- Nov 26, 2015
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Radiators vs normal cooling Techniques
- Thread starter Kudo-Shinichi
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Solution
Epsilon_0EVP
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- Jun 27, 2012
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Normal liquid cooling systems use radiators. You need something to dissipate the heat in the water; that's what a radiator does. Liquid cooling systems without radiators are possible, but they are definitely not normal.
Sensei Gamer
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- Jun 30, 2015
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The heat needs to go somewhere so a radiator is a cool, compact and efficient place where the water could exchange heat with the metal fins. Not having a radiator would mean that you would have meters of liquid cooling tubes and pumps to dissipate the heat which is not efficient and finally reaching the water heat carrying capacity making the liquid cooler useless. So you need a radiator.......
Epsilon_0EVP
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- Jun 27, 2012
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No, you don't need a radiator. In theory, you can use very exotic cooling methods to remove the heat from the water instead of a radiator. There was a person in this forum who built a machine with a loop that took water from a large tub filled with ice. No need for radiators as long as the ice is replenished (in fact, adding radiators would hurt performance). You could also use phase-change cooling instead of radiators, although it is probably better to directly apply the phase change cooler to the heat source (which is still technically liquid cooling, it just doesn't use water).
Solandri
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- Jan 4, 2012
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All you're doing is trying to move heat from one place (your CPU and GPU) to another (usually the air).
A heatsink and fan on the CPU is limited by being inside the case. It's limited by the case size so your heatsink fins (basically a radiator) can only be so big. And being inside the case means it sits in the hot air generated by other components. Heat flowrate is proportional to temperature differential. So if your CPU is 60C, room air is 20C, and air inside the case is 40C, then a heatsink inside the case will only be half as effective as if you could somehow put the heatsink outside the case.
That's what liquid cooling does. It uses water or some other fluid to carry heat from inside the case to outside. You then connect it to a radiator (same thing as a heatsink) which dissipates that heat in the liquid to the room air.
During winter, you could improve the effectiveness of the cooling by running the liquid cooling tubes outside (assuming it has some sort of antifreeze in it), and having a radiator outside dissipate the heat into the colder air. Or you could do what I did once and just put the computer in one room, open the windows to that room, close the door, and run the monitor, keyboard, and mouse cables under the door into another room. (That was my "refrigerator trick" to getting data off a dying hard drive.)
A radiator just improves heat transfer by increasing the contact surface area between the heat source (the radiator) and the heat sink (the air). Generally, heat transfer rate is proportional to surface area, but it's not exact because it depends on air flowrate as well.
The radiator is only necessary in a closed loop cooling system (the liquid carrying the heat is recirculated, so it needs to be cooled off before being sent back to the CPU). if you have a constant external source of cool liquid, you don't need the radiator. e.g. If you hooked up a cold water faucet to the inflow tube in your liquid cooler, and you put the outflow tube in the sink drain. That's why most power plants are located by the ocean or a river - a constant source of cold water and a place to dump warm water.
A heatsink and fan on the CPU is limited by being inside the case. It's limited by the case size so your heatsink fins (basically a radiator) can only be so big. And being inside the case means it sits in the hot air generated by other components. Heat flowrate is proportional to temperature differential. So if your CPU is 60C, room air is 20C, and air inside the case is 40C, then a heatsink inside the case will only be half as effective as if you could somehow put the heatsink outside the case.
That's what liquid cooling does. It uses water or some other fluid to carry heat from inside the case to outside. You then connect it to a radiator (same thing as a heatsink) which dissipates that heat in the liquid to the room air.
During winter, you could improve the effectiveness of the cooling by running the liquid cooling tubes outside (assuming it has some sort of antifreeze in it), and having a radiator outside dissipate the heat into the colder air. Or you could do what I did once and just put the computer in one room, open the windows to that room, close the door, and run the monitor, keyboard, and mouse cables under the door into another room. (That was my "refrigerator trick" to getting data off a dying hard drive.)
A radiator just improves heat transfer by increasing the contact surface area between the heat source (the radiator) and the heat sink (the air). Generally, heat transfer rate is proportional to surface area, but it's not exact because it depends on air flowrate as well.
The radiator is only necessary in a closed loop cooling system (the liquid carrying the heat is recirculated, so it needs to be cooled off before being sent back to the CPU). if you have a constant external source of cool liquid, you don't need the radiator. e.g. If you hooked up a cold water faucet to the inflow tube in your liquid cooler, and you put the outflow tube in the sink drain. That's why most power plants are located by the ocean or a river - a constant source of cold water and a place to dump warm water.
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