Bonaducci

I have some idea that I did not see on LTT yet and it might be quite cool to do something like that out of curiosity. So there were already coolers involving peltier devices which are just interesting thing but not real thing. There were projects involving real heat pumps in form of using small fridge or water chiller which worked great. Hey, there's the one Linus built and then adopted in a few videos that is essentially air conditioning unit cooling down water loop. And now that's the point, there was no project with direct heat exchange without additional medium. Water cooling blocks rely on water going through the block. Amount of heat transferred is quite fixed and depends only on temperature difference, so the only solution to that is decreasing temperature on the block. This leads to two problems. Water condensation on CPU with sub zero cooling and possibly artifacting on way sub zero cooling (that happens more with liquid nitrogen though). On the other hand air coolers are mostly limited by radiator surface and amount of air passing through it. You can use heat pipes to transfer more heat and faster, so you can provide more surface but there are some limits where making mounted radiator will be too big to use. So here are two ideas. Simpler one (more of a side quest) would be creating larger water block with heat pipes. That would increase surface area and this way you can dissipate more heat to water with less temp difference. That would be something interesting to check as well and does not sound too bad after all. Just a bit bigger heat exchanger with heat pipes inside. So to the point. Heat pumps use evaporator coils to evaporate medium which takes a lot of heat from surroundings, that's how AC, fridge and everything using heat pumps works. Instead of using it too cool water down which in turn cools CPU down, one can build something like evaporator coil that has build in heat pipes and water block. This way you can connect it directly to CPU and cool down heat pipes directly. It has one additional advantage. Heat pipes don't work with sub zero temps, they only work when medium inside can evaporate, so it will never bring CPU down to sub zero temperatures. The heat exchanger will freeze up over time due to condensation although you can prevent that by insulating it from the air. In overall you don't have to worry about condensation on CPU because instead of using sub zero fluid on CPU, you will use heat pipes to exchange this heat on more area. So to organize it in steps. 1. Get some air conditioning using, something not too big I guess. 2. Disassemble evaporator coil or drill holes in it for additional heat pipes. 3. Create cooling block with heat pipes only and stick them into evaporator coil. Obviously there are some technical problems with that. It would be better to have some AC equipment and create dedicated heat exchanger that would work as evaporator coil for AC and would take heat directly from heat pipes - no radiators here! That requires some skills and equipment. If it's too big, it can't be installed on CPU after all. The other problems are more related to controlling this AC unit. It can't run with evaporator freezing because over time it will not evaporate medium completely and will damage compressor. There's also some delay with starting up compressor and lack of water will make it lag a bit with cooling. That could be prevented by providing something with more heat capacity at the point of heat exchange. Ice buildup would be sufficient. It all comes down to some fabricating skills, available equipment and a bit of insanity to turn air conditioner into direct heat pump cooler. I hope someone from LTT will catch this idea ^^