efficiently as the other I mentioned. They are both built with identical parts. ;-)