Chilling?

S

shawngibson

Weaksauce
Joined
Dec 21, 2005
Messages
78
I know server rooms are often very-well temp-controlled (as in, the one I used to work in required a sweater to work in...), so how come I've never seen anyone add any kind of refrigeration to their cooling units?

I will be cooling 2 or most likely 3 computers soon (my 2006 project that I've started) and I have been considering building an array of rads and one large reservoir, and putting the whole thing into a modified wine cooler such as this: wine cooler

Is there any reason not to? Obviously, I'd need antifreeze. Drill a few holes in the side and change around the internal trays a a bit, shouldn't be hard, but why have I not seen this done before? Is there some kind of problem with the idea?

Shawn

edit: the reason I am interested is, even though I am in Toronto, I live in an apartment that is ALWAYS too hot, as in 25+ in February for some stupid reason, and the internal cooling/heating of the apartment only does heating during the winter...and summer it gets really obnoxious.
 
Sort of like the links indicate, but not really. I mean just cooling the array of rads (more rad space=more cooling, no?) and a big acrylic reservoir (big water/cooling storage in a very cool environment) would be put into the chiller or a small fridge, a couple of holes for lines drilled through. It doesn't circulate any of the fridge/chiller air, merely cools the rads and most importantly the large reservoir.

I would be sending chilled water to the cpu/gpu and maybe add one 120 sized rad in the computers, with a fan, all hooked up to this supply of chilled coolant.

Not per se cooling the case, but ensuring the liquid cooling 'system' bolted onto everything is supplied very, very cold water (and as I say, maybe 1 internal rad that MIGHT be cool enough with the coolant to warrant using it as an intake area for the case itself, with each computer...though I can't imagine a 120 sized rad actually doing much with an intake fan on it, to reduce the temp much more than a room-temp rad would do there, no surface area, and it's ambient temps being blown through the chilled rad...so maybe a very small percentage cooler).

It would add about 20% only to the total cost of cooling for 2 computers (not sure for 3) and it's basically drilling a few holes into a winecooler, if you don't see any problems with the setup? I already have 2 Swiftech kits that I'll start with, with the 220 rads...add 1-2 more rads, and build good acrylic reservior...look into the performance of the pumps.

Also means not having to stand up or anything so extreme as a walk to the kitchen for a cold beer:)
 
Depends on how "good" your fridge or wine cooler is I suppose. My parents had an old but quite cold 6'x4'x4' deepfreeze in the basement. I dropped my watercooled Intel setup into the deepfreeze at one point, it worked great...did help to drop my temps (obviously) but there is/was one downside...

Because the fridge/deepfreeze is an enclosed space, the heat being dumped out of my heatercore slowly started to collect inside the deepfreeze...and as the ambient temps started to raise inside the freezer, as did my CPU/GPU temps...and the ice inside the freezer actually started to melt away, and I had to physically cover up my comp, as melting ice hanging overtop of a computer system isn't really a healthy thing IMO.

Let me know if I missed something, but the main downfall with this kind of cooling idea is that these bar/mini/wine fridges and freezers are not meant to deal with any large amounts of direct heat output....they're there to keep your food/drinks cold...and without some type of modification I don't see how many of these fridges/freezers could efficiently deal with one or more computers heat output.
 
You got it, I think. No computer in the fridge, just the rads and big reservoir in there. I never realized the output would actually be so high, heat-wise, on the rads to make it a problem trying to keep it cool. Hummm. Maybe it's a size thing? If enough cool air is being generated over the hot air, in other words, if I look into how much the heat output will be, and how much a particular fridge/freezer can handle (I guess it's a per-hour thing) I could probably match it up.

Who knows, maybe a 4 foot freezer behind my desk would be fine...

Have to do some more research now that I feel better there is nothing inherintly wrong with the idea...
 
Hey no funny stuff...only reason I decided against a great big fish tank with coldwater bass and carp was cuz I didn't want fish poop in my cooling:):):)

Shawn:)
 
shawngibson said:
This is just too cool for me to pass up. I'll seriously consider it until next pay, and get it then if it's a good idea in my head still:

http://www.danby.com/en/productDetails.asp?model_no=DCF550BL&dept=0002
Click to expand...

Pretty cool man, maybe I didn't look hard enough, but does it have it listed anywhere as to the "cooling capacity" of that thing? Even just placing the radiator in the fridge/freezer it'll still end up dumping a fair bit of heat into the enclosure, and heat WILL still build up and raise the ambient temp inside the box if the freezer isn't up to the task.
 
Not sure how this lines up, but:

Freezer = 248 kilowatts/year 'consumption'
AMD Opteron if I remember from AMD thermal file (.psd on the site) is 100W
The rads are good for 115W each

I don't know if that means 4 CPU=400W, and if I get 2 more rads that means 4=460W and that means therefore the 248 is roughly half of what I'd need in order to ensure things remain chilly for 2 computers?

If that's the case, since it's a Montreal firm I might be able to find a decent price for the freezer- near as I can tell the freezers cost less than the Swiftech kits, each, that I have, so worst case would be one freezer for workstation, and one freezer for server. But server is probably going to be a lot less power-hungry, and I might just be sane with the cooling on that, which means it would just be the one computer I am cooling with this. And if I have the Watts part figured out correctly (highly unlikely) I should be OK?
 
shawngibson said:
Not sure how this lines up, but:

Freezer = 248 kilowatts/year 'consumption'
AMD Opteron if I remember from AMD thermal file (.psd on the site) is 100W
The rads are good for 115W each

I don't know if that means 4 CPU=400W, and if I get 2 more rads that means 4=460W and that means therefore the 248 is roughly half of what I'd need in order to ensure things remain chilly for 2 computers?

If that's the case, since it's a Montreal firm I might be able to find a decent price for the freezer- near as I can tell the freezers cost less than the Swiftech kits, each, that I have, so worst case would be one freezer for workstation, and one freezer for server. But server is probably going to be a lot less power-hungry, and I might just be sane with the cooling on that, which means it would just be the one computer I am cooling with this. And if I have the Watts part figured out correctly (highly unlikely) I should be OK?
Click to expand...

I'm honestly not the one to be asking about those things...I just wanted to know if you knew. Hopefully things work out for you, crossin' my fingers. :)
 
to reduce the strain on the fridg/freezer, put the rads outside the fridge and like 1 rad and the res in the fridge/freezer. the external ones would take some of the heat out before chilling which would yield colder water temps
 
That's a great idea, it would serve of course to reduce the temps in the freezer. And the bottom line here is, I am starting with a dual-swiftech kit that, on it's own, is meant to be sufficient, so what I am doing here is really an additive measure and for the sake of trying to keep the system running for a long time (the money spending on this computer justifies wanting a really good cooling setup since I'd like to not have to upgrade *major stuff* for at least a few years...). There is of course, and certainly most importantly, the cool factor, or dork maybe, who knows. I DO like to amuse myself with oddities occasionally...

...And what better way to amuse myself than maybe building a fishie thing? Another option is the fish chiller, which I discovered finally through a friend at work today, very expensive, but...well...relatively speaking...who knows:

http://www.marinedepot.com/md_viewItem.asp?idproduct=JB1113

This seems to indicate I might be OK with the (ahem) 'moderately'-low-priced one:

http://www.jbjlighting.com/prod_chiller_size.asp
 
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