Cooling them Hotties

[Terry1953]

I find that the PWS is a fairly closed off unit in most boxes. On my bottom mounted boxes it takes in room air with it's own fan and expels it out of the box back into the room. On a top mount it takes the warmest air in the box and expels it out of the box and into the room. And on it's worst day it can't begin to match the heat output of 2 6970's that are in the center of the box. The trouble is the total amount of heat generated and what to do with it. In the winter it is useful once you get it out of the box as a supplement to the furnace by moving it around the house. In the summer it would be more helpful to put it out of the house, or focus it on something useful like supplementing the water heater. At this Jason seems to excel with his watercooling. He has spent years learning to move the heat where he wants it to either dissipate it or use it to his advantage and turn it into money savings. The real problem as I see it is getting use out of the excess heat at a cost of less than the cost of just expelling it and eating the cost of generating it in the first place. As in if it cost me $10 to generate 1000 btu's and I expel the btu's outside, I have a total cost of $10. But, if I take my $10 worth of btu's and spend $4 extra to run a system that moves it to supplement the water heater and it only saves me $1 I have a net cost of $13 and I'm better off tossing it out the window. For some reason I get a picture of a Chevrolet Leaf popping into my head.

[Jason1478963]

Nflight did you share a similar cooling tactic used in data centers? It was done with cooled air delivered to the front of the racks and the hot pulled from the rear of the rows of racks. I believe it was two rows back to back with a door to access the back of the racks. I believe they reduced the fan noise greatly with this setup. I'm not sure how the air was treated, but with a newer building and heat pumps connected to water loops this heat could be put to use in the building elsewhere. I look forward to pictures of your completed systems for your geothermal home.

Dirk Broer This sounds like a great idea if you have a cooler that allows different mounting positions. I have still been using stock AMD coolers for my systems that are on air yet and they aren't that fancy yet. When the case allows it i try and make an intake duct from a plastic juice bottle to draw air from the vented cover. This works ok for systems I have running cpu based projects.

Terry1953 thanks for the recognition of the system for heating water. The biggest chunk of the cost for me was the initial waterblocks and pieces parts. I would say with my setup in the basement it doesn't really use more electricity to pump the water for heating as one 50 watt pump replaces 6 or more cpu fans and/or gpu fans. The week spot in my system is the thermal siphon heat exchanger and small tank. I don't overclock all that much as I like the ability to heat water and don't always use the hot water fast enough in summer time when running several systems. In the winter time I plan on maintaining a certain temp with the koolance controller in the pre-heat tank by circulating the water into the living room zone to help heat it. I'm not sure you could run an exhaust fan for the power the 2 cooling loop pumps draw. :P What are your doing to cool your facility with all heat producing machines your running? If you can do it without using a/c to fight the extra BTUs it would be a considerable energy saver. (1 kWh is the energy equivalent of 3412.3 BTUs)

[Dirk Broer]

This sounds like a great idea if you have a cooler that allows different mounting positions. I have still been using stock AMD coolers for my systems that are on air yet and they aren't that fancy yet. When the case allows it i try and make an intake duct from a plastic juice bottle to draw air from the vented cover. This works ok for systems I have running cpu based projects.

AMD are still using old-fashioned down-blowers for their products, even for the 125-Watt FX line. Though I would gladly put it on one of my 65-Watt APUs (it looks more than twice as high as the AMD coolers that came with my 65-Watt APUs and the fan looks bigger too), this seems a bit inadequate for overclocking a FX as compared to a good air-cooler:

[Dirk Broer]

When it comes to declaring a cooler 'the best' it ultimately comes to a trade-off between cooling performance and noise.
I've tried to set a few of the best coolers in a graph where one Y-axis is noise in dB(A) and the other Y-axis is the difference between ambient and CPU temperature under full load.
Data per courtesy of Hardwaresecrets.com
AirVsWater.jpg
Anybody wanting his/her cooler mentioned here too, just name it...

[Terry1953]

Terry1953 thanks for the recognition of the system for heating water. The biggest chunk of the cost for me was the initial waterblocks and pieces parts. I would say with my setup in the basement it doesn't really use more electricity to pump the water for heating as one 50 watt pump replaces 6 or more cpu fans and/or gpu fans. The week spot in my system is the thermal siphon heat exchanger and small tank. I don't overclock all that much as I like the ability to heat water and don't always use the hot water fast enough in summer time when running several systems. In the winter time I plan on maintaining a certain temp with the koolance controller in the pre-heat tank by circulating the water into the living room zone to help heat it. I'm not sure you could run an exhaust fan for the power the 2 cooling loop pumps draw. :P What are your doing to cool your facility with all heat producing machines your running? If you can do it without using a/c to fight the extra BTUs it would be a considerable energy saver. (1 kWh is the energy equivalent of 3412.3 BTUs)

LOL Right now I'm just paying an Air Conditioning bill. Next week I'll be moved into my shed hideaway and it will become my source of heat through the winter. I have an 8,000 BTU window air unit to get by till cooler air moves in and then the insulation, and it only being a 12x12 room should take care of it till spring when I'll bring the air conditioning back online. I will be venting much of the heat out the wall next spring and the air bill should be minimal. I just got another 6970 up and running this afternoon. I need one more to pair it up then I'm moving on to 7000 series.

[Nflight]

Butt ugly or not if it works don't mock it! Thanks for the fan points. Always nice to see they are moving towards more precisely pushing air not massaging it through the air.

[Dirk Broer]

Butt ugly or not if it works don't mock it!

But they can do so much better than a camouflaged piece of aluminium:

Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E Special Edition with 2x 140mm fans

[Jason1478963]

I'm still cooling most of mine with this antique Most of the fancy air cooled setups like this didn't exist when I purchased most of my water blocks. The quiet fans and heat-pipes has made liquid cooling less necessary for most people.

[Dirk Broer]

Am I stupid or does this Corsair H105 review really make a very big plea for the Noctua NH-D14 or NH-15?
The Noctua is expensive -for an air cooler- but the H105 is far more expensive. And look at those results......

[Dirk Broer]

There are hot CPUs and there are 'hot' CPUs, and the renewed battle for more cores between AMD and Intel has brought us some real beauties.

AMD first did a P4-like attempt into giving the Bulldozer-architecture a final kick, GHz-wise, with the FX-9370 and FX-9590. These had a TDP of 220 Watt and needed some real serious (water)cooling.
Intel i7 CPUs are known to go to a respectable 140 Watt when fitted into Socket 2011 or 2011-3 boards, while Xeon's can get up to 200 Watt (the 20-core Xeon E5-2679 v4) even.

In that light, Threadripper and Epyc are 'cool' CPUs, Threadripper supposedly not reaching higher/hotter than 180 Watt on 16 cores and Epyc doing the same on 32-cores, reaching far higher clock speeds than their Intel counterparts (EK Water Blocks reportedly having a 16-core Threadripper running 4.2 GHz on all 16 cores). Still, it is a lot of heat to transfer into the air. Added problem is that the aftermarket has no standard-of-the-shelf coolers for Sockets TR4 and SP3. But I bet the coolers for Socket 2066 are not that common too, let alone Socket 3647, though the professional server market has their own coolers -not known for silent running.

And behold my surprise when I came across this article, promising an aftermarket cooler for both Socket SP3 and Socket 3647.