As promised, I'm here to report on my farm's mass water cooling project....... Wow, where should I begin? How about we start from the beginning....
In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth.
And the earth was without form............Wait a minute, that's a bit too early in the beginning......
Let's try this.....I've been a "lurker" in the liquid forum for quite a while. I finally had something to ask and joined up in Mar 07. While hanging out there, a thread started titled AARP blah blah blah. It was, and still is a golden thread. I met Movieman there.
Then there was this "contest" between something called XSTA and XSTM. Dave PM'ed me to ask me to come and help out. I knew a tiny bit about distributed computing, but I could not figure out where to start. (Quite frankly, each of the teams needs a short, concise, explanation of who they are, what they do, and why a rookie should join up. This should be a sticky, and locked to prevent it from getting hijacked.....Of course, I learned later that Dave is probably one of the best thread-jackers on XS!!)
I joined up and put a QX6700 machine on the team. I followed all the banter and participated in a bit myself. I also saw the blow up occur and stayed out of it since I didn't know what was going on. My mantra was crunch, crunch, crunch. In the process, I saw a lot of you show your character. I was very impressed with the caliber of folks on this part of the forum. I made a commitment to the cause, and to the team, that a farm was coming.
I have thrown thousands of dollars in the toilet, in the past, on wasted hobbies and too many interests. (not counting my bar tabs...
) Well, you get older and smarter. It's really true.... I finally found something here that I could get my hands on. For me, it's about cancer. That's why I crunch and spend money. I've given to American Cancer Society in the past, only to wonder what that money did to help. This way, I can see it by the project reports. I'm not about points. I'm about the cure. When I pass, I do so quietly. When I get passed, I pull over to the side to let the teammate by. (Now Team 2ch, that's another story, we can't let them get too far ahead of us!!
)
So, I'm a professional staff electrical engineer for Motorola Inc, designing public safety communication systems. Now what? I build a rack of machines of course!!!
Here it is, as well as me, after cleaning out the hamster cages....
Anyone familiar with sharp farm implements will notice that I'm holding a manure fork, not a straw/hay pitchfork. Anyone doubting this can look here I have the number 74223 fork....Didn't know they still made it....Good to know that cr*p hasn't changed much over the years....Those hamsters are quite the producers of manure, particularly with the special DDT chow....
I knew I wanted to water cool this rack so I threw on all the best coolers I had, and refused to buy more air coolers. I was left running the lower machines on stock coolers. This led to loaded temps in the 70s....
Working with Alex at Petra's, I came to the following plan.
Alex suggested the series pump idea for redundancy. I decided to make two loops. I came to this plan with HW failures in mind. If one pump fails, no biggie. The other pump is there. If two pumps in a loop fail, it's worse, but water will (and does) flow backward through the failed loop from the other loop. Quite remarkable. (And yes, I know you're not supposed to run water through a Laing backwards, but remember, it a failed loop, so who cares?)
Here's the initial parts pic of the main gizmos in the plan. Got to have that on a build thread. Notice the pink/orange Petra pen? I've got a few of those. The whole mess was about $1,100 with additional tubing and parts I added later. And for Dave the XS toolman, that is a digital machinist's caliper on the mat....
(Shameless plug. Petra's absolutely rocks for watercoolers. Best place for a noob too. Alex or Quoc will always steer you right, and away from the junk kits out there....)
OK, here's lots of stuff put together. Cable mess, WC rack proto, I know, a bit ugly. Clean up will occur on placement to final location. The WC gear is going to go on a rack mount tray. That's why it's prototyped the way it is. Nice and compact. The 2x2s will go away...
OK, quiz time. This took me a bit to figure out. Look in the middle of the cooler at the white 3/4 cap sticking up. You'll see I have plumbed a T-line. I had thought that I would have to use it to charge the upper machines in the rack. I don't. I can fill by using only the radiator cap. Most convenient...
More details on how to handle mass cooling hose placement in a machine for service. This is the outside of the top machine in the rack. Note the grommets.
....and the inside of the same machine. This allows you to pull the entire machine by dis-mounting the CPU block and pulling it up through the slots. That way, you don't have to stop all the machines and drain the loops to pull a single machine out. In addition, the hoses are long enough to allow the machine to come forward full for servicing without doing anything. I'll be reporting on how this goes in future posts. I've got to come up with a service jig to make this easy.....
Now detail on the WC main part. The pics are front (with 120mm fan for scale), RH side, Rear, and LH side in quick order. I can make more detailed pics of any areas you may be interested in. No secrets here. Remember though, this is proto.....
On the LH pic notice the house well pump filter. This is something we are VERY familiar with here in the Pac NW. This is on the suction/supply side of the gizmo. It is for filtering out the odd crap that is STILL coming out of the rad. It is 50 mesh, or about 300 microns. I don't suggest any finer or coarser. 50 mesh is perfect. This was about 80 bucks, not cheap, but a lot cheaper than throwing chunks into your loop of $5k worth of quads....Also notice the ball valves on the filter. These are used for air bleed of the system. I'll post more "how-too" on that later. It took awhile to come up with this, and lots of distilled water sprayed around...
OK, you've either stuck with me for the above, or came to the bottom for results. Here they are.....These contain my initial coretemp numbers, an interim step when I had 3 machine in one loop, and two flavors of finals. Oh, I forgot, part of what I did was develop a custom speed controller for the fan. I have two speed levels of data here. On low, the WC machine is VERY quiet for it's size. On "medium" it's about like a 20" box fan on low setting. At high, well, it is a van radiator after all.....
What's next?? OVERCLOCK the living be-jeebers out of the farm!!! Look how low the clocks are now!!! That's not very Xtreme!!
I'm not a very accomplished clocker. Expect a bunch of questions on this topic. I looked at some posts and go WTF, how can you get that thing that high....I'm missing something here...
I sincerely hope this gives some inspiration to all those struggling with temps and farming. Car radiators rock, for the right application. This can be made cheaper if you wish. I am always open to PM for most questions if you don't want to post. I would encourage you to do so though. That way, we all learn, as I have....
Thanks much to all of you, my teammates, cheers...
Bob
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Originally Posted by njkid32
![Send a message via MSN to [XC] Malkec](images/misc/im_msn.gif)
do we have to take ever thread OT with your sick fetishes? 
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