Chillers

[Bwgan]

Anyone for experience with water chillers? Looking at aquarium chillers. It seems to me that pc specific devices are very expensive as they are aimed at a narrow market.
Cooling is all about heat exchange, so flow rate, temperature differential and area.
I'm thinking of cobbling together a 2 fish tanks (return and supply), return tank to chiller feeding supply tank and feeding into the pc

 

[Donnie Fisher]

Can a chiller cool at the same or greater rate as the cpu is heating the system ? If not, then it sounds a little pointless compared to existing established methods for long term running. Ie eventually the system could overheat. I would be surprised if a domestic fridge or freezer could out cool a cpu and gpu at full chat

Added to that, the chiller will likely have to dump its recovered heat into the ambient air, just in the same way that a air cooled radiator system would.

So you’ll have this massive fish tank setup running all relying on a teenie chiller pushing air through a teenie radiator cooler to get rid of the heat.

Surely you would be easier and cheaper running a few 360 rads in series with fans spinning slowly and quietly and you would achieve an equally good result.

Hardware Canucks did a video recently talking about radiator size and it was very evident that you reach diminishing returns.

 

[Grim5]

Standard water loop + air conditioning in the room is all you really need to keep the pc and yourself cool

 

[MikeTimbers]

A fish tank chiller only has to deal with removing the room's ambient heat from the water. You're putting a 400W heat source into the water. The chiller simply isn't designed to deal with removing that much heat. In the same way a fridge/freezer is designed to cool cold things. If you put hot food in a fridge just listen to what the chiller has to then do. And of course the hot meal isn't staying hot.

Knock yourself out if you wish but don't expect too much.

 

[geekyEd]

Standard water loop + air conditioning in the room is all you really need to keep the pc and yourself cool

It’s ocUK 99% of the year a window cracked will suffice