Why are there no water cooling systems that actually refrigerate the water?

Lemonade1947

Lemonade1947

Lemonade1947

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Last night I had a dream that I connected a water cooled rig to the water cooler in my school. Although this is stupid it got me wondering.

Why are there no water cooling systems that actually refrigerate the water? since it could be refrigerated to near freezing, it would obviously cool the processor/ gfx card a lot.

there's probably a really obvious answer to this and I'm gonna look like an idiot.
 
Do you know how big and how much power something would need to 'refrigerate' water in a PC? .. that'll be you're obvious answer..

Also, how long does it take for a bottle of water to cool in a fridge? 30-60 minutes.. Can a loop be that long or have water hanging around in one place for that amount of time?

Nice premise but a few problems for you to fix first. :)
 
You buy a chiller, a few people have modified beer coolers to work on systems, but you have the extra size of the chiller and noise.
 
Running costs also are pretty high - just getting it a few degrees below ambient let alone anywhere near freezing. (EDIT: beaten in the time it took to post lol).
 
Phase change cooling also exists which is what you're thinking of but without the water.

What I mean by that is fridges and freezers compress a gas to a liquid then evaporate it in a chamber to reduce temperatures. It then gets pumped round a large radiator to lose the heat it absorbed and gets compressed again.

Typically the place the temperature is being reduced is inside a fridge and the huge radiator is the black grille at the back.

It doesn't have to be like that. Instead the liquid can be pumped to an expansion chamber right on top of the CPU for ridiculous negative temperatures, then back out to a radiator to lose heat and be compressed again to liquid.

It requires a large chunky bit of equipment in a computer sized case outside your computer and a hose going into your case.

Also as has been mentioned, all this lower than ambient temperatures you get from phase changing or chilling anything in your computer causes water to condense on everything which is cooled. Controlling that in your daily use computer is a ridiculous chore.
 
You can chill the input air/water quite a few degrees below ambient (without shooting for zero or sub-zero) with great results and no real condensation problems without going nuts and still get very good results. But even thats pretty expensive when your dumping 100s of watts of heat into the system i.e. http://aten-hosted.com/images/1250c.jpg
 
ExRayTed said:
Anyone remember the Peltier/TEC coolers that were all the rage a while ago?
Click to expand...

Yes I had one, to use for the Athlon T-Bird 1000 @1500Mhz, and was watercooled. With an open waterloop also. :o (bucket, double pump and big radiator with "primitive" fans)

Alternative to cool an overclocked T-Bird was the FOP38 back then, and believe me, anyone who has used one, still remembers the noise. (as I did). But for not Greece where the ambient temp was getting 45C in the summer months.
(hence the bucket to drop some ice cubes in the loop at the hot afternoons).

Until the XP came out bit more than a year later, and saved us from the hassle. :D

----------------------------------

Regarding the main discussion. You can always use a cascade. :D
 
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Like everyone has said, it was done in the old days but not anymore, main reason being water cooling is simply a better all round solution.


ANDARIAL said:
or connect the loop to the mains water :D
Too wasteful of water but quiet and cheaper than a phase-change or chiller :)
Click to expand...

Or connect the CPU/GPU blocks to the central heating system, disconnect the boiler and fun times :P (I would only recommend doing this in summer as no computer is going to be able to heat a house).
 
You could do what i do and have the rads mounted in a box on a windowsill sucking cold air from outside. My water temp is currently 11.5 degrees although i have been down to as low as 7 degrees!! Never had any condensation problems either.
 
Wow- that was a trip down memory lane - I used to love chillers and phase coolers. Apart from submerging my radiator in the cistern of my toilet, I think the most fun I had was using a Pelt/TEC on my GPU that was then cooled by a chiller - ideal as it stopped the pipes from freezing, but still needed a pretty healthy amount of di-electric and cladding around the card!

There was a hybrid closed loop water cooler / chiller released a little while ago (same sort of size as the Corsairs) but it wasn't well received.

On an aside - given how little power the new chips use I'm amazed this stuff hasn't mad a come back. Especially the TECs - we were always limited by the sheer power requirements which should now be far more manageable!
 
I know someone who had one of those desk fridges. He cut two tube holes in the door and housed two radiators inside the fridge.

He had amazing temps until he killed his graphics card from the condensation dripping off the tubes.
 
cavemanoc said:
Wow- that was a trip down memory lane - I used to love chillers and phase coolers. Apart from submerging my radiator in the cistern of my toilet, I think the most fun I had was using a Pelt/TEC on my GPU that was then cooled by a chiller - ideal as it stopped the pipes from freezing, but still needed a pretty healthy amount of di-electric and cladding around the card!

There was a hybrid closed loop water cooler / chiller released a little while ago (same sort of size as the Corsairs) but it wasn't well received.

On an aside - given how little power the new chips use I'm amazed this stuff hasn't mad a come back. Especially the TECs - we were always limited by the sheer power requirements which should now be far more manageable!
Click to expand...

The big glaring thing is that they generate a ton of heat by themselves. In addition to moving heat from one side to the other.

So whatever the reason for having the peltier in there you now need an even bigger cooling solution to deal with the combined heat from the peltier and the chip.

Unless you're gagging for sub-ambient on the chip, if you have that kind of cooling already, why put a peltier in the way?
 
That's exactly why we did it - it's all about getting way down below zero, but in a usable way. I love what the guys are doing with LN2 and even Liquid Helium now, but what I loved about the Mach 1 and the Pelted chiller was that I could run it as an everyday rig. I am deeply saddened that the OEM Phase guys have 'evaporated' and the only way to do it now is with the custom builders. Given how little power is required now, I'm pretty sure even my old Mach 1 would be fine with a re-gas and a tune... almost wish I still had it.

Properly done it could even have gathered a 'mainstream' following, but unfortunately they died out as the chips got too hot, before they really had a chance to take off.
 
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