Watercooling Radiator Idea

[TeePee]

I'm going to be watercooling my rig shortly, and I'm giving some thought to radiator design.

The whole purpose behind watercooling is to transfer heat from the CPU to the air via a radiator with a large surface area. PC watercooling radiators are small, designed to fit into a case, and are normally designed to have air forced through them by a fan.

Since I have a shuttle for portability in adiation to my main rig, I was thinking about making a feature of a wall mounted radiator. With a large enough surface area it shouldn't need any fans blowing accross it.

My design so far, simply consists of two copper sheets, of approximately 1'x3' held about an inch apart by some copper bar, with the water flowing between the two. Provided theres a small gap between it and the wall, it will have 6sqft of surface area, which should easily be enough. The front copper panel facing the room would then be polished up for shiney-goodness..

I have a couple of concerns with this design. It's a very big object to solder together, without risk of leaks, especially with my limited tools, has anyone attempted anything on this scale? It's also going to be very heavy, although I ahould esily be able to secure it to the studs in the wall. The other problem is that it will have to be mounted near to floor level, since the maximum head height of most watercooling pumps is less than 2'.
On the other hand, it will take a lot of water, and it be a lot better for flow rates than the small radiators most people use.

The second possibility is to make a back and forth run of copper pipes, and solder this to a sheet of copper. The soldering should be far simpler, with much less chance of leaks occuring, and given that the pipes would all be covered by the copper sheet it will still look as good. The cooling won't be as sucessful, but I may have to compromise that for ease of manufacture.

What do you think? Any creative input?

[fondie]

this link may well be of use to you :- http://www.overclockers.com/tips1093/

[windog]

Check out a good quality plumbers merchant. You can get anealed microbore Cu pipe (8mm) .This bends easily and you could meke yourself a snazzy shaped radiator and would require little or no soldering perhaps just two strips on the back to hold it together and to use to mount it.

Windog

[Knoxville]

Originally posted by fondie
this link may well be of use to you :- http://www.overclockers.com/tips1093/

Impressive as that is, if the rads in another room then your not gonna be able to hear the fans anyway.......

[jamin]

Wow! Thats a top idea fondie! Wonder if it would be a bit more efficient if it was buried in the ground....

[SHARKMEAT]

What is the big deal here,but haft to amit it was a heck of a nice looking finesh product,except the tubeing in the case looks like a person in a intensive care unit.My CPU 3 gig runs at 30c Idle and all I hear is my power supply fans.no pipes no copper except for the zalman "CNPS 7000-cu" model heatsink copper fins.Love that heatsink,wish I had designed it,was close to the idear,but they beat me to the punch.But I have to say he must have had a ball maken the water cooler,as the last one said he would been better off in the ground,much less where he lives.In winter he would get water temp around 32F if he was below the frost line so it wouldn't freeze.. BTW wanted to let you know if you want to look at the Zalman heatsink it,s at zalman.com.didn't but in the triggers to make it clickable just type it