Tech Reaction

I thought i would share with you all my latest endevor in pc cooling or perhaps as my wife would say pc tomfoolery. I enjoy pc’s as a hobby not as a profession so I may not be extreme but maybe just creative. As you all know cpu’s, especially quad cores run a little warm. When overclocked they run HOT. So how do you solve that problem. Well theres air cooling, thats ok for stock speeds. not so good for overclocking. You can try the cold air trick but thats a little tough when its summer. In the winter in wisconsin where im at its ok, until your wife yells at you for having the pc hanging out the window and you sitting next to it with a parka on. So then you get to water which is pretty good. After that is dry ice and phase and ln2 and water ever else they use now. I did not want to go extreme but i wanted to get more from my PhenomII without breaking the bank or my wife breaking me so this what i did. I found an old ac unit , a cooler, a couple of different pumps , and an apogee gt water block and went to work. oh yea, forgot about the old server cabinet i found at the dump. used that too.

the motherboard tray

ok the board and the power supply are set, now to work on the cpu

kneadable eraser, insulate

yes there really is an apogee gt in there somewhere. maybe i went overboard but looking at other posts on the web of people using this method to control condensation is seemed appropriate. now we move on to the air conditioner. its a 5000 btu unit that i got for $10.00, it works good so i took most of it apart and modified it a little to suit my needs. added a coleman cooler and heres what you get.

evap and cooler combined

now onto the plumbing, at first i used a swiftech mcp655 pump to move the coolant, thats 2 gallons of ford gold coolant and 2 gallons of water with 2 bottle of deicer for good measure. unfortunately on my first test run the 655 did not seem to like the cold so much. it lost some of its pumping power.

frozen swiftech

on the day i was experimenting with the pump i had a plumber come to fix my water heater so while he was there he commented on my creation. to my amazement he went out to truck and retrieved a pump he had. its a little giant 4 md. he assured me this pump would not mind the cold at all and my gph capacity would increase by a large amount. needless to say he was right. the pump was a little pricey at 175.00 usd but i fiquired why not. rigged it up and added all pvc pipeing in the whole loop and insulation.

pump and pipeing

pipes up the cabinet

ac unit

well so far so good, time to fire it up. i kept everthing stock at first so i could test the ac and pump operation. running the ac unit for 30 minutes took the temperature of the coolant in the resivoir down to 0′c and after an hour it hit -15c. pump worked good and all seemed fine.

cold phenomII

now we are getting somewhere, no condensation problems, pump works great, the cpu is cold and im standing there in shorts drinking a beer. gotta love it. now it is time to see what i can overclocking. this cpu was pretty good on plain water cooling. i could get it to 4200mhz for spi1m but it struggled with 3dmark and wprime. ac on for an hour and temps at -15c in the res. when the cpu temp hit 0′c or below both aod and my board temp monitor lost it. both read -256c so we will have to assume the cpu temp was at least -5c. i cranked up the multi to 4100 mhz and just shy of 1.525volts and up the nb to 3000mhz and gave it a whirl with wprime1024. it worked great cpu temps were at 10c the whole time. so i just kept going till she would not go higher. 4305mhz so far in spi1m and 4280mhz for 3dmark runs. i kept it at 4250 for 5hours with a max temp of 10c.

so what did this little project gain,well so far about 200 to 250mhz cpu speed over what i used to get not to mention running nb speeds at 3000mhz all day long. i know there not earth shattering results but for what i do there pretty darn good. i could get myself a pot and try my hand at dice or ln2 but i chose something like this instead so i can keep it simple. i belong to small group of overclockers at a place called “the raptor pit” and we have 2 events each year called forum wars.thats what this setup is for, keep it simple and have fun. total cost really not much more than a high end water setup, about $250.00. now what can i cool next. oh i know how about those 2 4870×2 sitting in there or maybe the chipsets. we shall soon see.