Water Cooling a Personal Computer
I intend to water cool my next PC. There are three areas of heat production in a PC - the CPU, the GPU and the motherboard itself. Would it be more effective to treat these three areas separately (with three cooling loops) or as one system? And by 'effective' I mean best cooling. My thermodynamics is woefully inadequate, but my hydraulics is pretty fair. (I used to design high pressure sprinkler systems for acft hangers many years ago)
If as a single system would it be better to run the radiators as a common plenum cooling the three heat areas via their own common plenum? Or, in true series - Heat unit, radiator, heat unit radiator, heat unit radiator, pump...
I use 'three' radiators because in the case I have chosen I can fit three radiators...
--How will you control fluid flow thruogh the three if in parallel? – Solar Mike--
Were I to go the parallel radiator route, I would take pump output and feed that into a common plenum, then have an outlet from the plenum into each radiator. Getting picky, each outlet from the plenum to the radiators would have to have the same length / restriction to be truly 'balanced' Taking this idea further, have the three radiators' outputs feed into a common plenum, then have each water block be fed from THAT plenum, and their output go into into a final plenum and from there back into pump. 842
So, I would have pump out into radiator in plenum, then radiators and on to the radiator out / water block in plenum, then have a water block out / pump in plenum. From a hydraulic POV, the system is 'balanced' except for the water blocks. Some wee fiddling and measuring, find out all three water blocks true restrictions then add some to the least / second least and walla! paralleled and balanced. But is that the most effective way?
-"What are you doing with your computer that would require all this cooling? Did you modify your CPU to clock faster? – <PERSON>As a semi-professional animator my PC spends much of its time rendering. You don't know how annoying fan noise can be until you run most of your threads at 100% Given that, I also don't skimp on my components. Two quadros produce a LOT of heat. I would like to cool them as well to keep the TCO down. 742