Water-Tec

The build

A family member had an old Siemens Fujitsu in the garage, ready to be trashed and I needed a chassis to build on so this was the start of building up my chiller rig. Everything is inside that rig now. Since the chassis is only a miditower, I had to be very conservative with space.

loads of wires, and I am not going to hide them yet...

The electronics

The chiller:

4x TECs, 50x50x41mm (288 couple) 35v

4x Dominator GT waterblocks (two blocks, on two tecs)

1x EK CPU Supreme HF

2x EK DC 4 Pump

2x EK basic 250ml cylinder reservoirs

10x Bitspower angle fittings 13/19mm

10x Fittings 13/19mm

1 meter tube 13/19 (neoprene)

1 meter tube 13/19 (normal)

1x PCI-E female plugs

1x HWlabs GTX360

3x Enermax 120mm fans (push) not really good for rads!

3x Scythe 120x38mm 3000 RPM fans (pull)

2x Temperature displays

The computer:

PSU: Enermax MaxRevo 1500w

Motherboard: Asus P5WD2-E

CPU: P4 Celeron 360D, P4 D930, P4 631

Memory: Samsung P5300, 4x 1GB

Harddisk: Seagate 7200rpm, 300GB

Graphics: Nvidia 7300LE

Performance

I am always afraid of ruining anything when I try something new, so I am trying to carefully get some experience before going all-in to a project. In this case, the main concern is regarding condensation. I choose the old P4 platform for 2 reasons, 1) its cheap, if I break it, I can manage. 2) Its inefficient when it comes to power consumption. Many of the latest P4 chips before C2D, would with one or two cores, consume more than 130W, and Intel Speedstep isnt helping that much to improve the efficiency. When I clock these chips up more than 50%, I can really make some energy to work with.

At this moment, my chiller have 2 settings which is 6v and 12v.

6v means that all 4 tecs are feeded with 6 volts each. At 6 volts the tecs are super efficient compared to the power usage, but wont be able to make a high delta temperature between hot and cold side. 6 volts are considered the everyday usage, where I just want the CPU to run at ambient room temperature, or maybe a 5-10C lower when idling. 6v will from each tec pull like 15W, making it costs like 60W in Tec cooling. I see idle temps around 15C in this setup.

12v means that all 4 tecs are feeded with 12 volts each. My tecs are rated at 35v, so I am still only at like 33%. Using the tecs below 50% of max, still makes them really efficient. 12v really pull some power, its like 75w from each tec (300W of tec cooling) and the delta temperature goes as high as 35-40C. This setup will go far below ambient, but wont freeze in normal living room temperatures (22-26C). I see idle temps around 10C in this setup.

This setup consumes approx 710W from the plug in the wall, when the P4 are overclocked +50%, and thats with a Nvidia 7300LE in IDLE!!!!

Later on, I will experiment to try going even higher and make a 18v/24v setup, to freeze the water with the CPU running, but I dont have a good solution for that at this time.

Results

I have limited time to test things through, so I like to do stuff pretty fast; I need to be able to make a complete test of a processor over a single evening.

Archievements