case as radiator (weird wc question)
 

dont ask me why I thought of this...

but say you have an aluminum case, or at least one thats mostly metal. if you have a wc system, and a good pump, but no radiator...what you do is have tubing go pump to CPU, then to all around the case; a couple of bends in the top, down up down up the front, snakes left and right downwards on the side a few times, then comes back in the case from the back through a PCI slit, to the res, which then goes to the pump. obviously the pipes are touching the case every step of the way. how well would this work?

http://www.spatula-city.us/upload/up...pe_cooling.jpg

very bad illustration. i seem to have forgot to put the end of the pipe coming into a res and pump too :rolleyes: but you get the idea i hope. Im talking about a POWERFUL pump, a mag 3 at least, since thats a lot of piping.

It would not work very well at all.

Plastic tubing is more of an insulator than a conductor of heat.

Even if you had copper tubing, the surface area of tubing that would be connecting to the walls of your case is not adequate enough to cool the water.

well i meant the whole thing to be copper tubing :)

i got the idea from looking at the back of fridges, they seem to work well enough

Fridges use evaporation tehnology and not simple water cooling ;)

There are some cases out there that do this sort of thing but with air cooling. Where they use heat pipes and heat sinks to connect everything to the sides and what not. As far as the setup you show, something like this might work if you could get adequate contact between the copper and the case.

Maybe you could encapsulate the entire copper tube in thermal epoxy and sitck it to the case. If you can find something like this that is cheap might be worth a try. Of course the downside to this type of cooling method would be the need for at least two pumps to compensate for the tubing. Plus it would look like shiznatch. But then again so will my Koolance ghetto HD chiller thingy.....heh :D

EH?
Thats on the inside, the grill you see at the back of the fridge is normal convention between pipes and ambient air.

Anyway, the solution you are proposing,assuming you would solder the pipe to the case, would work fine if you put some airflow.
Thats because copper is very fast transfering heat, so even if a small area of the tube is soldered to the case, the heat would easily transfer to it.
How well it works? Do it and tell us how it worked :D

You should give this a try. Get some copper and get to it. I wanna see the end results. If it works good you can market it as a passive cooling system. Reserator style. Then all sorts of people will want to by it. (as indicated by a recent trend in several particular posts at this here site) You can even come up with a brand name. Perhaps Kronchlance. :D

But seriously, I have been interested in building a case out of copper for quite some time. I always think of it as the next step in the evolution of the case. Of course there are all kinds of funky design considerations that one would have to work out for something like this. Could you imagine how bad ass it would be to have a copper case with the tubing like you mentioned placed inside hollow copper walls. Unfortunately, copper is harder to come by then aluminum and steel. Maybe instead of using tubing, you could use a length of hollow copper bar stock. Of course that will be a hard thing to find.

ack, this has got the brain going on all sorts of passive cooling ideas that use the case as a radiator. I am going to have to steel your idea. :D

Flatten the copper first. Aluminum that will be easier to get will give similar performance, although you'd need to use a lot of antifreeze.

If you made the case out of extruded aluminum like this
http://www.wakefield.com/extrusions/...nge2=2&rng=rng
and soldered aluminum U channels to the inside of the case sides while using a non copper block this idea would probably work. Copper would be better, but the cost of copper is prohibitive, unless you want to spend serious money on this project.

i would love to do this but im at the point of life where there are two piles in my house, stuff im keeping, stuff im not. im trying to make the stuff im not pile much, much bigger than the stuff i am keeping pile :) plus obviously this is going to take some time, and thats what i absolutly dont have a lot of

I'll just point out one thing when soldering large portions of tubes to copper surfaces:
Soft solder (or whatever its called in english) has usually poor thermal conductivity, which would make the solder itself the bottleneck in heat transfer between the tubing and the copper plates. On the other hand, silver based hard solders with good thermal conductivity require more heat to melt and are difficult to work with.
Its not impossible, but it would require a good craftsman and good equiptment to do the job right.

When you can just use a real radiator, it doesnt seem worth the effort. If you must build a passive radiator it would be better outside the case. Attaching it to the sides of the case with solder isnt going to help.

That would be a good business idea for a Lian-Li or Coolermaster
 

Kronchev's initial idea of running poly tube all over the case wouldn't work too well, but I still think its a pretty clever insight. If a company like Lian Li or Coolermaster were to make a case with a radiator integrated on one of the side panels, preferably the one behind the motherboard, that would be a "cool" case so to speak.

It would eliminate a headache of watercooling: Where to stuff the radiator where it will both be exposed to air outside the case and be practical. When you get into running triple 120's and so forth, its not very simple to integrate....pain in the ass really. But if you could buy a case where basically one side was just a great big radiator, ergonimically and aesthetically integrated by design with the case, that would be friggin awesome.

The specifics for such a design such as # of passes, flow, fan mounting and size, I guess are open questions. A lot of different approaches to such a thing. But it is most definitely possible for sure. Unless it wuz outrageously expensive, I would buy one I think.

Doesn't really matter because the thickness of the solder is so low and the area is so big. You could probably use glue if you ran a few feet of pipe along the metal.

Hmmm,

If you attach the tubing to the cases sides ect., and that case meantime has a internal temp of say 32c, then it would seem to me you'd be better off NOT making contact with the case.

I disagree. In a passive radiator or in this case, the case :p , a good contact along with good thermal conductivity would increase the efiiciency of the setup by a few degrees (which is a lot in a passive system)
Glue is usually an insulator and would so hinder heat conduction. Thats why finned tubing or similar appliances with ideal contact are so expensive - they are difficult to produce.

Soldering is enouf.
Solder has way lower condutibility than copper, but is more then enouf to transmit the heat to the case.

i never meant poly tube, i meant copper the whole time. come on give me more credit than that ;)

my next possible mod (although i dont think ill ever get rid of my lian li...pull it out of my cold dead hands :p) will be to get a full sized car radiator and put it on the side of the case...nicely done, of course.

Its spelled E N O U G H

Once you transfer the heat to the case, then what? :shrug: The case heats up and the temp goes up. Arent you trying to transfer heat to the air? Luckily, people have travelled this path before us and come up with a device to do just that, its called....( imagine drum roll here ) ...

A radiator!

Try it. You can buy one today in stores near you.

jesus christ calm down

the point is the case acts like a radiator. the surface area should be enough to pull enough heat off. thats assuming the top, front, and one side are used. the case then *gasps* radiates the heat into the air.

the point is silent wcing, not performance.

Im calm. :)

Read more.
It is said that the case has to have airflow.

Thanks for the ENOUGH correction thouth.
PS: Is my post correct?

Its though ;)

/cringes

/runs away

:D

(not a flame, just a giggle)
Lighten up on the spelling nazi-ism Anti, we all knew what he meant, and hes not typing in text or anything.

HAHAHA

Are spellun is kewl! Mea tue.

Im not trying to attack anyone, sorry to offend.

But the idea of cooling a PC with tubing soldered/glued to the case is not a good idea. It might work, but it won't cool well. If it's passive cooled , the temps will be high. If it's active cooled, that would help a little, but not much. If you are going to use a fan, an ordinary heatercore with a shrouded fan mounted to one side of the case would be more effective. I wont even go there about the pressure needed to push water through a long copper tube.

Best solution is... ( imagine bugles blowing )

A radiator!

Of course if you have a roll of copper tubing and an afternoon to spare, don't let ME spoil your fun. Post some pics and prove me wrong. Good luck!