Technoogies Techno Blog

Liquid cooled computers aren’t all that the hype makes them out to be. I’m sure there’s the good, the bad, and the ugly but who wants to be the test lab at the price you’ll pay for them. Be sure to check out the hardware test sites before you leap like “TomsHardware.com” or “AnandTech.com”.

I always have the first kid on the block syndrome. I bought the Zalman Reserator XT more than a year ago and the VGA cooling block as well. The main-board I bought was the ASUS Maximus which has the north bridge water cooling block on the board. The heat pipes on it are pretty awesome as well. The video card is an MSI 8800 Ultra.

When I put the thing together I bought some extra fittings (A lot of extra fittings) and created a split from the main line to the video card so that the hot water from the CPU wouldn’t have to pass through the video card. How it works is that the CPU line is longer and the most critical so that is the straight line and the video line has a tee that runs a short loop through it and then a tee on the return line back to the main line. It works quite well. Originally I put a valve on the CPU line right after the tee for the video line so that I could close it down a little to force some flow to the video card but I found that on this system it wasn’t necessary.

Last week I had a nuclear melt down. The water had evaporated enough, after more than a year, to stop the flow of water. Instant shutdown. I’m grateful to Asus for making good overheat protection in their board. So I grabbed the distilled water and topped it off. Started the machine and all was well right? I thought it was.

Last night the same thing happened again. The beep, beep, beep, from under the desk and my panic motions to save files before everything went quiet. Here’s the thing, I’m not a scientist and I wasn’t about to cut anything open to see inside, but after running some mild solvents, dymethyl sulfoxide(DMSO) and isopropyl alcohol through the pipes, there seemed to be a lot of sediment from the Zalman coolant that came with the package. I’m not talking about great gobs but enough to concern me. I suspect enough to freeze the pump though. I took the pump out and poured some solvent into it and then placed it’s tubes into a large cup half full of solvent and water and let it run for an hour. After I put the XT back together I made a mix of about 70% distilled water, and 30% isopropyl alcohol and that’s what I’m running on now. My CPU being over-clocked from 3.0 to 3.2 GHz was running at around 59˚C and now runs at about 49˚C. The water temp at the pump was 39˚C and is now 37˚C tops. Wow, what a change.

I remember when I picked up that bottle of Zalmans coolant and seeing the sediment on the bottom. I should have left it there but no, I had to shake it up and mix it into the coolant and pour it into the tank. I guess if I hadn’t done that I might not have had a melt down but on the other hand I learned a very cool lesson. Toss the Zalmans coolant and mix your own. The DMSO is a good mild solvent for cleaning the cooling system. It freezes at 18˚C.  On the flip-side it has a higher boiling point too of 189˚C but can catch fire at 89˚C. (Water boils at 100˚C) Now you might think therefore, why not use it in the coolant? I tried that and found that it starts to separate from the other liquids after a while and causes air bubbles for some strange reason. Before you use this stuff read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfoxide and be cautious. Alcohol is the real key ingredient for a cooler(colder) cooler(that’s cool man!) cooler(CPU cooler). Don’t get carried away with it. You could probably use more than I did though. The alcohol will keep the micro organisms from growing as well since it’s an antibial. Lastly, be sure to use distilled water(not for drinking, in other words, don’t drink it). This type of water has less contaminants(no cooties). This reduces the chance of corrosion too.

It’s all great fun and we love this stuff anyhow. Be cooler!

- Cory L. Curtis

UPDATE :
It’s a good idea to tip your case on to its side to help get the air bubbles out of the lines and cooling blocks, CPU side up.

UPDATE : 2008-11-24
“The real Zalman Resorator XT Problem”

It’s the flow meter. The flow meter starts slowing and has trouble spinning. I put a garden pool pump in-line that has a 310 GPH flow rate at 1 foot lift and the flow meter would barely get past .5 gpm.

What I finally did was to put my own cooler, fan,  and pump together. I now run at 3.33Ghz and the temperature of the CPU is 43˚C. It works great. When I get this site moved to a new server I’ll be able to write a new article with pictures. I’ll try to list the parts I used and where to get them too, if I can remember all that.

- Cory L. Curtis

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts