Phantom, Dual Wall Clear LN2 Evaporator - First Encounter

This is my first encounter with the Phantom, Clear Dual Wall LN2 Evaporator

The Phantom
Made by www.LN2cooling.com

Special thanks to:
Aaron Schradin who was truly a pleasure to work with on this project.
Simon Solotko from AMD for his help with this project also.
Special thanks to Chew for the use of his TWKR. Chew is a top notch bencher, one of the best, and very nice, helpful guy !

One of the things that I really like about benching computers is the cooling aspect of each run. I have tried to stay on top of as many types of Extreme Cooling as I can, given the resources that I have. One question I remember hearing one time was “how does become a really good bencher”, something along those lines away. The answer was pretty simple, get the best cooling you can and the rest will follow with lots of hard work.

I began using many methods of cooling but SS Phase really got my attention at first so off I went to find one of the best units I could at that time. After some time a SS Phase unit built by one of my favorite builders, Jin Park, was in my shop and I was soon benching away with that.

It became very clear to me at that time that even though this SS Phase unit was very well built and could hold CPU’s at very good temps under high loads, aprox -51c unloaded and I have not gotten that unit below -39c under high loads, that it was just not cold enough for what I wanted to do. But I had the Phase/Cascade bug bad !

I then moved on to LN2 cooling as being able to get a Cascade was very hard to do. Yes this website XS has had a very bad influence on me LOL !

At this time, and now, LN2 pots made by K|ngP|n or Vince were the best we could get so I collected a few of them. The F1 and Tek’s filled my bench and were used on every bench run that I did. I also collected other pots made by others, MickMouse CPU Pot, Evaps and other SS Phase units. I love to collect these items as often I as I can :)

The next problem was a Dewar to hold LN2 in for benching. This was also not an easy thing to find. Keeping a eye out on ebay and other places I finally found a Taylor Wharton LD50 with pressure top and this has served me well.

Sometime later I had the chance to go to XS in Las Vegas for a very special event, the AMD LHe event where AMD CPU’s would be taken down to temps unheard of and benched at Extreme Conditions. At this event I saw several new pots being used, one was the early LHe pot built by Aaron Schradin with Simon Solotko.

Another event later in Austin Texas by AMD again the video Xtreme Conditions was created and I had the first chance to see the Phantom LN2 Evaporator.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR--2ivkFSQ&fmt=22

I saw this video and became very interested in this new tech for LN2 cooling.

Getting in touch with Aaron Schradin and we soon had a new pot being made for me. Aaron was a pleasure to work with on this project, very friendly and I believe he wanted to make a pot like no other. It was a few weeks to get all this done and after many emails exchanges, ones like “It’s Shipped”, and “It’s in your town now !”, I finally had this monster of a LN2 pot in my hands.

When I opened the box my eyes were like as wide open as they possibly could, I just went OMG when I held it for the first time. The pot that Aaron made for me is rather big for a LN2 pot at 15” tall.

Here is some data on this Evaporator, taken from www.LN2cooling.com

Careful materials selection is critical!

Importance of Materials Selection
• Why copper, and what type?
– At normal operating temperatures, there is little noticeable difference in thermal conductivity values in various copper grades.
– However, as temperatures decrease, conductivity of various grades increase at drastically different rates.
• Conductivity of “pure” copper
– Copper at 300K thermal conductivity is nearly 400 watts/m °C
– Copper at 100K thermal conductivity is nearly 400 watts/m °C
– Copper at 18K thermal conductivity is nearly 4000 watts/m °C
– Copper at 10K thermal conductivity is nearly 2000 watts/m °C
– Increase of a factor of nearly 10 times at the peak!
• Conductivity comparison of other materials at low Kelvin values
– Silver increases to 193 watts/cm °C from 4.5 watts/cm °C
– Aluminum increases to 71.5 watts/cm °C from 3.0 watts/cm °C

Interesting Temperatures for Simon’s Experiment

• Wood alcohol (methanol)
– freezes at -97.8° C (-144.0° F)
– boils at 64.7° C (148.5°F)
• Grain alcohol (ethanol)
– freezes at -114.1° C (-173.4° F) -- Everclear Alcohol? Something 180+ Proof
– boils at 78.5° C (173.3° F)
• Liquors:
– 24 proof liquor freezes at -6.7°C (20°F)
– 64 proof liquor freezes at -23.33°C (-10°F)
– 84 proof liquor freezes at -34.44°C (-30°F)
• Isopropyl Alcohol
– 90% isopropyl freezes around -90.0°C

I prefer to not show pictures of the base or how it was machined, if you are interested in this please contact www.LN2cooling.com

The base is rather complex and from what I understand took a fair amount of time to machine out. It is not simple holes drilled into a base of copper.
It is made from 99.9% pure copper and weighs ~ (need to get this weighed and I will add it in here)

So now that the Pot is here and ready to go I invited a few friends over for a benching party so they could see this wonderful pot in use also.
They were Cpt. Planet – Jake, Punx – Shannon, and Nick from EVGA, Nordic Jedi from 411overkill and ocgmj from NBOC.
As the rabid over clocking madmen headed straight from work on Friday and drove for 7 hours to get to my place which they did at about 1:00am Saturday morning and began setting up equipment right away, the session had started very early LOL ! Very sorry to ocgmj who arrived at noon that day and missed most of the benching session, very sorry about that :(

A few of these guys had not benched on LN2 before so this would be there very first time, how fitting to have the Phantom here for that :)

The Phantom was setup and benching started.

I must add here that this was my first encounter with this pot and was very tried when we ran this test. I had assumed that the pot was ready to go and had forgotten the instructions on applying the Teflon Tape on the mating surfaces, yup I am a idiot !

Out here in Calif getting 190 proof alcohol is impossible so I ended up using 80 proof vodka.
The test was started and soon found that we had leaks, and alcohol had leaked into the main chamber and would gel up and clog the base of the pot. That was unfortunate for this event but caused no serious problems.

Now I am not sure if the effects we saw were because of the leak but we had rather strange results from this session.

One of the effects that we noticed early on was how it pulled down temps. I would pour a good dose of LN2 into the pot and it would start to drop temps, but we reached a point where more LN2 being poured would actually warm up the pot. The best zone of LN2 we found was to keep the level of LN2 just down at the base. But filling up the pot to the top was ok for the first cool downs and made a really good show :) With a small dose of LN2 in the base it would make strange noises as the LN2 was moved about and being jetted around by the design of the base.

As we started benching the leak had began to clog up the base with gelled alcohol and we saw pretty bad temp swings and was impossible to keep at a given temp. We ended up stopping as the whole column was starting to gel up pretty bad. I has installed the temp probe in the eraser next to the CPU heat spreader. I am not sure if it was reading correctly there as we only saw a max temp of -159c I think it was, maybe because of the stacking effect of LN2 in the chamber, I am not sure.

Conclusion was that using 80 proof alcohol was a problem with how long you could run the pot before it started gelling up, higher proof = longer runs. I will have to try and find another liquid for this.
The inner tube or LN2 chamber seems to stack up LN2 in the tube, mixing with gas and boiling, making it hard for the cooling effect of liquid LN2 to stay in the base. Plus I also think that this pot is simply too tall, but usable. Bigger is better right ? well in this case it’s not really needed to be as tall :)

This is a extremely well made and nice evaporator and has strong possibilities for future use and tuning for better effects, there are a few problems with it now as any new tech has but I think that this can be figured out and tuned for better effects. It makes a really nice show but with size of the one I had built, but using it with one person is rather hard. But this pot would make a great addition for any benching show and other events.

Here are some pictures and video of its use.
The video is rather simple and crude. I am not a video artist, yet anyway and we were pretty tired when this was taken early in the morning. But it gives you a idea of how it looks and the gelling problem we saw.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLo7Dr_kR2U

I will get the leaking problem fixed up for the next run.

As with any new tech things evolve and change, I think this design has promise and I am sure it will improve with future units. Just like the very first LHe evaporators evolved I am sure this design will also. So take this as a first peak, or second anyway at some very exciting new tech that I am sure will become better with future models.

We don’t really have any benching results from this run because of the problems I stated.

Photos by Jake – Cpt. Planet and Lee – Nordicjedi

So here we have some prepping up pictures.

http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/5568/1002474u.jpg

http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/4302/1002479.jpg

http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/2616/1002485p.jpg

http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/4383/1002487.jpg

Getting it setup on the bench

http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/7769/dsc0031v.jpg

http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/8931/dsc0030ieg.jpg

http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/7907/dsc0019s.jpg

And the first pours start

http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/5201/1002530v.jpg

http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/8523/1002531v.jpg

http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/8031/1002538y.jpg

http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/3334/1002533m.jpg

Here we start seeing some of the alcohol start to gel up, this is the inside of the LN2 chamber were alcohol has been blasted up in the tube.

http://img371.imageshack.us/img371/9742/1002567.jpg

And here its gelling up in the alcohol chamber

http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/2661/1002572.jpg

http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/6998/1002575k.jpg

And what it looked like in the base chamber when we finished, it was pretty clogged up.

http://img154.imageshack.us/img154/3669/1002578.jpg

And the crazy bunch of rabid benchers who were dead tired but continued to bench away for 18 hours LOL !
Left to right – Me, Nick, Jake – Cpt. Planet, Shannon – Punx and ocgmj – George

http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/2351/1002676.jpg

Video uploaded

Yep that alcohol leaking into ln2 chamber surely botched your temps. Installing probe against side of IHS is never going to see the right temps, its part of my recipe for running 06 though ;) you can get a ballpark at what temps you fail at. It helps in eliminating whether you need to add volts or if its a temp issue.

Next time attach Probe to bottom of pot with tape, bet you see a very small swing.

That thing is massive. Great pics!

Nice Buckeye!!:up: Always interested in new products and this looks very interesting. Great pics & I didn't realize you are an ol' cougar like me!:rofl::rofl:

Great read, thanks mate! :up:
Hope you guys had a blast there, although I gotta admit that was a pretty early start! :D
This pot looks amazing (and damn, it's huge :cool:). Pity about the leaks, but I'm sure you can do something about it. :yepp:
And vodka idea wasn't that bad, huh? :ROTF:

Edit: nice video btw! :up:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Expat GriZ

Nice Buckeye!!:up: Always interested in new products and this looks very interesting. Great pics & I didn't realize you are an ol' cougar like me!:rofl::rofl:

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HAHA Expat, yup an ol' cougar I am, or I am sure I could be called a few other good names hehe :)

Thanks again Chew for your info and I will do that next time with the temp probe :up:

On this first encounter I clearly made a few mistakes and was extremely tired when we got around to getting this pot rolling. I will run this again in a more controlled setting and not be so tired.

All the benchers in the pic had been trying to get up here for a long time to bench and this was as good a reason as any for them to make the long trip.

I think we can get this bad boy tuned up a bit and get it to become more useful, that and not have a tired idiot running it LOL. It's a very interesting pot to run on LN2 that is for sure.

One of the neat things about it is, the center tube can be taken out and run on LN2 that way, it is a bit tall to run like that tho and this whole unit may be required to be down sized to work better. It's neat to see how it works with large pours and pulling down temps, but for actually running when the temps are pulled down a far shorter pot is more useful.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by zalbard

And vodka idea wasn't that bad, huh? :ROTF:

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LOL Zal I was thinking about you when I went and picked up the vodka ;)

I wonder what kind of drinks you could make with vodka gelled up at -180c :ROTF:

http://valid.canardpc.com/cache/screenshot/618178.png
http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=618178

http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/1633/leeetsuace.th.jpg

Thanks for posted that Jake, I was waiting for you to do that :)

Nice job guys. That is a very interesting pot design, I watched Chew* play with it down in Austin while I doodled away with my F1EE. Still prefer the F1EE, not as flashy but 1/3 the height :D

I have a faster time somewhere on one of the drives I know that.

Nice chip. Hopefully when you get the leak solved you can show us some nice 3d as well from this pot.

Looks cool, especially when pulling down :)

What's the purpose of the alcohol chamber? I can't see that enhancing the cooling effects of nitro with any base design :shrug:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by G H Z

Looks cool, especially when pulling down :)

What's the purpose of the alcohol chamber? I can't see that enhancing the cooling effects of nitro with any base design :shrug:

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Bling factor. For max performance pull the inner tube and let it rip. Everclear helps keep the temps a tad more stable when dual wall, but its mostly for show. When sealed properly it actually works as well.

Thats what I have decied to do Chew, have a new set of tubes being made that are shorter. Aaron is a great guy to work with on all this, many ideas on how to do things. Some things are going to be very, very cool.

So with shorter tubes I can use it with inner tube installed or pull it out and go full boar.

I am pretty torn about having the tubes I have now cut down as it's just to sweet to see this baby running at 15"

But a second set of shorter tubes will be nice to have also, gives me many more options for setups. Very flexable.

That thing is so cool looking and love the movie. Thanks! :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by loonym

That thing is so cool looking and love the movie. Thanks! :D

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HAHA Thanks :)

I am not a video person, yet anyway, did the best I could. It's not Simon quality but it's ok :up:

Getting ready for another round of testing :shocked::clap::ROTF:

:rofl:

http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/8935/img1251k.jpg

http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/3139/img1250k.jpg

Are you sure that's enough? :D

^No.

Good luck with another round of benches.

Bench setup

Thanks Gigabyte for the Motherboard !
GPU was from Gigabyte GOOC 09

http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/3236/pic0004i.jpg

A few frosty pictures :D

http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/9844/img1256r.jpg

http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/8176/img1260z.jpg

http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/858/img1259b.jpg

That's some amazing stuff. Looks like Vince is gonna be here with Sammy at Quakecom. :up:

Haha, buckeye, buy cascade just to use the top as a bench table :p:

I really wish I could make it to Quakecon, but to low on funds atm :(

LOL the Cascade makes a great bench top. :ROTF:
I use that Cascade almost everyday tho, and not just for a bench top LOL

So far though this pot is a dream to use, almost no baby sitting, just pour LN2 and bench away.

After mounting the pot turn on the comp and watch temps until about 50c or so. Give the pot a few twists to get it seated nice and tight. Screw the thumb screws down a bit tighter and we are ready to go cold.

I pour a full thermo of LN2 into the tube and watch temps drop like a rock and before you know it you are at max LN2 temps.

Seems the best use is aprox 1" - 2" of LN2 in the tube and that last quite awhile before needing any more.
You can tell without looking that its times for more LN2 by the sound. Pour some more and leave it. It really is no effort.

So looks like you fixed it, huh?
Does it mean that we are going to see some more results soon? :D

Yes the leak have been taken care and its working very well.

Shorter tubes coming any day now so I can retest the Clear Dual Tube setup again.

Great, looking forward to more then. Surprise us! :D

Great read Bill...keep us posted :)

Special thanks to Gigabyte for the MA790FXT-UD5P
And also AMD for the CPU’s
And a special thanks again to Aaron Schradin for all his help and ideas !

The Phantom Dual Wall Clear LN2 Evaporator – 2nd Encounter

I had a chance to make some addition runs with the Phantom pot, I had a set of shorter tubes made ~6” in length to do these runs and they work much better than the longer 15” tubes. All though the 15” tubes do work fine they are really to long for anything other than a LN2 show. I ran the 15” tube without the inner tube also and it worked fine.

Running the longer tube the setup looked like this. I wrapped a piece of sheet foam around the tube and cut to fit, then a layer of blue shop towel. This setup worked very well but was a tad tall to be sitting and trying to pour LN2 in the tube so I had to stand up often. You could really load this tube up with LN2 tho and run for a long time without even looking at the tube.

Here is that setup

http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/3236/pic0004i.jpg

When the shorter tubes came I ran them first with just the outer tube, and this is that setup.

http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/6933/img1271t.jpg

http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/6394/img1273o.jpg

This proved to be a very good setup and held temps very well, drop in temps from .2c were the norm for me with the probe mounted on the pot. It was very stable, could run for a long time without reloading, plus frost buildup was well under control. In fact the board would start to frost up well before this pot did.

With these kinds of pots swing is not a real issue and as long as you have the pot at max temps you are good to go. Simply keep LN2 in the pot and temps are stable. It required just about no baby sitting and was very nice to use.

It had been said to me to just keep LN2 to about 1” deep or near the base copper for normal running for best temp control. I did not see any real difference in keeping levels at the 1” level or much deeper. This pot was that stable in temps.

When you are at max LN2 temps you can hear the difference in the sound the pot makes, it goes from a rapid boiling while pulling down to a somewhat calm slow boil that makes very little noise. The bubbles are much smaller and in this pot because of the design of the base you can see a flow of LN2 as the level drops to the top of the base. I have tried to show this in the video that I did. You will see the center of the base boiling faster than the edges. I believe that this is because of the massive surface area of the base, the way it was machined to channel a flow of LN2 to the center and the very large number of sharp edges which heat from the CPU radiates to these edges causing flow.

This is how the single outer wall looks before setup

http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/2056/img1281t.jpg

http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/7555/img1280t.jpg

Now let’s look at the Dual Wall prepping and setup

All the parts laid out and ready to be put together

http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/8379/img1282m.jpg

Teflon tape is wrapped around the inner tubes threads and around the base threads. Wrap tape around many times to assure a nice tight fit and no leaks.

http://img81.imageshack.us/img81/2258/img1287c.jpg

Set the inner tube and washer assembly on top on the base.

http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/9890/img1285n.jpg

Now screw the outer tube in place. Tighten everything up good and snug to prevent leaks.
I then took this completed assembly and filled the outer ring with water to check for leaks. I only had 1 small one which was easily fixed by just tightening the inner tube just a bit more. I then let this sit for awhile just to make sure I had no leaks. All was good :clap:

http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/5501/img1289llg.jpg

Now insulated and installed on the motherboard.
Insulation was very easy for both methods. For the single tube setup a simple foam sheet cut to fit work great. It could be removed very easly by simply sliding it off to go for dual wall setup.

As you can see I just used two layers of foam with the circle are cut out for the pot to fit into. This could be cut to fit any motherboard easly.

With the single tube setup the layer of foam around the tube really didnt interfer with any parts on the motherboard, except for the first ram slots.

The foam I used was 1/2 inch think which insulated well and provided plenty of clearance for parts on the motherboard.

http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/19/img1290.jpg


Here is a short video of the Phantom in operation.
This run was about 4 hours long and ran just fine throughout the whole session. The only problem was it began to start frosting over after about an hour to an hour and a half. It just let it go to see what was going to happen. As you can see it became very, very frosty by the time I finished up. The motherboard was getting very, very cold and was becoming very hard to keep stable OC’s towards the end.

Watch in the video for the LN2 in the base and how it looks from a boiling to down to no LN2. This was not easy to video as light was not that great and focus was hard to maintain but I think it came out ok.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhwEaQ4gcX4

Some additional photos of the session.

http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/5936/img1330f.jpg

http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/6637/img1299j.jpg

http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/7101/img1318oct.jpg

http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/3531/img1319b.jpg

http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/9852/img1326u.jpg

http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/7318/pic0007u.jpg

http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/4139/pic0014q.jpg

http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/7006/pic0009gbk.jpg

http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/299/pic0015o.jpg

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http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/9831/pic0008z.jpg

http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/2542/pic0018i.jpg

My conclusion is that with the 80 proof alcohol that I used here my run time with a clear viewing time was somewhat limited to maybe one to one and half hours. It started frosting up and the alcohol began to freeze close to an hour into the session. After awhile the alcohol froze up solid and frost became rather heavy. This did not appear to impact the function of the pot in anyway other than you could not see the insides. If a higher proof alcohol is used such as Everclear which I cannot get in California I understand that the freezing of the alcohol takes longer, I am not sure if that would keep the frost away or not tho. A blow dryer might have helped and could be useful in a demo or event type of setting to keep things clearer, but frost melting off of the pot might become an issue.

From what I could tell the difference between the two setups was not great in running, in fact they both seemed to work the same to me. So getting this setup with dual tubes has its advantages of being run with just the outer tube for normal use, then being able to use the dual wall setup for events and thing of that nature. It really works out very nice.

Use of this pot with AMD chips is very simple and this pot performs very well.

I do have a few mods in my mind for an event type setting such as lights and what not, I will update this thread when I get around to those :)

Enjoy !

As I did this a few times and finally got around uploading this to youtube, here is a snippet of what its like filing to LD50 from the big dewar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JveF60WmiP0

Woot woot!!!

Thanks for the update Bill :toast:

lol jake told me he was african american LOL

Quote:

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Originally Posted by teyber

lol jake told me he was african american LOL

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Who ?

cpt planet did i read the op wrong? :D

very good job

Instead of 80proof alcohol, have you tried denatured ethanol from hardware store? They sell it in ~5 gallon cans here.

looks awsome