dicki
05-19-2002, 04:20 PM
this is a little blurb i wrote about direct core cooling... initially published on kms's site www.pclincs.co.uk i thought it might go nicely over here too... enjoy
Well this is my first online article so I apologize if it sounds awkward and doesn't explain things well, obviously I will be about on the bulletin boards for help or advice so feel free to write me a note. I’m also available on icq (96717898) and via email (dicki@pclincs.co.uk)
This brief article is an introduction to budget water cooling, this is a kind of diary of my personal experiences and as such I do not recommend that other people try these things and I will not be held responsible if you flood your computer trying any of this stuff out. Also because it’s a diary and not a guide this is an unedited account with the mistakes I made included. I feel it will be a lot more useful for people to see my mistakes and learn from them, than for me to edit them out and appear a god like over clocker ;)
I’ve been over clocking computers for about 4 years now since the days of the AMD K6-2. My first really over clocked machine was an AMD Duron 700 on a KT7-raid, when I bought this machine I began to get seriously involved in over clocking and cooling due to the extreme voltages that I was putting into the chip. In those days I used an alpha 6035 and a delta fan along with some innovative ducting to keep everything cool. I managed to get the chip up to 1.1Ghz but it was seriously hot, about 65c, and not exactly stable. On top of that the noise from the delta fan was driving me mental so I began to look at the possibility of water-cooling, mainly as a noise-reducing device but also with a view to getting a stable 1.1Ghz. But being a poor student I couldn't afford to go for a proper water-cooling kit so I had to look for other methods.
Whilst wandering about in the NinjaMicros forums me, jozzer and player0 had a bit of a chat about the possibilities of direct core cooling... this is the idea of sticking a cup over your cpu and squirting water directly over the core admittedly I was skeptical at first and player0 was sure it would never work ;) but jozzer gave it a go and it seemed to work for him so I just had to try it. (Historical note: a couple of months after jozzer tried this for the first time leufkin tech released a direct core cooler… coincidence? J )
I went down to the local hardware store and raided their plumbing department looking for sensibly sized bits of tubing that could fit over the core of my CPU, as well as some marine epoxy and some 3/8" brass barbs. On top of that I ordered myself an eheim 1250, this pump is so good it scares me, it pushes an amazing amount of water and has a good head on it (ability to lift water) and it's absolutely silent. If your water-cooling this is the pump to have, the 1045 works pretty well too it just pushes a bit less water.
As you can see from the picture above the idea was fairly simple :) I prepared the CPU by using nail varnish to waterproof all of the contacts on top of the ceramic plate and I lapped the bottom of the pipe to ensure it was flat and glued it to the top of the CPU using a strong marine epoxy. If your going to try this you must ensure whatever epoxy you get is waterproof, some glues can be degraded over time by contact with water. I discovered this the hard way because the first glue I tried was not specifically waterproof and I ended up filling my computer with about a gallon of water before I noticed and shut it down. Also make sure you follow the instructions regarding drying time do not try to use the cooler before it's dry, and don't use a hair drier on it, it will just weaken the glue and leave you with a very soggy computer.
On a side note… I know this sounds stupid but water and computers aren’t as big a problem as you might think… the voltages involved are so low very little if any damage will result (again see the disclaimer!!!) I’ve flooded my computer more times than I can remember and I’m still using the same old motherboard… admittedly it’s got a bit of aluminum and copper bloom on it (furry stuff that is the aluminum/copper equivalent of rust) but all I do is dry it off in the airing cupboard and brush it off with a stiff electrical component cleaning brush and some strong alcohol used for cleaning components and it’s ready to use again when it’s dry. Defiantly don’t panic it will only make things worse.
To complete my water cooling experiments I got myself a big yellow bucket to use as a reservoir and plugged everything together, in this system I decided to use shear mass of water to absorb the heat of my processor knowing that this volume of water would give me a huge time constant and allow plenty of time for a shut down if temps start creeping up.
After powering up the computer I ran prime for a couple of hours at stock speeds and voltage to see what happened and was very impressed by what I saw… temps stable at 32c looked bloody good to me, they’d be at least 40c with the alpha so I was happy to push it a bit further. Knowing that the chip would run at 1.1ghz I went straight for it. 10 * 111 with 2.1volts running prime, the temps started at 38c which was brilliant but I had obviously reached the limits of this cooling system because with no radiator as I was gaining 1c every half hour, once I reached 50c core temperature I chickened out and stopped prime to see how long it would take the temps to come down, it took roughly the same amount of time to drop down and eventually stabilized at 35c with normal browsing.
At this point I decided to try some water-cooling tricks of the trade, first thing I did was enabled the CPU halt instruction using wpcrset this was to ensure my idle temp was as low as possible, this dropped my idle temp down to 32c meaning that if the computer went to full load I would have an extra hour and a half running time before I would need to idle again, I also started keeping a couple of liters of cold water beside my computer to top up the tank or cool things down in an emergency. The water level would go down fairly rapidly when the computer was working hard due to evaporation so that bottle was very helpful, it also helped to bring temps down in a hurry if I forgot to check them all the time.
Everything was going fine for at least 2 months until disaster struck, for some reason the system sprung a leak and filled my computer with water… I was away for the weekend so I didn’t notice for a couple of days and when I can back things did not look good (as you can see below) but like I said above after cleaning everything off it was fine. On disassembly of the cpu I couldn’t tell exactly what had gone wrong, it appeared the water had gone straight through the ceramic plate of the cpu, I had a bit of trouble believing this but it was my best guess at the time and it seemed to be confirmed by a guy I know who works in a chip FAB telling me how chips are put together (the silicon bit is just glued on top with holes drilled through the ceramic for the gold wires). After a while I am now beginning to think that the nail varnish was my downfall because it was all flaking away when I took it all apart, I think it may have lifted a bit where the pipe was glued down and allowed water underneath the pipe and onto the chip where it leaked into the socket around the edges of the chip. I say this because jozzer was running his chip for significantly longer than me under these situations with no trouble so I can’t believe the water got through the ceramic.
The other possible problem developing was the build up of calcium deposits on the CPU core itself, this would have been bad over time because calcium isn’t known for it’s heat transmitting properties so would have lead to a gradual increase in temperatures, also it’s not the kind of thing you can easily strip apart and clean once it’s assembled so it would present some problems.
And so concludes the first episode of my budget water-cooling series, the total cost of this cooler was about £50 and that was nearly wholly the cost of the eheim pump, everything else cost less than £1. It vastly out performed my old alpha, was entirely silent and was good comedy value when people see your computer and come out with the classic line “why is there a big yellow bucket in that computer?” anyway the moral of this story is don’t be afraid to experiment you’d be surprised what you can do and it’s a lot of fun. Happy cooling ;)
Well this is my first online article so I apologize if it sounds awkward and doesn't explain things well, obviously I will be about on the bulletin boards for help or advice so feel free to write me a note. I’m also available on icq (96717898) and via email (dicki@pclincs.co.uk)
This brief article is an introduction to budget water cooling, this is a kind of diary of my personal experiences and as such I do not recommend that other people try these things and I will not be held responsible if you flood your computer trying any of this stuff out. Also because it’s a diary and not a guide this is an unedited account with the mistakes I made included. I feel it will be a lot more useful for people to see my mistakes and learn from them, than for me to edit them out and appear a god like over clocker ;)
I’ve been over clocking computers for about 4 years now since the days of the AMD K6-2. My first really over clocked machine was an AMD Duron 700 on a KT7-raid, when I bought this machine I began to get seriously involved in over clocking and cooling due to the extreme voltages that I was putting into the chip. In those days I used an alpha 6035 and a delta fan along with some innovative ducting to keep everything cool. I managed to get the chip up to 1.1Ghz but it was seriously hot, about 65c, and not exactly stable. On top of that the noise from the delta fan was driving me mental so I began to look at the possibility of water-cooling, mainly as a noise-reducing device but also with a view to getting a stable 1.1Ghz. But being a poor student I couldn't afford to go for a proper water-cooling kit so I had to look for other methods.
Whilst wandering about in the NinjaMicros forums me, jozzer and player0 had a bit of a chat about the possibilities of direct core cooling... this is the idea of sticking a cup over your cpu and squirting water directly over the core admittedly I was skeptical at first and player0 was sure it would never work ;) but jozzer gave it a go and it seemed to work for him so I just had to try it. (Historical note: a couple of months after jozzer tried this for the first time leufkin tech released a direct core cooler… coincidence? J )
I went down to the local hardware store and raided their plumbing department looking for sensibly sized bits of tubing that could fit over the core of my CPU, as well as some marine epoxy and some 3/8" brass barbs. On top of that I ordered myself an eheim 1250, this pump is so good it scares me, it pushes an amazing amount of water and has a good head on it (ability to lift water) and it's absolutely silent. If your water-cooling this is the pump to have, the 1045 works pretty well too it just pushes a bit less water.
As you can see from the picture above the idea was fairly simple :) I prepared the CPU by using nail varnish to waterproof all of the contacts on top of the ceramic plate and I lapped the bottom of the pipe to ensure it was flat and glued it to the top of the CPU using a strong marine epoxy. If your going to try this you must ensure whatever epoxy you get is waterproof, some glues can be degraded over time by contact with water. I discovered this the hard way because the first glue I tried was not specifically waterproof and I ended up filling my computer with about a gallon of water before I noticed and shut it down. Also make sure you follow the instructions regarding drying time do not try to use the cooler before it's dry, and don't use a hair drier on it, it will just weaken the glue and leave you with a very soggy computer.
On a side note… I know this sounds stupid but water and computers aren’t as big a problem as you might think… the voltages involved are so low very little if any damage will result (again see the disclaimer!!!) I’ve flooded my computer more times than I can remember and I’m still using the same old motherboard… admittedly it’s got a bit of aluminum and copper bloom on it (furry stuff that is the aluminum/copper equivalent of rust) but all I do is dry it off in the airing cupboard and brush it off with a stiff electrical component cleaning brush and some strong alcohol used for cleaning components and it’s ready to use again when it’s dry. Defiantly don’t panic it will only make things worse.
To complete my water cooling experiments I got myself a big yellow bucket to use as a reservoir and plugged everything together, in this system I decided to use shear mass of water to absorb the heat of my processor knowing that this volume of water would give me a huge time constant and allow plenty of time for a shut down if temps start creeping up.
After powering up the computer I ran prime for a couple of hours at stock speeds and voltage to see what happened and was very impressed by what I saw… temps stable at 32c looked bloody good to me, they’d be at least 40c with the alpha so I was happy to push it a bit further. Knowing that the chip would run at 1.1ghz I went straight for it. 10 * 111 with 2.1volts running prime, the temps started at 38c which was brilliant but I had obviously reached the limits of this cooling system because with no radiator as I was gaining 1c every half hour, once I reached 50c core temperature I chickened out and stopped prime to see how long it would take the temps to come down, it took roughly the same amount of time to drop down and eventually stabilized at 35c with normal browsing.
At this point I decided to try some water-cooling tricks of the trade, first thing I did was enabled the CPU halt instruction using wpcrset this was to ensure my idle temp was as low as possible, this dropped my idle temp down to 32c meaning that if the computer went to full load I would have an extra hour and a half running time before I would need to idle again, I also started keeping a couple of liters of cold water beside my computer to top up the tank or cool things down in an emergency. The water level would go down fairly rapidly when the computer was working hard due to evaporation so that bottle was very helpful, it also helped to bring temps down in a hurry if I forgot to check them all the time.
Everything was going fine for at least 2 months until disaster struck, for some reason the system sprung a leak and filled my computer with water… I was away for the weekend so I didn’t notice for a couple of days and when I can back things did not look good (as you can see below) but like I said above after cleaning everything off it was fine. On disassembly of the cpu I couldn’t tell exactly what had gone wrong, it appeared the water had gone straight through the ceramic plate of the cpu, I had a bit of trouble believing this but it was my best guess at the time and it seemed to be confirmed by a guy I know who works in a chip FAB telling me how chips are put together (the silicon bit is just glued on top with holes drilled through the ceramic for the gold wires). After a while I am now beginning to think that the nail varnish was my downfall because it was all flaking away when I took it all apart, I think it may have lifted a bit where the pipe was glued down and allowed water underneath the pipe and onto the chip where it leaked into the socket around the edges of the chip. I say this because jozzer was running his chip for significantly longer than me under these situations with no trouble so I can’t believe the water got through the ceramic.
The other possible problem developing was the build up of calcium deposits on the CPU core itself, this would have been bad over time because calcium isn’t known for it’s heat transmitting properties so would have lead to a gradual increase in temperatures, also it’s not the kind of thing you can easily strip apart and clean once it’s assembled so it would present some problems.
And so concludes the first episode of my budget water-cooling series, the total cost of this cooler was about £50 and that was nearly wholly the cost of the eheim pump, everything else cost less than £1. It vastly out performed my old alpha, was entirely silent and was good comedy value when people see your computer and come out with the classic line “why is there a big yellow bucket in that computer?” anyway the moral of this story is don’t be afraid to experiment you’d be surprised what you can do and it’s a lot of fun. Happy cooling ;)