watercooling a renderfarm

[Danm54]

For the loop design id use a 3 pipe system, its still a standard flow and return but it makes all the loops near enough the same length so balancing the flow rate between each loop will ba a lot easier.
I can get some pics that explain it easier if you want.

 

[robinlawrie]

that'd be ace.

 

[Danm54]

Ha ha, couldn't find a clear pic so ive had great fun with Paint!

Before i start, water will always take the easiest route around any loop and this is what you need to stop happening.

This is the first, and wrong way to do it, the pump will easily feed the first block/loop but not the last, to solve this balancing valves are required to restrict the flow of water to the first blocks/loops and force it to flow around the rest.

This is the layout you want, changing the return pipe so it makes all the loops the same lenght, and therefore they all have the same resistance so the pump won't favour one block/loop over the rest.

It dosen't matter where you put the rads as long as they are before or after all of your tee's, if you put it between blocks/loops then you'll make the ones after the rad have less resistance.

Hope this is clear enough.

 

[miniyazz]

You might notice high-end systems use two large power supplies rather than one uber power supply. This is because higher-end PSUs become prohibitively expensive, as well as relatively noisy and inefficient. I think you'd do better to use one PSU per system rather than attempt to use fewer, more powerful PSUs.

 

[cavemanoc]

Why not just run the water through the blocks in 'series' instead of trying for a complicated splitter system? The gradient across the loop will still be minimal if your flow is sufficient (water temp in block 1 will be almost the same as the temp in block 5)

 

[JonJ678]

Mainly because the head pressure needed would be considerable for a series loop, there's a hell of a lot of restriction in ten cpu blocks. I'd also be inclined to put them in parallel as I favour low pressure systems, since I don't know what pressure standard watercooling components will fail at.

Which arrangement is actually better depends on the characteristics of the chosen pump as much as anything.