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Liquid Cooling Computers

ColorBAT believes in providing liquid cooling for computer workstations that are being used for serious work. The information below will give you the details on how we provide such cooling for our own computers. If you'd like for us to up-grade one of your computers to liquid cooling, just send us an EMail and tell us what you're interested in. We'll get back to you.

If you'd like more information, send us an Email. We'll try to help.

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Continuous Flow System (CFS)

Liquid Cooling Computers

Fifteen years ago the typical CPU consumed about 5 - 8 watts of power. In fact, back in the early days, there was no such thing as a CPU cooling fan. Such things did not come into use until Intel brought out the early 486 Pentium CPUs. Ever since then, the wattage consumption of CPU's has been steadily increasing. There is every reason to believe that it will continue to get higher as we ask for more and more performance from our computers and the hardware that drives them. Today, the Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo consumes about 118 watts at idle and operates at about 105°F (41°C). Under 100% load, the Core 2 Duo goes up to around 148 watts and operates at about 109°F (43°C). The Intel Pentium D 930 CPU is a little worse. It consumes around 140 watts at idle and operates at about 105°F (41°C). Under 100% load, the Pentium D 930 goes up to around 186 watts and operates at about 116°F (47°C). Video cards typically use over 125 watts and hard drives can easily use 30 watts. RAM modules typically use 20 - 30 watts per module and chip-sets on motherboards can use 10 - 20 watts per module. If the air temperature in your house is 80ºF, then your computer-cooling fan-system is literally blowing fairly warm air across things to try and cool them. This requires bigger and more powerful fans that generate more and more noise. If you have more than one computer in your work area, you will have a rather noisy little space to spend your time in. Further, after a few months of operation most CPU fans begin to clog up their cooling fins with air-bourn dirt that greatly reduces their cooling effect. With all of that is mind, we have explored ways to use liquid cooling techniques to both improve cooling performance as well as to reduce the noise level. Currently there are a half-dozen or so different companies offering some form of liquid cooling - either complete, ready-to-install kits or the separate parts for do-it-your-self folks. After a lot of study, I finally decided on a system offered by Zalman called the Reserator1 Plus. It consists of a "cooling tower" about 2 feet high, the heat exchangers for the CPU and the video card, and the related tubing, connectors, clamps, etc. The tower holds about 3 quarts of liquid coolant that is re-circulated by a built-in water pump.



	The cooling tower is that tall black thing between the monitor and the computer case. I've tricked the computer out with a lot of blue lights. There is an accessory Zalman fan on top of the cooling tower that blows air down across the fins of the tower. The tower fins amount to a little over one and a fourth square meters of surface area.

I decided against using the standard liquid coolant that Zalman ships with their system. Instead, I used a product called Fluid XP+ Extreme, about $35/qt. It is made in Texas. It's claim to fame is that it is NON-CONDUCTIVE!! That's right, if it spills on the motherboard or other electronics.... NOTHING!! No shorts... no smoke... just NOTHING!! It is also bio-degradable, non-toxic, and made from FDA-approved products (what ever that means). Yes, it is a tad pricy, but considering the cost in materials and labor to replace a trashed motherboard that might get wet from a leaky connection, I think it is well worth the price. Right now... after about two years and a half of 24/7 operation, my unit is keeping the CPU about 25 degrees F COOLER than the cooling fan used to keep it! So, I'm a very happy camper! The CPU is now running about 10 degrees F above ambient room temperature. The Asus motherboard (like all Intel motherboards) has a monitoring utility that tells me exactly what the CPU operating temperature is at any given moment. The Zalman liquid cooling system comes with a heat-exchange unit for both the CPU and the video card. Setting it up was fairly easy, except for working the air bubbles out of the lines. The lines need to be "bleed" to be sure that all the air is out of them. Otherwise, the air pockets act as a block and no fluid flows at all, which will result in the CPU overheating and shutting down in about 60 seconds after power-on. Trust me... been there, done that! The fluid tubes that Zalman ships are 12/8mm (12mm OD and 8mm ID). That's important to know. Not all liquid cooling accessories from other companies are interchangeable due to tube size differences. The Zalman tubes are fairly stiff and will take a rather tight bend without collapsing. But, there are special springs and plastic coils that you can buy to fit over the tubing to guarantee that it will not kink if you bend it too tightly. I had thought about trying to extend the liquid cooling system to the RAM modules and the hard drives, but gave that up when I discovered how slowly the fluid was circulating through the basic "system" of just the CPU and the video card. I really should get a more powerful fluid pump if I want to use this freaky, non-conductive, coolant. I would like to add some sort of alarm system that will shut the computer down in the event of a fluid-cooling-failure... before the CPU actually over heats. But, so far, I haven't decided on just how I want to define a fluid-cooling-failure or how I want to detect it. Here's the problem. A pump failure could result in either no amperage being drawn (winding burn-out) or a high level of amperage (bearing failure or clogged water line). Due to the high viscosity of the non-conduction fluid, there is very little water pressure on the fluid that is just barely circulating. So, trying to detect water pressure is not real practical unless I install a more powerful pump. Perhaps I could rig a temperature monitor on the CPU and use that as a definition of cooling failure. I added an additional fan-powered cooling device for the 4 RAM modules. The RAM cooler is called the NEON CRAB Memory Cooler, model #EC-MNC-E and sells for about $14.00. It contains 2 small fans that blow air on the RAM modules. And, yes there are blinking lights all over it! But it makes a noticeable difference in the temperature of the RAM modules. Before the "Crab", the modules were pretty hot to the touch. Now, with the Crab installed, they are no warmer than room temperature to the touch. One "Crab" cools all four modules.

	This is a photo of the Neon Crab, It does a great job of keeping up to four RAM modules cool. It will work with almost any type of RAM modules.

I'm still using front-removable all-aluminum caddies from Vantec for the hard drives. Each caddy has a built-in fan that blows air across the hard drive. Vantec offers caddies for both IDE and SATA drives. Expect them to cost about $45.00 each.

	This is the Vantec hard drive caddy. It has a built-in temperature display that monitors the hard drive. There is also a built-in cooling fan. Caddies are available for both IDE and SATA drives. In my set-up, I have 3 IDE drives and 6 SATA drives. I'm gradually phasing out the older IDE drives. The SATA drives are hot-swapable.

	This is a close up of the Vantec LCD display. The hard drive temperature is displayed in either Fahrenheit or Celsius. A high-point alarm can be set to alert you if the temperature ever goes too high. An icon in the upper right corner confirms that the built-in fan is operating. And, a second icon in the upper left corner confirms when ever there is read/write activity.

Right now the Vantec caddies and their built-in fan coolers are allowing my hard drives to run about 15-20° F above ambient room temperature. That seems to be OK. But, it is hard to know for sure how operating temperature relates to motor/bearing failure on hard drives. The large black-colored case that I'm using is made by Thermaltake (www.thermaltakeusa.com) and has 10 front accessible spaces for 5.25" devices. I have used one of the sspaces for a DVD/CD-ROM burner and the other 9 spaces for hard drives. I'm also still using a floppy drive on all of my computers.

	The Thermaltake Armor Case

This liquid-cooled computer is running a Pentium 4 D Hyper-Threaded, 3.00GHz CPU with 2GB or DDR-400 RAM, and 9 hard drives totaling 2.5 terebytes of storage. It uses an ASUS motherboard, P4S800-X. For more details on how we use these hard drives to back-up our data, click HERE If you'd like for us to custom-build a liquid-cooled workstation for you, just get in touch with us (EMail). Together we'll figure out exactly what you need and I'll then quote you a price. Delivery can usually be in about 3 weeks after receipt of your order.