Aquarium Coolers
- Thread starter NugentS
- Start date
Soldato
- Joined
- 15 May 2012
- Posts
- 5,863
- Location
- Louth, lincs
When you say cooler are you talking a chiller or pump/both, as with certain chillers you need a pump also, ive used a pond pump before fed from a cool box with water and ice with good effect for benchmarking runs 
, also used it when i was lazy to cool system with just water but you have to change the water every so often as no radiators in system to dissipate heat. Chillers can work well, but not so cheap to run. Better off just upgrading your PC's cooling tbh, you can get them to run pretty much silent unless under heavy loads.
, also used it when i was lazy to cool system with just water but you have to change the water every so often as no radiators in system to dissipate heat. Chillers can work well, but not so cheap to run. Better off just upgrading your PC's cooling tbh, you can get them to run pretty much silent unless under heavy loads.Aquarium equipment isn't really going to be that helpful long-term. Chillers are expensive to buy and run. If you're wanting to transfer heat to a different room, your best bet would be a massive external rad, and depending on distance, resistance etc several D5 pumps each way to ensure flow.
Last edited:
I'm not fully sure what the OP is intending, or if they have any experience of water cooling, but I have sometimes toyed with the idea of using quick connects to run tubing from the PC in my computer room down through the floorboards and up in to the bathroom next door, in the cavity under the bath, where the rad and fans would be out of sight. Depends on how easy it is for you to get your floorboards up, or you could go through the wall I guess. Basically this is the same as a radbox setup but with the tubes going through/under a wall. With the noisier parts of the loop in another room you can run everything full blast and not hear it. Apart from when you go for a dump.
Put your PC in the other room then and get fibre optic HDMI / DP cables and some USB extensions that run on cat 5 etc.
Finding a water chiller that was designed for a fish tank with the correct size fittings, correct flow rate and pressure running pipes into another room and hoping nothing ever leaks sounds like a recipe for disaster.
After doing a boat load of research that where I am heading with this. I was kind of up to 3 loops. 1 for the PC leading to a heat exchanger, 1 to cool the heat exchanger from the large resevoir and the final loop for the aquarium cooler.
My current plan is to put a big rad in the attic along with a couple of decent pumps (hopefully quiet). Its a 3m (ish) lift. Pumps at the bottom to push. mavity would work for the other side.
My attic did reach 35.7 in summer (I have added a bit of ventilation since then) but I am not planning on any significant overclock. Even a 35 degree attic should keep a GPU & CPU at useable levels
I am trying to move the heat expelled from the PC case and the noise away from the officeWhen you say cooler are you talking a chiller or pump/both, as with certain chillers you need a pump also, ive used a pond pump before fed from a cool box with water and ice with good effect for benchmarking runs
Why not just put your PC in another room, and run extended cables to your monitor etc like Linus tech tips? Will save you a boatload of cash
Hmmm - never considered that idea. Would clear some space in my office too.
3 monitors, mix of DP and HDMI. I think the DP is the 4K monitor, other 2 (2K) are HDMI
I would need to put the PC about 8 metres away. The 4K monitor at 180Hz/120Hz (I can't remember its been so long) might struggle
I am also concerned about adding extra latency to mouse, keyboard, USB, Screens etc. Is that even an issue?
Last edited:
Hone
Honestly, not sure but length with the right equipment shouldn't be an issue, you'd have to research but I don't recall them having latency issues doing it. You can even get a Silverstone product that allows you to remotely power, shut down and restart your PC with a little key fob thingy. That works on 2.5ghz WiFi signal.
I can't say for certain if it would add more latency or not but guess if done correctly it would be fairly minimal. For a full external water cooling loop , with multiple rads, 4-6 pumps, depending on flow, fittings, tubing and blocks you are talking likely £2k minimum at a guess.
Honestly, not sure but length with the right equipment shouldn't be an issue, you'd have to research but I don't recall them having latency issues doing it. You can even get a Silverstone product that allows you to remotely power, shut down and restart your PC with a little key fob thingy. That works on 2.5ghz WiFi signal.
I can't say for certain if it would add more latency or not but guess if done correctly it would be fairly minimal. For a full external water cooling loop , with multiple rads, 4-6 pumps, depending on flow, fittings, tubing and blocks you are talking likely £2k minimum at a guess.
Years ago I did exactly what you are trying to achieve, but without the Chiller. I ran some piping through the wall and into the bathroom, then immersed the radiator (old copper heater matrix pulled from from a car - kinda dates the project ) The cold water in the cistern cooled the radiator, and the occasional flush was enough to avoid the water heating up.)
As the toilet was about the same level as the computer I didn't need a massive pump, but back then it was all aquarium stuff, so it was definitely overpowered anyway! I did have a secondary radiator just in case the system was overwhelmed, but never actually needed it. The real win was in the fact that the water was constantly being refreshed.
A simple RadBox would achieve what you wanted, and if you did run it into the roof, you would have the advantage of great, low temps during winter - just be aware that any time you move well below ambient, you are going to have condensation issues. It's normally far better just to have the radbox in a differnt room with lots of cooling.
"Cascade" cooling, with multiple loops is fun, but not great value for money - if anything, Id just be tempted to build a box with multiple, large radiators, and leave it at that.
I have run computers remotely from other rooms in the house. It's a neat idea, but I've never managed to get it to run robustly enough to not spend all my time having to go through to fix whatever issue it's having
) The cold water in the cistern cooled the radiator, and the occasional flush was enough to avoid the water heating up.)As the toilet was about the same level as the computer I didn't need a massive pump, but back then it was all aquarium stuff, so it was definitely overpowered anyway! I did have a secondary radiator just in case the system was overwhelmed, but never actually needed it. The real win was in the fact that the water was constantly being refreshed.
A simple RadBox would achieve what you wanted, and if you did run it into the roof, you would have the advantage of great, low temps during winter - just be aware that any time you move well below ambient, you are going to have condensation issues. It's normally far better just to have the radbox in a differnt room with lots of cooling.
"Cascade" cooling, with multiple loops is fun, but not great value for money - if anything, Id just be tempted to build a box with multiple, large radiators, and leave it at that.
I have run computers remotely from other rooms in the house. It's a neat idea, but I've never managed to get it to run robustly enough to not spend all my time having to go through to fix whatever issue it's having
It would save you a ton of hassle, risk and power use.
I have my pc in another room for this exact reason (noise/heat) and usng quality 5m cables 4k 144hz all works fine, no latency problems as cables will have to be in spec and they are fairly chunky so thicker gauge wires most likely.
All peripherals are done via usb 3.0 extension cables
Active fibre optic ones can do 50-100m
All peripherals are done via usb 3.0 extension cables
Active fibre optic ones can do 50-100m