My computer used to overheat all the time. Nothing like the smell of burning electronics in the morning. Suprisingly it wasn't the CPU that was causing all the problems. In my POS computer I am running 7 HD's and 1 DVD-RW. All thoes HD's put off alot of heat. So I decided to look into water cooling. I looked around for a couple hours and saw the price averaged between $200 - $350 (OUCH!). I don't know about everyone else but I don't have that kind of money waiting to burn. so I got it into my mind that I would make it myself. So I started to look at the cooling systems on the internet. nothing fancy. A small raidator, some plastic tube, a cooling block of some sort, and a water pump. that doesnt' sound to hard. I was thinking to my self... What could I use for a radiator that is small. I went down to the local wrecking yard and went looking around at some cars... Seeing how a full size radiator does not exactly fit the form or fit of the case and isn't exactly cheep I started looking at oilcoolers and heater cores. I went under the dash of a old car and desided it was too much work to pull out the heater core, so I went around to the front of it and shure enough there was a 10 X 10 oil cooler. pulled it out and only paid $15 and it had a 12V fan atached (WOOHOO!!!). went home and cleaned it up. Works great and it even runs off the power supply. Next I went out to the boat shop. I was looking for a 12V pump and some hose. I found on sale a $10 500gph bilge pump. That was much more than I ever needed. Hoses and fittings ran me about $10. the last thing I needed was some cooling blocks for the hard drives and cpu. I went down to the local hobby shop picked up some thin copper plates, chaneling, tubing, and solder total cost $8. Went home and belive it or not soldered it on my stove top on a medium heat setting (don't have a soldering iron). The soldering was the only hard part. after I soldered the cooling plates I was ready to go. I put the bilge pump in a bucket of water. Hooked up the hoses to the raidiator and the cooling plates I made. and one more for a return line from the cooling plate back to the bucket of distilled water. At first I hooked the pump up to the yellow (+12v) and the chacy (common ground -). WOOHOO!!! it works. No leaks. I ran it for about 48 hours to conferm that there were no leaks. next was to hook it up to the computer. Taking the left over copper plating I made some brackets/clips to hold the CPU and HD coolers in place. Hooked it up and turned it on again with the MainBoard unpluged. no leaks. I ran it for another 24 hours to conferm that there were no leaks again. Plug in the MB and time for a test drive. Everything was going grate. After about 3 hours I noticed that the water temp was going up. the Pump was running so fast it that the radiator couldn't take all the heat away. so I rewired the pump. I moved the positive wire on the pump from the yellow to the red (+5v). I ran it like that for about a week with out turning the computer off. Works great. the cooling system was running at 12F above room temp (73F). And the best part is that the computer doesn't keep the room too hot any more and it still has enough resources left to cool a second computer.
Total cost for all supplys $32 + tax.
Total cost for all supplys $32 + tax.
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