StoneyMahoney

During the Jayztwocents vs Gamers Nexus OC battle, I was confused as to why the contestants used submerged radiators rather than actual liquid-to-liquid heat exchangers. So I thought I'd get one and try it.
 

 
This is a plate heat exchanger I got as a refurbished spare for a domestic hot water heater for £10 (GBP). It's rated heat transfer is 2.5k when being used to heat water in that application, so I needed to test whether it would work well enough given the much smaller temperature delta between ice water and a PC water cooling loop. If I was patient enough to do this properly I would have tapped G1/4 threads into the ports, but couldn't get access to a pillar drill to do it and fluffed it up a little trying to do it manually. So those barbs are just super-glued into place.
 

 
With some cheap-ass chinese watercooling parts and semi-decent fittings to build my test unit with, this is the result just before I fired it up. The hot and cold loops counter-flow in opposite directions through the heat exchanger for optimum efficiency, that blue thing you can see in the background is a coolbox full of ice water - as I had that available, I also tested a Cooler Master Seidon v3 240mm AIO I had laying around to see how it compared. The AIO was deployed as-is, with all the dust cleaned out of it, the radiator submerged and finally with an additional pump (borrowed from the heat exchanger) to circulate the water around the coolbox. The CPU block attached to the heat exchanger hot loop is also a cheap chinese thing, it does have some 1mm channels cut into the cold plate running between the two ports, but it's still primitive AF.
 

 
The test bench has a delidded, LM'd, Devil's Canyon i5-4690K running at 1.35v and 4.5GHz, 1.85v Vrin. Moderate LLC settings have been applied. The test load is Prime95 v29.8b6 Small FFTs FMA3, measurements are CPU Package temperature measures from HWiNFO64. Reported CPU Package Power consumption during the tests is ~180W.
 

 
AIO - Dusty: 36C Idle, 98C Load
AIO - Clean: 35C Idle, 94C Load
AIO - Ice, static: 15C Idle, 75C Load
AIO - Ice, flow: 12C Idle, 65C Load
Heat Exchanger: 10C Idle, 57C Load
 
So yeah, worked pretty well. Concept proved (like it needed it.) Would be interested to see how it stacks up against larger radiators but I don't have any lying around I can use. Never mind.
It needs some improvements. The heat exchanger itself has some kind of residue inside it that seems to be burnt into place, I've tried to clean it out chemically to no avail and a fair amount of flakey bits broke off into both loops during these tests. The connection to the heat exchanger itself leaks in a few places and the water block was crap, but my main idea is to add some temperature sensors to the two loops, along with atmospheric temperature and humidity sensors, allowing a controller to calculate the dew point and adjust the flow rate through the cold loop to maintain the hot-side of the loop condensation-free as a safety feature, not to mention self-detecting fire-and-forget smart ice-bucket cooling that runs just above the dew point sounds like a cool idea.
 

 
Condensation built up on cold loop, the heat exchanger and the hot loop reservoir very quickly, but not so quickly on the hot loop tubing and the water block - lots of wiping it off though, had to remove the fan I placed on the RAM (blood was indeed shed to bring you these results.)
 

 
Soggy CPU socket, but it survived a few hours of HWBOT runs after these tests no problem - can't waste 6Kg of ice now, can I?
 

 
Pay no attention to the thermal paste spread, thermals were fairly even across the cores in use, the lop-sided remnants here are from where I had to man-handle the block to get the suction to release. Also please ignore the rough edges, I had to dremel the AMD bits of the bracket off to get it to fit. But do pay attention to the condensation that built up on the underside of the block.
 
So yeah, hopefully you actually get to see the images here, as opposed to when I tried to post this on Reddit and it's .jpg processing immediately broke. Suck it, /r/overclocking! Hey Alex and Linux, next crazy cooling experiment, perhaps?

During the Jayztwocents vs Gamers Nexus OC battle, I was confused as to why the contestants used submerged radiators rather than actual liquid-to-liquid heat exchangers. So I thought I'd get one and try it.
 

 
This is a plate heat exchanger I got as a refurbished spare for a domestic hot water heater for £10 (GBP). It's rated heat transfer is 2.5k when being used to heat water in that application, so I needed to test whether it would work well enough given the much smaller temperature delta between ice water and a PC water cooling loop. If I was patient enough to do this properly I would have tapped G1/4 threads into the ports, but couldn't get access to a pillar drill to do it and fluffed it up a little trying to do it manually. So those barbs are just super-glued into place.
 

 
With some cheap-ass chinese watercooling parts and semi-decent fittings to build my test unit with, this is the result just before I fired it up. The hot and cold loops counter-flow in opposite directions through the heat exchanger for optimum efficiency, that blue thing you can see in the background is a coolbox full of ice water - as I had that available, I also tested a Cooler Master Seidon v3 240mm AIO I had laying around to see how it compared. The AIO was deployed as-is, with all the dust cleaned out of it, the radiator submerged and finally with an additional pump (borrowed from the heat exchanger) to circulate the water around the coolbox. The CPU block attached to the heat exchanger hot loop is also a cheap chinese thing, it does have some 1mm channels cut into the cold plate running between the two ports, but it's still primitive AF.
 

 
The test bench has a delidded, LM'd, Devil's Canyon i5-4690K running at 1.35v and 4.5GHz, 1.85v Vrin. Moderate LLC settings have been applied. The test load is Prime95 v29.8b6 Small FFTs FMA3, measurements are CPU Package temperature measures from HWiNFO64. Reported CPU Package Power consumption during the tests is ~180W.
 

 
AIO - Dusty: 36C Idle, 98C Load
AIO - Clean: 35C Idle, 94C Load
AIO - Ice, static: 15C Idle, 75C Load
AIO - Ice, flow: 12C Idle, 65C Load
Heat Exchanger: 10C Idle, 57C Load
 
So yeah, worked pretty well. Concept proved (like it needed it.) Would be interested to see how it stacks up against larger radiators but I don't have any lying around I can use. Never mind.
It needs some improvements. The heat exchanger itself has some kind of residue inside it that seems to be burnt into place, I've tried to clean it out chemically to no avail and a fair amount of flakey bits broke off into both loops during these tests. The connection to the heat exchanger itself leaks in a few places and the water block was crap, but my main idea is to add some temperature sensors to the two loops, along with atmospheric temperature and humidity sensors, allowing a controller to calculate the dew point and adjust the flow rate through the cold loop to maintain the hot-side of the loop condensation-free as a safety feature, not to mention self-detecting fire-and-forget smart ice-bucket cooling that runs just above the dew point sounds like a cool idea.
 

 
Condensation built up on cold loop, the heat exchanger and the hot loop reservoir very quickly, but not so quickly on the hot loop tubing and the water block - lots of wiping it off though, had to remove the fan I placed on the RAM (blood was indeed shed to bring you these results.)
 

 
Soggy CPU socket, but it survived a few hours of HWBOT runs after these tests no problem - can't waste 6Kg of ice now, can I?
 

 
Pay no attention to the thermal paste spread, thermals were fairly even across the cores in use, the lop-sided remnants here are from where I had to man-handle the block to get the suction to release. Also please ignore the rough edges, I had to dremel the AMD bits of the bracket off to get it to fit. But do pay attention to the condensation that built up on the underside of the block.
 
So yeah, hopefully you actually get to see the images here, as opposed to when I tried to post this on Reddit and it's .jpg processing immediately broke. Suck it, /r/overclocking! Hey Alex and Linux, next crazy cooling experiment, perhaps?

Trying to classify companies like that and expecting them to act exactly like the categories they're placed in isn't even a vaguely realistic expectation. And zero tolerance for gambling in video games? That's a personal opinion, and you're totally entitled to it, but there absolutely are gambling mechanics in video games that are totally healthy and not even vaguely worthy of the slightest comment about how ethical they are.
I looked at like 30-40 articles posted in the mainstream media about the GTA V casino, only one even mentioned there were limits at all and didn't go into any detail about it.
 
Here's thing about that, because Rockstar can say there's no official way of redeeming the chips back to real money, is there any difference between using real money to buy a virtual helicopter and using real money to buy virtual casino chips? It's all imaginary property with no tangibility outside the virtual world of San Andreas. That didn't stop RS from limiting the purchase of chips in ways they've never even thought about with the rest of the contents of the various vehicle dealerships / gun emporiums / strip clubs / whatever in the game, they knew this would be controversial and did something about it. Not that anyone cares.
Preach it, brother/sister!
I saw that and was like *facepalm*. Then again, as an IT contractor in central London, I've used what are called "umbrella companies" - you effectively work for them rather than yourself when you do contract work for other companies, they file your taxes as though you were an employee so you don't have to hire an accountant, and it's totally legal for you to claim back against tax any expenses for travel, meals and hardware purchases that are even vaguely work related - the end result is that I was paying almost no tax at all and the umbrella company took a small fee for their services so that everyone in the arrangement was better off. Except the tax man. Tax evasion isn't a thing just for big companies and rich people, I totally can't judge Rockstar for doing something I have done myself.

I used to be a social worker in a low SES area of country Victoria, I was around when they legalized casinos and pokies in our state.  I was on a government panel investigating the effects of gambling on local communities.    I have a fairly reasonable foundational understanding of the problem gambling can be and how it affects society.  I would never want to take it away from those who aren't effected, but by the same token communities benefit as a whole when they are regulated properly and due precautions are taken.

14yr old player of GTA Online here. Quite frankly, even though I really enjoy gambling (online and irl, also i dont have a problem, its mostly just like £10 on whos gonna win the sports match), and I have spend GTA$200,000 in the casino, im not gonna buy shark cards because when I want more money I just ask my friend who's a modder to load me some more money. But even if I didnt have a modder friend, I still wouldn't buy shark cards just to blow, anyway its hard too blow money quickly, the most you can bet one time is 15,000 chips, which equals GTA$15,000. I personally think they underestimate the maturity level of most kids. I did spend GTA$230,000 on champagne but that was for jokes and I wouldn't done it if I didn't have all that money. Even then I don't think the drinks are of interest to kids in there and even if they are, 4 most of the 7 ones there are free so not a big deal imo.
 
 

Trying to classify companies like that and expecting them to act exactly like the categories they're placed in isn't even a vaguely realistic expectation. And zero tolerance for gambling in video games? That's a personal opinion, and you're totally entitled to it, but there absolutely are gambling mechanics in video games that are totally healthy and not even vaguely worthy of the slightest comment about how ethical they are.
I looked at like 30-40 articles posted in the mainstream media about the GTA V casino, only one even mentioned there were limits at all and didn't go into any detail about it.
 
Here's thing about that, because Rockstar can say there's no official way of redeeming the chips back to real money, is there any difference between using real money to buy a virtual helicopter and using real money to buy virtual casino chips? It's all imaginary property with no tangibility outside the virtual world of San Andreas. That didn't stop RS from limiting the purchase of chips in ways they've never even thought about with the rest of the contents of the various vehicle dealerships / gun emporiums / strip clubs / whatever in the game, they knew this would be controversial and did something about it. Not that anyone cares.
Preach it, brother/sister!
I saw that and was like *facepalm*. Then again, as an IT contractor in central London, I've used what are called "umbrella companies" - you effectively work for them rather than yourself when you do contract work for other companies, they file your taxes as though you were an employee so you don't have to hire an accountant, and it's totally legal for you to claim back against tax any expenses for travel, meals and hardware purchases that are even vaguely work related - the end result is that I was paying almost no tax at all and the umbrella company took a small fee for their services so that everyone in the arrangement was better off. Except the tax man. Tax evasion isn't a thing just for big companies and rich people, I totally can't judge Rockstar for doing something I have done myself.

I completely disagree with the comparison between Rockstar's casino and "surprise mechanics" - there is no surprise what-so-ever here at all, there are no "chance of getting X = less that 1%" misrepresentation, and when you walk into that casino and order some chips you know EXACTLY what you're getting into. If they only sold their cars in loot boxes and said you have a "less than 1% chance" of geting... I don't know, what's the current most badass car in the game? Sure, then you'd have a point. But they don't do that. You always know exactly what you're buying from them and can ALWAYS use currency earned by playing the game instead. I just searched YouTube for "Fifa ultimate team pack opening" and the fourth video down shows a guy blowing 13,000 GBP in 22 minutes. Blowing through the same amount of money in GTAs casino would take AT LEAST 10,452 hours (1.193 years of constant gambling), based on worst-case Shark Card transaction rates, owning a penthouse at the casino (which costs a few million on it's own) and losing every chip you have before the 48 minute cooldown period expires every single time. Also, f*ck EA.
 
Limits on losses (or at least the rate of loss) have an enormous impact on gambling addiction. I have seen it develop first hand myself in real-life casinos (I used to work at one, to my shame) that people get stuck in a cycle of losing all the money they've converted to chips/tokens/coins/whatever and immediately go and get more to chase their losses. Simply being told "no, you're blowing through too much, you have to wait X amount of time" has been scientifically proven to have an enormous impact on reducing future participation in gambling. The gambling industry's line on this has always been "we can't practically impose limits on people, they'd just go to our competitors instead as soon as the limits kick in" so Rockstar implementing these limits in their own little economy shows they really REALLY don't want people getting addicted to gambling on their turf.
 
And let's be honest, no-one would start playing GTA V just to gamble when they can use real actual casinos online from wherever they happen to be on their phone. Rockstar are a video game company, they've had casino features in their games for more than a decade now, I would strongly suspect it's taken them this long to enable the casino that's been on the map and "coming soon" since the original launch of the game because they've been working through the international legal aspects to ensure they comply with all local laws. Yes, I agree, they should have made Shark Card money ineligible for using in the casino, I'm certainly not saying their angels in any way shape or form, but I am arguing that the level of hysteria and negativity in the press, media and user community that's surrounded the launch of the casino is completely unjustified and is down to bad reporting skipping over the most important feature of whole experience.

No correlation, let alone causation. In reality the causes of that increase are probably social media and the inherent disassociation of relationships on it, increased use of psychotropic drugs in children, and in the case of Parkland, a complete and utter lack of significant consequence to any of his actions leading up to that day.