Just to be sad, I thought that I would share with you guys my latest field of experimentation, phase change cooling.

Coming from being quite the don in normal air cooling, I had started to grow sick of having a permanent ringing in my ears from delta screamers.
I decided to give watercooling a try. I didn't have time to sort out a custom kit and the kist that I wanted was not yet available in the country. I got a Koolance rig and set it up. The results of this are in chapter 1 below:

http://www.scoobynet.co.uk/bbs/threa...ted&ForumID=34

Anyways, I liked the koolance setup, but craved something more extreme and completely custom built by me. I was going down the watercooling road again, with copper heatercores etc, but then the Prometeia phase change system came to my attention'Drool'.

In anticipation of leaving the koolance setup, I had purchased an Epox 4g4a+ Motherboard, an Intel 2.2Ghz 'Northwood' cpu and 2 512mb sticks of Samsung DDR333 RAM

The Northwood core Intels are notorious for overclocking severely and the same for the Samsung ram too.

Anyways...... I ordered my Prometeia unit and it arrived this week. This thing is seriously, seriously, heavy. The freezer unit itself looks fine, but the actual Enlight case that it bolted onto the top of it is a nasty piece of work. That can always be changed however....But not today.

I have started to mod the case in order to get it ready for all of the components that will be going into it.

Old case prior to starting:



The nasty enlight case was removed from the freezer unit and I drilled out a 120mm case fan hole in the roof, with just enough room between the cpu and first CD Drive. I then cut out 2 80mm blow holes in the side of the case:



The front fan holder was hacked back in order to make the incoming airflow less directional. I then fitted sound deadening material between the pc base the the freezer due to the fact that the case is built of bacofoil.
Once bolted back down, I deadened the side panels then fitted the 2 papst fans in charging air out.

The case now has the following cooling in her:

1xPapst silent fan charging in at the front
1xPapst silent fan charging out at the rear
1xEnermax 120mm adjustable fan in the roof charging out
2xAdjustable fans in the Enermax PSU

Having this configuration makes for a nice amount of negative airflow, which means that there is more air being sucked out that charged in. The front fan has less work to do as air is being drawn through it and air is not left circulating around warming up in the case.

I jumpered pin 4 and 6 of the ATX connector to start up the PSU. Nice result, excellent airflow and pretty silent.

Anyway, this is the point that I am at now:



Hopefully I will get her finished tonight and see how far above 3ghz I can go running the CPU at sub-zero

I will post more once that I have got her finished.


Cheers,

Nick



[Edited by Mr Footlong - 8/23/2002 3:39:53 PM]

[Edited by Mr Footlong - 8/23/2002 3:42:27 PM]

 

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

 

get out more

 

Right, it has been a week now and I can finally be arsed to post the next stage of this rig build. The first job was to remove the normal Heatsink bracket and install & seal off the Heat Exchanger mounting bracket on the motherboard. The was done using the magical sticky black rubbery-type string that they provided:



Once that the mobo was in place in the tinpot case, I could start fitting the main cooling head. After both the p4 heat spreader and the copper block on the heat exchanger were cleaned with solvent, a tiny layer of AS3 was applied to the head with a stanley blade and then sealed with string fitted.

I fired her her up and almost died when I saw that the core cpu temp was reading as 80 degrees! Switched her off, unclamped the head and pulled it off using fair force, as the silly string forms a great seal. I saw that although the head was making good contact with the main slug, it wasn't sitting fully flat. I had been slightly overgenerous/cautious with the sealant string and a tiny amount of it had got squashed down in the wrong place stopping full contact. Unfortunatly, I had read that this was the only common flaw during the setup. Luckily, unlkie a couple of other that I had come across building these, I actually tried to be careful.
Anyways, I corrected all of this and after waiting for about 1.5 hours for the coolant head to warm back up and stop freezing the air around it etc, I refitted it after cleaning/reapplying compound.

80C again!!!! Oh jesus. Now I was starting to have my doubts about the readout from the BIOS, but had to make absolutely sure. I again removed the head and saw that pretty well perfect contact was being made For the hell of it, I whacked it together without any of the sealant this time. Fired up, guess what? 80C again. Now I altered the speed from 2.2 upto 3ghz and the temp sat mostly on 80C, occasionally jumping to 81. Hmmmm.

After 5-10 mins of this, I shut down and quickly removed the block to get a vague of the actual temp. OMG! It was just as well that I had powered down when I had, as miniature frost/icicles/condensation had formed all over over the cpu heat spreader/silicon! I Touched the centre of the core and my knuckle froze to it! Had to be done really

Right, so it was deffo a misreport then [img]images/smilies/mad.gif[/img]
It was now about 2 in the morning and I was too drunk and tired to be a complete saddo and wait to put it back together again....

Once it was bolted back together, I joined the dots with the components and got left with this:





As you can see, I had my work cut out for me trying to make all of those drives, cables etc fit in there tidily!

I spent most of the sunday playing with the different CPU and RAM speeds, figuring out what RAM speeds and CPU voltages were needed at different levels of overclocking.

It was at this point that I realised that the twin 512mb Samsung sticks were not going to be upto the job of what I wanted them for. They were absolutely fine at their rated speeds, and could go quicker without too much bother, but to run at the speeds fsb speeds that I wanted to run at, I had to decrease the RAM timings and/or whack the RAM voltage upto 2.8/2.9. I had thought that I was going to be happy with doing this, but I wasn't in the end, so I sold them on.

Anyway, using the Samsung RAM, I was able to run the CPU upto 3.1ghz@1.85 volts, but with very passive RAM timings.
It wasn't worth the hassle until I got faster RAM, so I settled down at about 2.83Ghz and cranked through Sisoft Sandra, Hot CPU Tester and 3dMark 2001SE to check her for overall stability and she sailed through.

At the default 2.2Ghz, the temps from the system were as folows:



If you can't read that, the core CPU temparature was sitting at -25C, going to -23/4C on full load,with the main exchanger head reading out at -45C. At 3.1Ghz/1.85V, it sat at -7C full load, with the main head at -30C. Not bad really

For now, I will leave you with just 1 benchmark result, taken from 3dmark and those of you in the know will be pretty impressed I think . Benched at 2.83Ghz with non aggresive RAM timings and no card overclocking whatsoever, as it made the performance drop!!..........



http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=4279496

I have othr Benchmarks, but I will put them up when I get around to getting the New RAM.

Cheers,

Nick










[Edited by Mr Footlong - 8/31/2002 7:04:41 PM]

[Edited by Mr Footlong - 8/31/2002 7:14:31 PM]

 

looks good! we'll compare with my water cooling think your will run superior though


si

 

How much did the cooling setup cost ya then?

 

tooooooooo much

http://www.over-clock.co.uk

-> extrem cooling

theres one example

si

 

the case/freezer setup was £430

 

Dang, all this time and I never noticed that I didn't mention what VGA card I was using. Well, it was mentioned in the watercooling link.

Anyway, it was a Leadtek Gf4 Ti4600.

I got Dual sticks of Corsair XMS3200-C2 ram soon afterwards and was pushing out just over 15,500 3dmarks at 2.91 ghz with more aggresive ram timings, Was stable 24/7, which was good

Half the parts are sold on now but the next beast is looking very nice.

Cheers,

Nick

 

Takes a highly trained pedant like me to notice no gfx mentioned

And the next beast is?

 

Hes got to wait for the m/b to be released if its the one i think he mentioned