More Adventures in Cooling

By Andy Patrizio

January 12, 2004

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The weather may be getting cold out, but heating issues never seem to go away. I decided to continue my tinkering, at the near-expense of my 3-GHz Pentium 4.

One of the newest toys to hit Fry's Electronics is the Koolance Exos liquid-cooling system. Liquid cooling has been a popular method among the elite of PC hackers for overclocking for a few years. As chips got hotter with increasing clock speeds and people continued to overclock them, even when it was entirely unnecessary, more creative methods of cooling were needed.

The 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 and AthlonXP 3200+ are clearly hotplates and require some hefty cooling. Their own fans, supplied by Intel and AMD, are okay, but if you run a heavy load (like a distributed computing client), you can expect your CPU to run at 120-130 degrees, constantly. Plus, in the case of the Intel fan, the wiring is such that it's liable to get chewed up by the fan, and that can get ugly.

The advantage to liquid cooling is you can really cool things down this way. Water gets darn near frozen in a refrigerator, then pumped through the system much in the same way a human circulatory system works. Cold water goes to the heat sink, cools the heat sink, and the heated water is pumped back to the coolant system.

You can get the CPU down to almost freezing this way if you're aggressive enough, but to do so generally requires buying a lot of parts from different suppliers. Getting them from a single source isn't very common. You need a special heat sink for the CPU, tubing, a pump, a refrigerator and fans to cool the liquid. Tom's Hardware Guide had an instructional walk through for building your own system, but the parts were from different sources.

Koolance has introduced the first (as far as I can tell) mass market liquid cooling system, where you get everything in one box, even the coolant, which is more like anti-freeze. Most cooling systems simply use distilled water. For $229, you get the whole shootin' match.

For starters, there's a main cooling/power unit, with three built-in fans.

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