watercooling a 19" rack

[MrP]

Just been to the pub and chatting with USS final frontier from team picard.

at the mo he has a 19" rack with 8 motherboard in it doing seti 24/7, unfortunatly its getting rather warm (its heating his garage quite well at the moment)

so, one idea was water cooling the whole lot.

so the first question, is cooling 12 CPU's fesable??

the second question is, if it is fesable, how??

my first idea was a large car radaiator, when when i put my mind to it, this had been discussed along time ago and i think the outcome was that a car rad wasnt efficent enough.

so the next idea was getting a compressor and cooler from a fridge to cool the water. i think that this might work (but i aint no water cooling expert) but the next problem is, how do you set it up???

if you do it in series, the first processor will be nice and cold, but the last one will get rather warm. so what about in parrelle, 3 or 4 branches, each doing a couple of CPU's each, and then going back into a main feed back to the compressor.

would that be possible???

any ideas people???

toodles :xsofa:

[Player0]

Usually, if your in rack mode already....air conditioning is the way to go. Most computer rooms are air conditioned. Well, good ones anyway. I think thats something to look in to, it might be the more efficient solution.

As for watercooling each CPU...8 is a lot. You can pretty much rule out chilled water. No simple fridge/water cooler is going to cope with that kind of power. No, you'd need something custom.

No, I would go for evaporative cooling, all the way. If its in the garage, then he should have no problems hooking up a couple large bongs out there. This would be the most efficient way to cool all those CPUs. It should be cheaper too. If a radiator is a must, a car radiator or two with some box window fans would do the trick, but you really want these outside for the best results. With bong cooling, you might even beable to get water temperatures below ambient.

I would create a bong tower, maybe four large pipes, each with its own shower head. The more powerful the pump the better. I would get a large 110/220v pond pump, with 3/4" fittings, use that to pump water through the 4 showerheads. Get large, fine spray models. If you get a strong enough pump, you might even beable to use an atomizer head (fuel injector).

The bong pumps would be seperate from CPU pump(s). The bong pump dedicated to circulating water through the bong towers, the otherone dedicated for the cpus. 10-20 gallons of water for sure, in a sealable tank (dont want squirles getting sucked in there)

I would get the best waterblocks you can out there (Maze3) for each CPU, with 3/8" fittings. Not 1/2". This is for pressure reasons. You can probably get away with one small 400gph pump for 4 cpus. But it MUST use 3/4" ID tubing or better off the main! You want the pumps submerged right in the bong water resevoir, for best head results. Spilt the 3/4" tubing off using Y adapters (not T) in to 3/8" ID tubing. This will ensure that each cpu gets the best flow. Run 3/8" lines from each CPU back in to the pump, dont recombine them.

Important: All the 3/8" branches coming off the main line (3/4" or better) should be as equal length as possible. And all tubes should be as short as possible. The more pumps per CPU the better, but you could get away with two.

Another alternative would be to run 2-3 400gph (or better) pumps in parallel. That is...they are all sitting in the bottom of your resevoir, and all three have a 3/4" tube running off their outport. You combine the 2-3 3/4" output tubes in to one large 2" PVC Tube, which has all 8 branches sticking out of the other end (equally spaced and as far away from the entrance of the tube as possible). You might want to do sort of a gravity feed to help increase pressure.

Well, its a big topic for sure. Its certainly possible, it sounds fun, I'd do it if I had the space :)