Hi!
Some of you may remember the post I started about using car radiators. Since the beginning of the thread some time has passed so if anyone thought I had just given up the project after long and apparently useless discussion I and apologize for the delay. I have been extremely busy at university and most of the time I give top priority to anything which could benefit me on the long run as far as my education and career is concerned. I do however take pride in finishing what I begin so here I am.
Project name: Make it a double!
introduction
You may remember that I had chosen a 140 l/min 10m head pump. It could have been the perfect solution but it had one fatal flaw. It was built for temporary uses and not continuous as mag pumps are. My first experiments ended in tragedy. The pump literally burned down during a 2 days and 2 nights stress test in a small service bathroom, recirculating water under no constriction from a tub and back into the tub. The chassis turned so hot the circuitry was damaged and the capacitor somehow leaked. I understood my mistake and looked for a mag. driven pump. I will make a long story short: I went for iwaki pumps. The model is the MD-30RZ but for this project I needed muscle so I bought 2 for $40 + shipping. Powered with a step down converter I hooked them in series to provide a whopping 16m head pressure.
Most of you will almost immediately point out that the pump has a massive heat dump. True but I have a solution. Loving symmetry I installed 2 AUDI TT radiators in series to provide for enough cooling for my rig and the pumps.
The loop works as follows: pump1 pump2 radiator 1 radiator 2 ek supreme
The radiators
The Radiator are both 44x 66 cm. However they are not identical. The one which is mounted towards the exterior and features an impressive fin and pipe density. The number of fins makes it almost impossible to mount any normal type of fan array in order to achieve adequate cooling at a reasonable noise level. Thinking about this I chose to add a second radiator. This specific model was designed to provide cooling for less performing audi tts so it features larger pipes and less fin density. This was ideal to achieve maximum cooling efficiency whilst providing for some degree of “flow through” air movement. Both radiators are sandwiched as can be seen in the photograph and sufficient space is left between them for air to rise and dissipate heat by convection.
Heat dump
My calculations were fairly simple. A single radiator might be seen as a sheet of metal. With no active cooling it is essentially a plate. Therefore I can confidently say that radiating surface is almost equal to 2,904cm^2 take two radiators and we have 4 surfaces which makes the total surface area equal to 11,616cm^2. Let us say that we have an overall 80% efficiency of these 4 surfaces and we get an equivalent radiating surface of about 9292,8cm^2. Now let us assume that I have a total heat dump of 600w (way off considering that I only have 80w of pump heat and 200w at most of cpu heat). This means that I have 0,065w per square cm to dissipate. Not difficult to achieve under passive conditions!
Setup
The outmost radiator will dissipate the initial heat from the cpu and pumps. When the water is done travelling through the radiator then it will be fed in the second radiator which will not provide as much restriction and help shave of the residual heat. From there the coolant will travel to the ek supreme and back to the pumps. Tubing is ½ inch on ½ barbs. Equivalent barbs are used on all connections so as to avoid changes in pressure within the tubing.
The coolant is a mixture of distilled + paraflu radiator coolant (80:1 ratio should be enough to prevent corrosion).
here you can see the realy switch connected to my fan plugs on the mobo. the blue LED signals nominal activity.
Temperatures
load @ stock 1.24v
and load @ 3.6 ghz 1.6V!!!
Observations:
1.the Ek supreme will restrict flow. No big surprise there. What comes as a surprise is that the low pressure part of the loop (suction from the ek to the pumps) will collapse the tubing. No matter how thick the tubing will visibly collapse under the negative pressure. The stronger the pumps the stronger the negative pressure. It does not hinder performance but it still is a nasty surprise given that it is all stress being applied to the tubing. I use clamps to keep the tubing in shape.
Hope you enjoy!
P.s. important edits
1) TIM: coolaboratory metla liquid pro
2) naked dies: if anyone is interested check my thread on removing HIS
3) the noise is not terrible but you can definetely hear the pumps
4) the setup is entirely passive but I have an idea to add inferior fans to achieve convection type cooling (under the radiator sandwich that is)
5) the EK is not adequately engineered to work with naked Dies. I have core 3 and 4 running 6-10°C cooler than the other two. I will have to lap the ek!
added a picture of my assembly...so that you can see that the final result can be quite clean even qith exterior tubing...
the insides of the radiator assembly. Exterior rad is on the lef. interior and last pass rad is on the right.
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