My Crazy Setup - 20 degrees C using watercooling with Mini frig as the radiator on a gaming PC coffee table

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SkiTTLeKiLLeR

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Jun 2, 2017
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So I'm new here. I use to be big on gaming back in the day (2000-2005), but I finish school and started spending most my time working in the industrial field (I'm an E&I Technician)

So one day I had the crazy idea to build a new power PC, because I wanted to start a few youtube channels for all the hobbies I'm into (fishing, cooking, boating, firearms, forging, gaming...etc) I needed a powerful PC to use for audio and video editing. Long story short I'm a bit odd/weird/extreme type of person so I made a coffee table into a gaming PC. Here are the specs:

Intel Core i5-7600K Kaby Lake Quad-Core 3.8 GHz (didn't know for $50 more I could have got the i7..UGH!)
Arctic Cooling Liquid Freezer 120 CPU Water Cooler
ASUS ROG STRIX GTX1060 with a Barrow GPU Water Block
ASUS TUF Z270 Mark 1 LGA1151
G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) 288-Pin DDR4
SAMSUNG MZNTE512HMJH 512GB M.2 SSD Solid State
All running on Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate(I wanted to use Ubuntu 17.04 to use VMWARE with a passthrough but I was having too many issues with drivers.)

I have at the moment the input and output 1/4 inch 15ft hoses running under the carpet, behind the sofa, and to a mini refrigerator with 15ft of 1/4 inch copper tubing going to a 16oz glass mason jar acting as a reservoir.

I been out of the gaming crowd for awhile but playing GTA5 on very high settings I'm getting 20-24 degrees C after playing for 1 hour. I'm looking online for an average temp and I'm seeing 25 - 40 C. I just completed today and wanted to post pictures, video, and do a benchmark but I'm working shift until Tuesday. I'm using the software that came with my GPU (ASUS GPU Tweak II) and set it to "gaming mode" for overclocking. It just cause the GPU temp to raise 3 degrees to a steady 23 degrees. It peaked at I think 25 C degree because I was playing GTA5 while I was running backup and Windows updates.

My question is if 20 to 25 degrees C normal for the specs I have under a load?
 
Solution
Karadjgne
The only way you'll get any life out of a system like that is to use a good sized fish tank and a fish tank water chiller. You need the volume of liquid to compensate for the compressor kick on/off at a slower rate. While compressors are made for on/off cycles, constant running tends to burn out bearings pretty quickly. It doesn't take much for that chiller to keep a 15°-17°C temp, but it'd take quite a while for a small source like a cpu to actually raise the temp of the tank to any degree. The downside is ppl tend not to want to include a fish tank as part of their cooling loop although surprisingly you'll see quite a few cases with grommeted holes in the back panel for just such an idea.
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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This has been tried many many times.

It is a fast way to kill a mini fridge.
The compressor and pump is not made for a continual heat source.
It will work for a while, and then die an early death.

The only benefit you gain here is being able to say you are running at 20C under load. It provides no performance gain.
 
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Karadjgne

Karadjgne

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The only way you'll get any life out of a system like that is to use a good sized fish tank and a fish tank water chiller. You need the volume of liquid to compensate for the compressor kick on/off at a slower rate. While compressors are made for on/off cycles, constant running tends to burn out bearings pretty quickly. It doesn't take much for that chiller to keep a 15°-17°C temp, but it'd take quite a while for a small source like a cpu to actually raise the temp of the tank to any degree. The downside is ppl tend not to want to include a fish tank as part of their cooling loop although surprisingly you'll see quite a few cases with grommeted holes in the back panel for just such an idea.
 
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Solution
rubix_1011

rubix_1011

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Jan 12, 2007
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Better use of that mini fridge compressor would be to use it to force chill coolant to be used in a watercooling loop, not by attempting to act as the air chiller for the heat exchanger. You'd have to gut the fridge and rebuild it for this purpose, but many people have done it and there are many guides online and on YouTube.

But USAFRet is correct - we've seen this on this forum and others for years and each time someone says it will be a great idea but we never see anyone coming back a year later to update us on how it is going. The fact is, refrigerators are actually very poor at thermal transfer and reduction in air temperature, which is why you aren't supposed to put hot food in your fridge or freezer to cool down - it is much more of an insulator than it is a cooler. Therefore, if the compressor cannot remove enough excess heat from the source, it bleeds into the surrounding area - food, ice cream, ice cubes, etc....and in this instance, the empty air inside the fridge. Air is an insulator also, which makes it even harder for a compressor to chill the air, which will then chill the coolant....that is continually having thermal load applied.

In the sense of a compressor being used to force chill coolant, the thermal exchange is far more superior because you are bypassing the need to use air to chill coolant - you are either directly cooling it with the compressor coil internally, or directly cooling it externally with direct contact with the cooling coils.
 
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