Hello and some newbie general brainstorm questions

JoshK · Post by **JoshK** » Tue Jul 12, 2005 7:44 am

First off, hello to all as I have never posted on this forum before! This is a great site that I came across sometime in the last year and I have read most all of the DIY articles. Great stuff!! (I also read the stickies here and a number of threads.)

I am kinda a DIY audio hobbiest and have been planning a HTPC project for the last year. I am still in the idea gathering stage and planning, as I have to finish up a laundry list of amps, preamps and power filtering projects for myself and others.

I plan to build my own case from, essentially scratch. Or at a minium strip out the frame of cheap case and built out the shell to my liking. I have seen some of the solutions like Atech Fab that are ungodly expensive (although that isn't really the issue) but I was thinking of something a little more creative.

My questions

Has anyone thought of, built, tried, etc to use heatpipes in conjunction with a water cooling solution? I mean, what if you use heatpipes from all the 'hot stuff'

to the side of the case where you mount a radiator block. The radiator block then has an intake and outtake for water to flow through?

Seems like 1) one could avoid leakage issues inside the case, 2) avoid galvanic corrosion by having the side mounted radiator and a larger water cooling radiator made of the same material, 3) have ease of maintainence and layout. Construction of course is not trivial, but I have seen some really remarkeable projects here of equal or greater difficulty.

Well this is my idea thus far. I have some newbie questions though. How far away can I place the pump, radiator (not the side radiator), etc? I would like to have all the loud and ugly stuff in the basement just below the room where my HTPC will reside.

I was thinking of then running tubes up to the HTPC from the basement where the pump and radiator are. Is this too problematic? I read that air can get trapped in the higher radiator, how much of a problem is this?

If I had a pump with the gusto to drive water uphill to the HTPC, will there be too much noise, even with the pump in the basement? I.e. will the swurling of water through the hose and radiator likely make a lot of noise? My goal is silence if you haven't inferred that already.

Thanks!

JoshK · Post by **JoshK** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 9:23 am

apparently not the friendliest forum to new comers....

eander315 · Post by **eander315** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 2:59 pm

By using a heatpipe with a water cooling loop, you're adding inefficieny into the system by using mutiple heat ransfer materials. There is a certain amount of resistance to heat transfer in any given heat pipe setup. The same is true of any given water coiling setup. adding those together will get you more than the typical resistance of one or the other of those systems alone. I don't beleive that type of setup is advantageous to the home PC user.

Galvanic corrosion will only be a problem inside the water cooling loop. in opther words, it doesn't matter what you used for the heatpipe side of things, if you went ahead and built this. The rules than generally apply to water cooling would still apply. For the most part, if you're building a custom (not from a kit) solution, you're probably better off sticking with all copper parts, especially if this is your first attempt. I won't get into why; you can find more on this forum by searching for "water cooling galvanic corrosion", as well as ProCooling and Google.

If you're already willing to use a very long run of tubing to anther room/floor of your house in order to make a silent install, why not just use a straight water cooling solution and call it good? Build a radiator box that contains the radiator and pump, run the tubes up from the basement into your room and into the PC where you'll have a small reserviour as well as all of the waterblocks (CPU, GPU, etc). The noisy pump and radiator fans will be in the basement, leaving you to deal with the power supply and hard drive noise. You can use very long circuits of water, even vertically, as long as it's a closed system. This British watercooling forum thread is an excellent example.

You can avoid getting air stuck in the system by having the reserviour at the top of the loop so you can bleed any air bubbles out when you're filling the loop for the first time. if you rotate and gently shake the radiator during this process, you'll allow most or all of the air to escape, which can then be released at the top of the loop upstairs.

Using a long loop like that will cause significant flow issues, but if you use reasonably low-flow waterblocks you should be fine. As for the swirling water noise, it should not be a problem. It's not that difficult to arrange things such that they don't make sloshing water noises in a cooling system with a normal flow rate.

eander315 · Post by **eander315** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 5:16 pm

Oh, and welcome to SPCR

JoshK · Post by **JoshK** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 9:37 am

Thanks for your answers!

I was under the impression that the bottleneck to cooling in a heatpipe to heatsink solution was that the cool side (i.e. the heatsink) was not cool enough. I thought that the water cooling block would reduce the temperature over passive air/convection cooling. I do like the idea of not having water inside the computer and less materials to worry about corrosion.

I don't know what I'll decide on but thanks for helping me brainstorm. And thanks for the welcome.

JoshK · Post by **JoshK** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 9:39 am

doh! double post...

jamesavery22 · Post by **jamesavery22** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 11:30 am

JoshK wrote:Thanks for your answers!

I was under the impression that the bottleneck to cooling in a heatpipe to heatsink solution was that the cool side (i.e. the heatsink) was not cool enough. I thought that the water cooling block would reduce the temperature over passive air/convection cooling. I do like the idea of not having water inside the computer and less materials to worry about corrosion.

I don't know what I'll decide on but thanks for helping me brainstorm. And thanks for the welcome.

In the average setup you may be correct. Not sure on efficiency. But all heatpipes have limited capacity. You can get the cold end to -110c if you want, it still cant carry all the heat if the heat load is too much.

There was a discussion on using heatpipes to help watercool VRMs and chipsets. Much like some 939 boards used heatpipes to cool the chipset with the cold end being by the IO port area where it will get decent air flow from the cpu's HSF.
Course thats kind of moot since cooling the back of the mobo is better anyways. But it could be used for a lot of nf4 chipsets. Its hard to get a WB to fit there, although many people have done it.

eander315 · Post by **eander315** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 12:39 pm

As far as the corrosion part of the question goes, it doesn't matter if you use a heatpipe or not, you'll still be dealing with the same corrosion issues. In other words, if you mount the water block to a heatpipe, or if you mount the waterblock directly to the CPU, it's still a piece of metal with water running through it, thus making it susceptable to corrosion if there are different kinds of metals in the loop. The heatpipe will not simplify that part of the system.

I would say a heatpipe isn't a good idea unless there isn't enough physical space to install a waterblock, such as a chipset located under a videocard, etc. As far as sound or cooling efficiency goes, you're better off using waterblocks mounted directly to the part you are trying to cool.