Liquid Cooling Showdown

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Well put. You must not understand what antifreeze is if you think it's used to aid in cooling.
 


Antifreeze was in there because I had previously heard roumors of such attempts, but seen nothing quantative on review sites. This made me curious. If, however, I had heard instead of soysauce being utilized for cooling, then the we would have used that instead :lol:

But, as previously stated, I'm definetly open to trying different mixtures of water/antifreeze to see the results we get there. There's a lot to sort through before we take the next step, but I'm confident that it will be worth while.
 
I can tell you that putting anti-freeze into a Koolance system will dissolve the seals, crack the polycarbonate heatsinks, and void the warranty. Doh!

It seemed to hold the temps as good or better than the Koolance liquid though. :)
 
Ok I think I can straighten a few things out. But first I think it would be helpful for everyone to know some definitions,

Specific heat - The amount of heat, measured in calories, required to raise the temperature of one gram of a substance by one Celsius degree.

Heat - is the transfer of kinetic energy from one medium or object to another or from an energy source to a medium or object. Such energy transfer can occur in three ways: radiation, conduction, and convection.

The specific heat of water is 1 and that%u2019s about as high of a specific heat as you can get when you consider everyday commonly available liquids. I think the stone gypsum has a specific heat of just above one but that%u2019s in its solid state, I digress back on topic.

So basically water can carry a lot of kinetic energy or heat. The fastest and most efficient way to transfer heat is through conduction (objects physically touching one another to facilitate heat transfer). This is why water blocks generally have a lot of little passageways for the water to travel through because it increases the surface area that the water can touch and there for the water is able to gather up and store as much heat as possible to be carried away (and why HSF have a lot of fins for the air to move over and cool).

Now to explain a few things that people have talked about.

1. Alcohols of any sort won%u2019t work as a coolant very well because its specific heat is not greater than waters. The reason beer worked decently is because it%u2019s mostly water 95% to 92% depending on the beer. If you%u2019re thinking, %u201CWell rubbing alcohol feels cool on my skin.%u201D That%u2019s because it is evaporating off your skin. We can%u2019t have coolant in our pc evaporating on us that quickly or we would need gallons of it per day.

2. The reason antifreeze didn%u2019t work well is because its purpose is like its name suggests, to prevent freezing. It is supposed to be an additive to water (H2O) in your car to prevent the water from freezing in winter and cracking your engine block. Yes it works as a coolant in summer too but that%u2019s why you mix antifreeze 50/50 with water because that mix won%u2019t freeze unless it gets very cold but it works well to cool your engine.

Edit: I think I should say that if you live in an area that never sees cold weather you still need to put antifreeze in your car. It also raises the boiling point of water and acts as a lubricant for your water pump so don't go thinking you can just put water in your car because thats not good for it either.

I%u2019d like to say that what I have said hasn%u2019t been fact checked to an extensive amount. Physics class was a little while ago and I typed this up in a bit of a hurry, but it is for the most part accurate. I very well could have made a mistake and welcome corrections that need to be made if I or someone else sees them.

 



I don't think you get it about Anti-freeze. Anti-freeze itself has a significantly lower capacity to absorb heat. Adding in any faction of Anti-freeze to water will lower the cooling capacity period. It's only functions are to significantly enhance the range in which water stays liquid, and to prevent corrosion in Aluminum/Iron cooling systems.

The only possible way it could be useful is if you were to stick the radiator in a freezer and didn't want your water to freeze when the pump is shut off.

That said, it was worth a single attempt just to show how pointless it is to use in a conventional room temp environment.

Automotive products that are worth tring are Redline's "Water-Wetter".



In no way that I know of could Anti-freeze be considered a lubricant for your water-pump. The bearings in every water-pump I've even seen (or replaced) are completely sealed. Only when these seals are breached (by wear or corrosion) and the bearings are actually exposed directly to the coolant do the water pumps fail, and every one I've ever had to replace failed due to bearing seal breach.

Plain water in your engine is fine under many circumstances. In certain engines, however, it will absolutely create corrosion issues, filling your cooling system with rust particulate, eventually clogging either your t-stat or your heater core. This is very common in certain dodge/chrysler engines, even with proper use of anti-freeze because of poor choice in materials.
 
I agree, you won't be able to improve upon water. Basically, you need density * specific heat capacity / molar mass > 4.18. Then your liquid is better than water. specific heat capacity is measured in J/mol*K (only chemists use calories). I saw one website claim ammonia is better, but it boils at -30C, so we couldn't use it, even if we thought it would work. But, it doesn't fit the equation, since density = 0.682g/mL, specific heat capacity = 80.08 J/mol*K and molar mass is 17.03g/mol.
 
lol! nice part 2!

not surprising, seeing as beer is ~95% water, I am sure with time you will get some allege build up?

long term: corrosion probably is not an issue

i think will we hook the keg to the system with flat bear then output to liquid chiller after the cpu,gpu and chipset we can then finally add CO2 to system and output the coolant directly to mugsl

geek bar!

o ya the, sorry,sad plug:
DSC_0123.jpg


 
RoyalCrown,
You ever used a Koolance water block? Apparently not, or you'd know that they are injection molded plastic surrounding the metal inserts, and the coolant passes through the plastic. Crack the plastic and they leak.

Koolance told me that the only time they'd heard of that happening was with someone else's coolant. Within a month of changing to anti-freeze the first block cracked. The 2nd one lasted about the same. The seals in the 18 month old Exos2 went out at the same time as the 2nd CPU cooler (that's actually when I noticed it), which was the end of water cooling for me. The leaking seals took out a PX7900GTX TDH Extreme, and very lucky it didn't take out more. Now I don't know for sure if the seals were attacked by the anti-freeze, but it's funny that they went at the same time. The seals should have lasted much longer.

My best guess is that this is polycarbonate, as I was an injection molding supervisor/molding technician for 17 years. These are definitely injection molded inserts as I can see the ejector pin marks, flow lines and gates. I do know that polycarbonate is attacked by many chemicals. That's how we used to get stuck parts off molds, apply a little acetone and PC shatters like glass. That's exactly what these CPU blocks look like, disintegrated at the base and cracked all the way around.

That's also where I learned about cooling with water. The most important variable is turbulent flow. I have yet to see a pump for computer systems attain turbulent flow, which is about 5 gallons per minute of circulation. With proper flow, heat can transfer in and out of water faster.

My thinking with the anti-freeze is that its much more dense, thus would take longer to heat up, which should be good for short term overclocks. Unfortunately, it would also be slower to cool back down. At any rate, I won't be using it again.

Here's a couple pics. Sorry for the quality but my camera sux for this kinda stuff. The half that didn't come off is also cracked all the way around and the entire bottom is brittle. :)

http://www.ultramaxcc.com.au/images/cracked1.jpg

http://www.ultramaxcc. com.au/images/cracked2.jpg
 
Dont know if anyone said this yet, but about the beer will obviously cool better than a 25% anti freeze solution. anti freeze only prevents freezing and helps stop corrosion it is not good for cooling. Ethylene glycol is a MUCH worse conductor of heat than water, you cannot beat water ITO cooling if it was not for hydrogen bonding there would be no life on earth. 4200J/l/K vesus whatever else, and since everything else is lower than 4.2 kj good luck cooling something with anything other than water and expecting results that are as good.

Beer will be VERY crappy to clean cause it contains a lot of malt and still quite a bit of sugar, you will therefore get a lot of Maillard reactions when your sugars react with your proteins and form a nice sticky brown mass all over you cooler and in your tubes. Also the etOH will not be a good thing either. They make beer out of whatever is the cheapest crap they can find for their particular yeast to grow on, so you will be putting all kinds of horrible stuff in your pc, let alone your mouth which, it seems, is attached to something dumb enough to put it in a pc and down it's throat and not the drain where it belongs.
 
BTW, Koolance's water blocks may be acryllic. Can't think of what other material they could possibly be besides PC. I'm still pretty sure the anti-freeze is what degraded the plastic though.
 
I watched both videos Aug. 11th.

Part one showed:
liq. idle temp liq. load temp CPU idle CPU load
Thermaltake 26 29.4-29.6 21 43
Silverstone 26.4 28.6 21 48
Koolance 25.5 29.9 22 49

Thus, in the version of the video I watched 6 times (while taking notes); the Thermaltake liquid is shown to be by far the best at cooling the CPU under load. The Thermaltake liquid keeps the CPU under load five (5) degrees Centigrade cooler than the Silverstone liquid!
 
Darklife, did you get any pictures?

Maybe we need to test more for endurance and corrosion.

One thing is for certain. There's not enough hard, tested data in this area. What fluids cool the best? How often do you really need to change the fluid? Does the really expensive stuff do anything? And there's only one way to get this data.

More tests. Longer and harder tests.

Questions? Comments? Test suggestions?
 
I found it very interesting that anti-freeze was used.... I don't believe that antifreeze has better heat transfer capabilities than distilled water, its primary goal is to lower the freezing temperature of the cooling liquid, and secondly many manufacturers try to include additives to help improve heat transfer capabilities which were lost by adding the anti-freeze components. I would like to see a test using a glycol ether mixture such as waterwatter made by redline, this cooling liquid is used to maximize cooling capabilities in race cars with no freezing temperatures considerations which is more applicable to the current application. The optimized mixture of water and watterwetter should have a low viscosity and pump easly through the standard PC water cooling pump

Chris


 
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