Dry Ice and a Cooler

[t0p5ecret]

wun911, melting dry ice is not a painless way to go, you do know it is happening because it is carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide poisoning causes a shortness of breath and an automatic choking/gasping response. You are possibly thinking of Carbon Monoxide poisoning which shows very few side affects.

 

[hashv2f16]

You are possibly thinking of Carbon Monoxide poisoning which shows very few side affects.

apart from death

 

[t0p5ecret]

nice call hash perhaps i should have added "apart from the obvious"

 

[-Feller-]

"If you dont think its deadly I dare you to stick your head in a bucket of dry ice!

ie your head does not touch the ice but the bucket is deep enough to sink your whole head into it.... then let the ice melt...... its a painless way to put out your lights. "

Actually, you’re thinking of Carbon MONOXIDE. Carbon dioxide is a completely different animal. People commit suicide in their cars with carbon monoxide because the body can not tell the CO is blocking the oxygen and you pass out, then die.

Carbon DIOXIDE will HURT LIKE HELL. If you breath high concentrations of CO2 you will cry. It will feel like you are drowning and your body does not like that. When you hold your breath and then it starts to hurt and you feel you have to breath... that is when your body begins to measure elevated levels of CO2 in the lungs.

Just FYI

I would agree, this is not a practical or intelligent idea for cooling.

 

[elpresidente2075]

Since it seems to be quite a topic, I suggest a test to see whether it will hurt or not:

Take a tall glass and fill it about 1/2 - 3/4 full of soda, something with a lot of fizz, then stick your noze into the top of the glass immediately and take a big breath through your noze.

A bit of advice: Make sure you are sitting down and are somewhere that is easy to clean up.

 

[babbler]

To see whether it is cost effective to use such a system, after you invest in all of the hardware you need, you should look at the Latent Heat of Vaporization for CO2. I've only checked one resource and it listed the value as 241BTUs, about 70 watts, for 1 lb of dry ice. I'm pretty sure that the ratings for most CPUs are watts/hr, and if you're looking to put your whole motherboard in a fridge, you'd have to add up the heat from the chipset, video card, hard disks, etc.. So it looks like you'd be looking at at least 3 lbs of dry ice per hour. Not sure if it's cost effective, but it would be good exercise.

I think the issue that must be addressed is avoiding any condensation. Therefore, your refridgerator/freezer has to be sealed tight, and probably evacuated before adding the dry ice. (You couldn't exactly have a separate condensor inside the fridge for moisture, since the whole fridge would work on the same principle.) Otherwise if any moist air gets into the refridgerator it will freeze and remain frozen until you run out of dry ice and it warms up, probably quickly since you'd have your complete system inside.

I'm not sure what your use of this PC will be. If it's for getting the ultimate overclock for a few minutes, it could probable be done, but if you want to play BF2 for several hours on dry ice, it would probably be easier and cheaper to buy a faster CPU and GPU or do water cooling.

If you're deadset on using dry ice in some way, and money isn't as much an issue, I'd do a closed loop cooling system with chilled gylcol, using dry ice to cool the heat exchanger/radiator. You could plumb this all inside your fridge and condensation in the fridge wouldn't matter. However, you'd need to insulate and then heat wrap the cooling lines going to the CPU heat exchanger in order to prevent condensation.

I've had a few years experience fighting condensation using heat wrap tape when I worked as an engineer, and have learned not to have much faith in it, so be forewarned.

If you do choose to make a dry ice system, good luck and please share your experience.

 

[unsmart]

What about non circulating watercooler? Run a hose form your tubs faucet to your waterblocks and bake to the tub. The cold water should be around 40-50f and after some hard gaming you can take a warm bath and chill. For real cooling put the waterblocks on some tec's and seal the mobo in a cooler with some of that drying salt[can't remember the real name] for basements. With the water getting dumped no need for a rad and fans and the sealed box with drying salts no condensation. You should be able to run some big tec's[200w] with water in 40-50f range and get sub zero on cpu/gpu.