How to lower colant temp ?

[Exie]

Hi,

I brought a Zalman Reserator1V2 a little while back and fell in love with water cooling. It did a great job of cooling my CPU!

Now I've added a chipset block, a HDD block and a new GPU block, and everything seems a bit cooler.

I also added an in-line temp sensor, and was not surprised to see my cooland temp now ranges between 35-45c which tells me theres just too much heat been taken out of the PC and the passive radiator cant get rid of.

I know I could get a optional fan bit for the top of the zalman tower, but my ambient temp is usually fairly high, so I'm looking for something like a peltier device to cool my water.

I like the FreeZone CPU cooler (http://www.coolitsystems.com/), but I dont want it just for my CPU, can anyone make a suggestion of what to get ? could I mod the FreeZone and plumb it into my current setup ?

[bigben2k]

Overkill.

Roscal/Rosco tried out an idea I had with the Zalman Reserator: wrap it with paper, and slap a quiet fan on top of it: works wonders.

[Brians256]

If you want purely passive cooling, the fan is out of course.

Cooling the water would be easier by running it through another passive radiator than by running it through a peltier. In order to effectively remove enough heat from the coolant, you'd need a LOT of peltier wattage.

If you are trying to do it on the cheap, find a radial fin transmission cooler for about $40 and use it. That is what the reserator is based upon.

[Exie]

Thanks folks,

Adding a fan isnt completely out of the equation as I still have 1 fan in my PSU, but this is certainly not preferable.

My main reason for considering the peltier option is that the ambiient temp. is quiet warm. As I understand a passive cooler cannot go below ambient ? Thus if I were to use a peltier-like-device I could maybe bring the coolant temp down (sub-ambient) ?

Here's the rough tempratures at the moment (which are fairly typical)...
Ambient ~25c
Coolant(coming OUT of tower) ~37c
CPU ~46c
GPU ~42c

From this, I conclude that the radiator isnt transfering much heat, so I figure if I can lower the coolant temp, the core temps should drop a little too.

[ricecrispi]

Putting that pelt thing won't help. First, it has a fan and is very loud so defeats your purpose two fold.

Makes the fan & cardboard tube solution look even sweeter. The airflow will help alot. Try it with a larger slow speed RPM fan.

Second, thing is $300. Not cost effective
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Options

Replacing the pump or reducing the number of blocks. The pump is very weak. With the multiple blocks and small tubing, the loop would be very restrictive. You don't need a HDD block and there are passive option. Same with the chipset option as well. Adding an external pump like DDC and removing old pump will help.

Replace kit with better CPU and GPU waterblocks and sell off the old blocks.

Buy another reserator for $130-$200 or a passive trans/oil rad for $40 on ebay

[DVL73]

Unfortunately, problem with the Zalman Reserator is that it's not designed as performance wc system. As passive solution, it will cool your components just fine (although I wouldn't recommend serious OC) ... but you shouldn't expect miracles. If your system is stable, I don't see much point in improving things. Although 45*C coolant temperature is high, no dobt.

In my opinion, wc loop with proper low CFM radiator (PA160 or PA120 ... etc) with silent 120mm/25mm fan (even better option is maybe silent 120mm/35mm) downvolted to 5V -7V, will cool much better with little or no noise (it's even comparable to passive solution) and more importantly you will be much flexible during the system upgrades or even when you decide to upgrade your wc components.

Almost forgot ... ditch the chipset and hdd waterblock. They are just on the way and this could be the first step if you want to improve things.

[Exie]

Thanks again for the tips folks.

Firstly, I've ditched the HDD cooler, it didnt cool the drives much, and didnt seem to affect the coolant temp either.

I have an ASUS board with the Intel 955x chipset, the board came with a 'fanless' chipset with just a largeish heatsink, but I used to burn my hard on it - it was that hot!! So I would like to keep the swifttech block I got for that.

I will pick up the Zalman fan (ZM-RF1) tomorrow if I can. It's a 140 x 25 and see how that goes on top of the tower.

I should point out, that this box is not clocked up at all. However it is a greedy-power-hog Intel 530 CPU. I was thinking about an upgrade to a 9xx series which are aparently cooler (and quicker), but havent bit the bullet yet. Might try the next before I add another reserator/radial fin tower.

[Pyrotechnic]

I run a heatercore in a semi-passive setup. It doesn't have a fan directly on it, but the fans that are mounted in my case pull air through and around it. Works fairly well because of the large amount of surface area.

I would recommend a larger radiator with more surface area if you can fit it, and possibly a larger pump if the one you have isn't up to the task. Not sure what the Zalman setup consists of but make sure you have at least 3/8 tubing on the CPU block and at least 1/4 on the chipset and GPU blocks.