?c02 cooling?
 

well, guys, tell me what you think. i'm an avid paintballer, so i've run into plenty of cold co2 tanks, and they're cheap to fill, and the more you let out the colder it gets, and i was watching the fast and the furious the other day and came upon a stupid idea.

co2 - nos syle. set up a button on the case of your computer that injects co2 onto your cpu/gpu/north bridge/ram. i soon realized just how bad of an idea this was, when i remembered that co2 creates quite a lot of condensation. but i did some reading, and some special pastes with neoprene around 'em can fix that. so on to the second problem: i'd always want to push it. push push push push push push push push.... -15C well damn everything stopped working. hmmmm, i have 2 inches of frost on the back of my motherboard, and there's a funky white liquid dripping down my mobo. so i came up with an idea to use a solenoid(valve on sprinklers) to release it from a co2 tank. i also found these little thermostats that have a built-in alarm. you know what that means. you just re-wire the electrical current going to the alarm to go to the solenoid (or a switch to the solenoid) and it injects the cold stuff whenever your [insert overclocked part here] gets to [insert alarm temperature here]. the only thing you have to do is pay your $3 every month or so (or week, if you're doubling multipliers) and figure out a good temp to inject on. any comments are welcome, as i'd rather be ridiculed and still have my computer than try it and lose everything.

I know many people who use CO2 for Intercooling chilling in cars, seems to me like it would be a very expensive process to keep a PC cooled, but cheaper than LN2.

well for cost here's what i assume:

a) you have watercooling, making the co2 control spikes and high-end cpu usage
b) you have a paintball shop or something similar in the area
c) you can hook this up so you're only using a little co2 at a time.

when playing paintball, if you used a 24oz co2($3 to fill around here, can be up to 10 in some very very rare cases), you can get up to 3000 shots. firing a paintball takes a lot of pressure and a lot of volume. so the way i figure it, one $3 fill should keep you going through a few lan parties at least before it runs out. and really, when you spend this much on a computer, isn't it worth a little more to get a huge boost?


one more thing....
d) compare this to the cost of nos.....



... my point exactly. this is nothing.

This would be very inefficient and dangerous. If you want a more stable subambient solution, use chilled watercooling (phase change or peltier) or just use a bolt on phase change unit (Vapochill or Prometia).

that's much much much more expensive. co2 would cost me about 10 bucks to set up, and it would give a huge performance gain. i'm just not sure if it's do-able.

It's not. In the end you'd spend more than the cost of a phase change unit to get it set up and semi-reliable ... though you can never engineer out the human component unless you have a university scale budget (i.e. massive waste, fraud, and abuse).

i think there's a lot of things to consider that may cause problems here.

if nothing else, if you're doing these "burstings", how hard is this going to be on your hot pc components when they're blasted suddenly to below freezing?

secondly, i think it would be a much better system in a closed loop, with some sort of reclamation system. but then you're getting to the point where you just as well go phase change or whatever and use refrigerant, since you'd need a compressor and such anyways :)

right i see what you're saying. it's just the idea of having something new and inventive, and trying something nobody else has before. so i probably won't try this, it is pretty risky, after all. thanks a bunch guys.

although it would look pretty cool seeing a die shatter from the sudden temp change.:eek:

heh, yeah, a while back i was playing with my canned air, and i thought, "hrm... wouldn't it be cool if..."

i decided rather quickly that's a bad idea, and not nearly practical. phase change would be much better. :)