A/C water chiller questions

[Thick8]

So after looking into all of the options available to me here, I've decided on a water chiller because it will be totally silent and I have the A/C unit. I'm going with a simple window A/C unit with an evaporator water bath like DR_DX made. The unit will be outside the house with the water lines running up through the floor to the computer. My question is can I run 1 large diameter hose and then split it into 3 smaller hoses to cool my 8350 and 2 290's? I'm going to use a pond pump to move the water the 20 feet to the hose branch so water flow will not be an issue. Should I be concerned about an imbalance in the flow restriction of the blocks? I intend to use an EK extreme EVO CPU block and the Alphcool Hawaii GPU coolers with the active backplates.
Thanks,
John

[Thick8]

Well it would seem that no one is doing this type of cooler anymore. So I 'll just document the build here for myself
I popped the cover off of my Frigidaire 5000 BTU window unit, pulled the temperature probe off of the evaporator, blocked the evaporator airflow, and fired it up. Iced up in about 3 minutes. Yea!!!
I remembered that I had a 5 gallon plastic bow front fish tank in the attic. The width is perfect. I'll have to cut down the height a little but it should still be about 12 quarts when finished.
So the plan is to
1. remove the unit from it's base
2. remove the condenser fan assembly and replace it with 6 pure wing fans that I already have
3. insulate the fish tank
4. submerge the evap. in the tank
5. mount it all to a board.
Once I get to this point I will test it without a heat load to check for leaks and temperature setting. This unit does not have a digital thermostat so I will have to see if I can set the capillary tube thermostat to maintain a constant temperature. If I can't then I will pick up a digital thermostat for $15 on Ebay and wire it in to the thermometer circuit.
I had mentioned that was going to put the unit outside but it occurred to me that putting it in the attic would be a better solution. I still haven't decided on a pump yet but I have a couple of pond pumps in the shed that I will try. Hopefully I won't have to buy one.
The biggest expense will be the water blocks ($400ish) but nothing worth having is free. I can always sell my current radiator and Swiftech Apogee II to help offset the cost.
I'm thinking of going < ambient but > dewpoint. Knowing me I'll probably will want it colder when I finish so I may see what it will take to insulate the computer.
Well I'm off to see about mofset, chipset, and memory blocks.
John

4.

[n00b 0f l337]

Hey you'll have better luck over in the vapor phase section.

[Thick8]

I thought of vapor change but after looking into all that is involved decided against it. I would still want the unit in the attic, would still want to cool the CPU, GPU's, chipset, mosfet's, and memory, and have it be completely quite in the computer room. I don't see that as being possible for a phase change system.

[ogblaz]

I am interested in your work so at least one person is reading .will you run this 24/7 becouse the electricity will be expensive. You should build this and turn on the ac unit by demand when gaming or benching.
Pic pls

[Thick8]

I am interested in your work so at least one person is reading .will you run this 24/7 becouse the electricity will be expensive. You should build this and turn on the ac unit by demand when gaming or benching.
Pic pls

This is my game rig so it is only on for about 5-6 hours a week so the electricity cost won't be bad at all. I disassembled the A/C unit today at work and ran it for about an hour. I wrote it into my lesson plan and used it to demonstrate phase change theory to my students. Needless to say they were highly engaged. Tomorrow they are going to create dimensional drawings of the components and present their ideas of how the system should be configured and mounted. We'll vote on the best design and I will have them build it. Isn't science grand
Here's a couple of pics of the students disassembling it.

[Buckeye]

Looks interesting and good luck with the build.
Nice to see some new work logs in here

Also, you can use a hosting site like imageshack.com and then get a forum link so it shows the picture.

[Thick8]

Well we got it apart and I dropped the evaporator into the water filled fish tank. The evaporator had 1/2" of ice in about 30 minutes. So I swapped out the water for windshield washer fluid and tried again. With no insulation the temp dropped to 13f in about 30 minutes.
I was thinking that I might just try putting the evaporator and my current water system radiator in the tank. Will I loose a lot of cooling potential doing this? I was thinking that I could maintain a closed loop secondary system to eliminate the possibility of system contamination. Thoughts?

http://s1368.photobucket.com/user/jdoon5261/slideshow/

[Buckeye]

Yeah those onedrive.live links are not working.

[Thick8]

Looks like the photobucket slideshow is working. I'll work on resizing and captioning them so I can have them display here on the forum.
Thanks Buckeye

[Thick8]

So I've gotten the A/c unit and fish tank together. I noted on the side of the 5000 BTU A/C unit it states that the cooling capacity is 500W. Does this mean that this unit probably won't cool my CPU, 2 GPU's, northbridge, and MOFSETs?
Opinions

[n00b 0f l337]

The power consumption is 500w I bet.

[Utnorris]

You should use a cooler instead of a fish tank and a 5000 BTU Window AC should be able to cool that hardware, the question is how cool will it keep it. Here is my old post when I did this a few years ago to give you some ideas.

http://forums.extremeoverclocking.co...d.php?t=307110

Also, Drewmiester is a wealth of information and is still active on that site.

Still have mine, sitting in the garage, but it still works.

[Thick8]

The thing is that I have the fish tank. I insulated it this morning with some 1.5" duct board that I had left over from redoing my home A/C.
I ran it for about 2 hours and had no condensation at all. Time to fill it up with a glycol mix to check if my pond pump will move enough fluid. I'm thinking about 2 GPM should be good to cool 4 circuits.
[IMG][/IMG]

[Thick8]

So I'm ready to do a test run on it. I think I'm going to run the test on an old computer that's been in the attic for a couple of years. I'm going to try to make it go sub zero just to see if it will. I plan on using some liquid electric tape and insulation. Where can I find that black foam sheets that everyone uses?
The test computer components that I will be cooling are an AMD 4800+ and a HIS 6970. I'm going to use the waterblock/pump assemblies from the H50 and H100 that I have.

[shadow6491]

I think you will find that the pond pump will work best if you go through the floor they are designed to pump water up not suck water up. Also I would not split the main water line just go from one block to the next in series. There will be an increase in tempreature at each point but it should be minimal as the water actually moves rather quickly.

[Stewie007]

You should use a cooler instead of a fish tank and a 5000 BTU Window AC should be able to cool that hardware, the question is how cool will it keep it. Here is my old post when I did this a few years ago to give you some ideas.

http://forums.extremeoverclocking.co...d.php?t=307110

Also, Drewmiester is a wealth of information and is still active on that site.

Still have mine, sitting in the garage, but it still works.

This made me chuckle a bit, because mine is still sitting in a garage. LOL!

Anyways....

Coolers are a good item to use because the plastic can handle lower temperatures. Although, 0F is at the lower end and pretty close to the brittleness temp. The insulation protects it pretty well, and they're rigid so I haven't heard of anyone having a problem. I'd be worried about a fish tank. Polycarbonate does not handle low temperatures very well. Stress fractures would be easier to come by.

You could also check on places like plastic-mart.com for some Polyethylene RV/Marine tanks. They get to be a bit pricey, though. You can buy them with standard fitting ports, but metal fittings are a no-no. usplastics.com has some good HDPE fittings that will withstand low temp. They also sell a good bit of tubing for various temperature ranges.

PE is generally good down to about -20 safely. -28F is a sweet spot for most of those kinds of tanks, so you wouldn't want to approach it. Not that it would bust, but it wouldn't be a good idea. I gather you aren't trying to get down that far?

I tend to shy away from anything other than PE or PP for plastics. PE has a lower brittle temp, but neither one is going to be an issue.