I’m thinking about making small watercooled machine that would use whole sidepanel as a radiator.
IS there a way to make a piping joint that could swiwel while keeping watertight ? It would be nice if I could open the radiator/vent sidepanel while machine is operating and water is circulating.
Is there a decent way to have multiloop colling ? by that I mean several coldplates/coolers - CPU, GPU, VRM, RAM etc and regulating flow trough each loop without having wholly separate loops (cooler- radiator- pump) ? I understand these are dangerous if unregulated as each joined loop can screw the flow through other loops.
Is there a way to get by on the cheap with copper piping for home heating etc etc without fancy computer watercooling tax ? Where to look for small copper radiators that one could tweak and repurpose , for example car AC units etc ? Is there a decent parametric search engine for car parts ?
Car heater core is going to give you a better result! AC components are designed for pressurized gas. Check out smaller cars and such in your local salvage yards for even cheaper parts!
This part is pretty much how it got started. Most car radiators are going to be bigger than the side panel size you’re looking to do, most heater cores (for the interior HVAC) are probably going to be too small.
Tradeoff being, you’re going to have to do your homework on the parts with greater scrutiny. The odds of mixed metals in the loop and the related galvanic corrosion problems is one of the headaches that (usually…) goes away with buying the dedicated PC kits.
They call them “rotary 90 degree fittings”. If you’re asking for a normal straight barb, but one that spins…I’ve never seen that fitting exist, but if they can make a rotary 90, there’s no technical reason they can’t make a rotary straight barb…just nobody does.
Just use one loop. The water moves through the loop so fast that it doesn’t have time to absorb all the heat it could absorb. CPU → GPU vs GPU → CPU only leads to a 1-2c temp difference. The water is moving through the loop too fast to pick up even 50% of its thermal capacity.
Sure. You’ll need to do a lot of braising, but sure. There’s nothing special about copper. It holds water. Period.
What Kingdud said, just use one loop. The temperature of the water matters, which means your radiator surface area is the primary driver of how well the loop handles multiple heat sources. You’re not gaining much of anything running multiple loops, but it’s going to cost way more upfront, waste more power, and also be much louder. Pumps are going to be the loudest part of any watercooled system if you have quiet, efficient low speed fans.
As for doing it cheaper with copper… I would honestly be surprised if copper plumbing was cheaper than some EPDM based tubing. Plenty of watercooling radiators have copper cores, this is one reason they tend to cost so much in the first place. The cores you find in cars are still aluminum far as I know which is why they’re cheap, and you absolutely don’t want to mix aluminum in your copper tubing loops…
If you want it to swivel sideways, use a rotary 90 degree. If you want something that can swivel in any direction you can either use two rotary 90 degree fittings, or EKs offset thing (which is basically the same except as a single piece). You will want to use soft tubing with either solution.
Another option is to simply use some extra tubing for both runs to the side panel, so that the hoses will still reach even if the panel is lifted off to the side. This is the solution least likely to leak, but it won’t be pretty (assuming this matters to you) and you may need to use a DDC pump, or two D5s, depending on how restrictive your tubing is. Flow rate doesn’t matter very much most of the time, but it can be nice to not need to use 100% pump speed (pumps are noisy).
IDK what pumps you guys are using. I’m using Alphacool’s VPP pump (Alphacool’s VPP755 Pump Sounds Too Good To Be True, Better Than D5 In Every Metric | Tom's Hardware) and it’s inside Heatkiller mounting bracket (so, basically, just some rubber isolated screws between the pump and the frame that connects to the radiator) and there is so little sound I wasn’t sure it was even running. And that’s at 100%. My Noctua fans, at minimum RPM, are louder than the pump. So…yeah.
Also, I can wholeheartedly NOT recommend Heatkiller products. They are German in the worst way. Over-engineered, overly specific (brackets that should be universal aren’t, and it isn’t clear what works with what). It IS what it claims on the box (borosilicate glass). So…that’s nice.
