Layering Rads

Muel · 1 Feb 2011 at 14:34

Hey All,

I've been considoring water cooling. Wanted to try it for ages but never been able to justify the price.

I want to stick with my Antec 300 because I love it and it's got the space for all my hardware, thing is it hasn't got space for much in the way of watercooling gear.

I was thinking I could get 2x240 radiators in the front pretty easily, with 6 fans in a fan-rad-fan-rad-fan arrangement.

Could this be made to work? Good plan? Would it make much difference to the amount of heat extracted from the water?

iamtheoneneo · 1 Feb 2011 at 16:00

good plan? no. horrible plan? yes

theres no way that would fit seriously, you underestimate how big and wide all that is going to be.
at best you would need to cut the hdd cages out, but realistically your going to need a better case or look at an external rad configuration

Muel · 1 Feb 2011 at 16:06

I have 5" of space in there to be going at. Single 240 in push/pull then? It's either that or stick with air cooling. Currently I have a Titan Fenrir which is only just enough on my 965BE, but I doubt it would be on an 1100t or something in the Bulldozer line.

I would like to have a crack at getting the 965BE to 3.9ghz before I get rid though, but I can't push the temps any higher.

iamtheoneneo · 1 Feb 2011 at 16:15

you cant get it in the front .... i dont see why thats hard to understand. :confused:

The antec 300 has bottom harddrive cages that need to be cut out to even begin to look at getting it in there.
are you prepared to butcher your case in order to get a radiator in there? if so go right ahead if not look at other options.

you seem to be looking at this in a very one dimensional way without any regard to sizes of the case, radiators or fans. a 'one size fits all' approach doesnt exactly work with such a basic case thats not designed in any way for wc.

OLDPHART · 1 Feb 2011 at 16:17

Hi, use a 360 RAD instead, my case if a FT01 were you mount the rad on the rear, what l did was make a shroud out of a old 120 fan. Just cut the fan support arms the fan will drop out and smooth whats left down, put the shroud between the rad and rear of the case and mount where the rear 12cm case fan is and this gives you room for cool air to get to the fan, works a treat rock solid, this might work for you.

At first had a push/pull set up, but read a review about different fan set ups for cooling the rad and found that the fans just set up to pull air through my rad worked just as well if not slightly better will also be fitting shrouds to the fans as they help the air flow through the rad especialy the dead spot in the centre of the rad which is caused by the fan not being able to draw air through that part of the Rad . You can read this articale at skinnee labs -

http://martin.skinneelabs.com/Radiator-Fan-Orientation-And-Shroud-Testing-Review.html

mjones1 · 1 Feb 2011 at 16:20

It's not really recommended since the heat dump from one rad goes into the other causing the water to warm up, i remember seeing somewhere that you need shrouds, low fpi and quite powerful fans for this to work efficiently.

Muel · 1 Feb 2011 at 16:29

iamtheoneneo said:
you cant get it in the front .... i dont see why thats hard to understand.
The antec 300 has bottom harddrive cages that need to be cut out to even begin to look at getting it in there.
are you prepared to butcher your case in order to get a radiator in there? if so go right ahead if not look at other options.

you seem to be looking at this in a very one dimensional way without any regard to sizes of the case, radiators or fans. a 'one size fits all' approach doesnt exactly work with such a basic case thats not designed in any way for wc.

Sorry I should have made clear, it will fit because I've already removed the HDD cages just to make it easier to work in and look neater.

The space to fit the rad/rads in is 290mm by 160mm by 110mm, although this would take some fettling. At the moment it's only 290mm by 160mm by 70mm.

OLDPHART said:
Hi, use a 360 RAD instead, my case if a FT01 were you mount the rad on the rear, what l did was make a shroud out of a old 120 fan. Just cut the fan support arms the fan will drop out and smooth whats left down, put the shroud between the rad and rear of the case and mount where the rear 12cm case fan is and this gives you room for cool air to get to the fan, works a treat rock solid, this might work for you.

[pic]

At first had a push/pull set up, but read a review about different fan set ups for cooling the rad and found that the fans just set up to pull air through my rad worked just as well if not slightly better will also be fitting shrouds to the fans as they help the air flow through the rad especialy the dead spot in the centre of the rad which is caused by the fan not being able to draw air through that part of the Rad . You can read this articale at skinnee labs -

http://martin.skinneelabs.com/Radiator-Fan-Orientation-And-Shroud-Testing-Review.html

Cheers, it's an option but I'd rather keep the rad/rads inside the case for asthetics sake. If it comes to changing the case then it'll have to fit at least one 360 in it.

mjones1 said:
It's not really recommended since the heat dump from one rad goes into the other causing the water to warm up, i remember seeing somewhere that you need shrouds, low fpi and quite powerful fans for this to work efficiently.

I thought this might be the case, but wouldn't that only happen if the air from the first rad is hotter than the water in the second? Otherwise it'd still cool the water, just not as much I thought?

OLDPHART · 1 Feb 2011 at 16:54

Hi again, mounting the case on the rear is easier which will give you more room in the case to route your custom loop, how would it spoil the case looks, is your case on show? My sons friends are all into PC's and not one have said it spoils the looks of my case its been the opposite in fact, used blue coloured tubing with black anti-kink springs going to the Rad looks really nice.

Frozennova · 1 Feb 2011 at 18:16

Stacking rads as a bad idea from research. Watercooling in an Antec 300 isn' the greatest of ideas either but very doable.

I'm currently running setup below.

XSPC 750 Dual bay pump/resevoir
XSPC Delta v3 waterblock
XSPC RS120 radiator (Rear mounted)
EK Coolstream XT240 radiator (Front Mounted)

Cable management will become a PITA with no where to hide unused cables if you've got a non modular PSU, you'll need to find somewhere to put your HDD as your optical bays will be filled with pump/res and a optical drive. Mines currently laying on the bottom of the case, however I will be replacing my pump/res combo with a Laing DDC which will free up two optical bays allowing hard drives to be mounted in there with adapters.

If you've any more questions just give me a shout.

Squakingcow · 1 Feb 2011 at 18:27

Rad stacking is only a good idea if you plan on using really high speed fans (and even then a single rad with a high surface area per fan is probably a better idea).

This is because by stacking 2 rads together you are essentially doubling the thickness which in turn doubles the air resistance through the radiator, which requires more powerful fans push/pull the air through the rad at the same rate. This will result in worse performance than a single radiator with quiet fans.

JonJ678 · 1 Feb 2011 at 21:01

Quite a lot of bad physics in this thread.

For a radiator to remove heat, the water within needs to be warmer than the air passing through it. The air coming out the back of the radiator is warmer than that going in, but never as warm as the water itself. The effectiveness of a radiator can be cast in terms of how close to the water temperature the exhaust is.

The problem is that modern radiators are damned good. The air leaving them has increased in temperature by around 75% of the water - ambient difference. This means that a second radiator is drawing in air which is rather close to the water temperature, and it wont remove much heat.

I'm considering stacking radiators as a means of driving two seperate loops, where the water temperatures are significantly different to each other (one is gpu, one is cpu), but even then I'm not sure I'm going to bother.

Squakingcow · 1 Feb 2011 at 22:15

It's not really got much to do with the temperature delta between the air and the water in the second rad being small, it has much more to do with air resistance through the radiator.

With a radiator there are two main factors which affect the rate of heat transfer, the rate at which air passes through the radiator, and the surface area that this air comes into contact with.

Obviously to increase the rate at which air passes through the radiator you can fit a faster more powerful fan, which will also result in an increase in noise (which is undesirable).

So the other option to increase the rate of thermal transfer is to increase the surface area of the object that the heat is being transferred from. In most water cooling radiators this is done in two ways, by increasing the density of the fins, or by increasing the thickness. Now the issue with this approach is that the surface area of the radiator is proportional to the air resistance of it, which is going to result in an increased pressure drop in the air from the fan passing through the radiator, which results in less airflow from the same fan speed.

What this means is that for any given fan speed, there is a specific surface area of radiator whereby the balance between air resistance through the radiator, and rate of heat transfer is at it's peak.

Now by stacking two radiators around some fans essentially all you are doing is increasing the surface area of your radiator (imagine the stack as a single rad). The problem with this is that as it is right now, for the quiet fans (600-1200 rpm) the market is already saturated with single rads that have the optimum surface area for that range of fan speeds (your MCR, RS, RX, SR1, PA, TA etc.), there also exist rads (HWlabs GTX etc.) with an optimum surface area for high speed (1800rpm+) fans.

So right now unless you plan on running a quadruple stack with 6000RPM deltas a stack simply will not outperform a single radiator.

PS: it's also worth noting that the above is also the reason that uber expensive thick radiators are a joke, since it doesn't matter how you increase surface area, the air resistance will increase by the same factor.

Muel · 2 Feb 2011 at 13:22

So what we saying for my setup then? It's got to have scope to cool an 1100t at the highest clock I can get out of it. Single thin RAD with 4 fans in push/pull? 2 fans with shrouds?

Cheers for all the advice so far, has made for very interesting reading.

This is roughly what I'm working with, although now it has a different motherboard, cable management is nothing like as good and I have another graphics card in there.