Hi,

I am wondering how much water would it take to cool a P4 2.4 Ghz without having any fans. I saw some of the extreme solutions that some people are taking. Most of these require some reasonable machining skills. But I wonder if one could start with an off the shelf water cooling solution and just use a big reservor instead of a radiator and associated fan. Would putting the pump into a bigger reservior (say a 3 gallon fish tank) provide enough lot of thermal mass to hold the temps stable?

I guess I will have to dust off my old physics books and see how hard it is to disipate 60-70 watts.

Jerry

take a look at my project thread
most ppl think its overkill btw :]

Looks great!

How has it worked so far?

Als, what is "ppl"

jerry

ppl = people

Technically having more water only delays the inevitable because without a a way to radiate the heat, the system would eventually overheat. I would concentrate on finding a decent large radiator and you should be able to passively cool that kinda wattage. A small car radiator comes to mind.

Water cooling just moves the energy - you still have to dump it somewhere.
If you're looking for no-fan passive cooling, go down to the local home depot and get a 3' section of slantfin radiator baseboard - this is already designed to encourage air thermosyphon through the vertical fins.
Just a thought I'm toying with - currently an using a small (black ice 120mm) radiator with a 5V 120mm fan - I can't hear it over ambient so I'm not motivated to try to make it quieter...

That actually sounds line a good idea.

The amount of water doesn't matter.

Only the surface area of the system matters, and the medium and temperature on the other side of the surface (putting your tank under ground is much better then having it in open air, for instance).

The amount of water matters only when it comes to how fast the system will react. If you have four gallons of water in the system, it will take a long time before you reach the maximum temperature (probably an hour or more), but you will reach the same temperature as a system with a quarter of water with the same surfaces, eventually.

I use two large Senfu radiators myself. The system contains about half a gallon of water. It's slightly too little surface to cool my system fanless (I've directed airflow through there, so it doesn't matter), around 4800 square inches.

Maybe get a large used car radiator from a junkyard if you want to experiment? Although they might require som work to adapt to a ½" water system.

/Mirar
http://www.mirar.org/casev2