Liquid Cooling with a Passive Radiator- Any Experience?

[Dash Lambda]

This isn't something I actually intend to do, but it is interesting to me. After all, it seems like it would be a lot easier to do well than passive air cooling and it would definitely be quieter.

So has anyone done it?

[Enderman]

yeah a lot of people have

just go to google images and look up "passive pc water cooling" and you get a ton of results

some of them are actually pretty nice looking PCs with passive radiators on the outside

here are some http://www.frozencpu.com/cat/l3/g30/c95/s1511/list/p1/Liquid_Cooling-PC_Water_Cooling_Radiators-Passive_Radiators-Page1.html

[Dash Lambda]

4 minutes ago, Enderman said:

yeah a lot of people have

just go to google images and look up "passive pc water cooling" and you get a ton of results

some of them are actually pretty nice looking PCs with passive radiators on the outside

here are some http://www.frozencpu.com/cat/l3/g30/c95/s1511/list/p1/Liquid_Cooling-PC_Water_Cooling_Radiators-Passive_Radiators-Page1.html

Yeah, I've seen the pictures, but I was asking people more about their experience actually doing it. Thermal performance, how easy/difficult it is, noise, so-on.

I hadn't actually seen them in a store, though. Thanks for the link~

 

EDIT: Interesting that those three are the only ones on FrozenCPU...

[Enderman]

1 minute ago, Dash Lambda said:

Yeah, I've seen the pictures, but I was asking people more about their experience actually doing it. Thermal performance, how easy/difficult it is, noise, so-on.

I hadn't actually seen them in a store, though. Thanks for the link~

noise = nothing except for the pump, which if you use a D5 is extremely quiet

 

performance depends on how much rad area you use, and more = lower temps

 

and its not any more difficult than building  custom loop is

[Dash Lambda]

Just now, Enderman said:

noise = nothing except for the pump, which if you use a D5 is extremely quiet

 

performance depends on how much rad area you use, and more = lower temps

 

and its not any more difficult than building  custom loop is

There can still be other sources of noise, though I do realize that most other noise is negligible... So good point...

 

Yes, performance does depend on the surface area, but I would think it would need to be considerably larger than a typical radiator to get the same performance. So what I'm asking is how it compares to normal liquid cooling.

 

And I find it hard to believe that it's the same level of difficulty as building a normal loop. If anything, it should be a lot harder just to mount the radiator... After all, they don't seem to fit on standard radiator mounts.

... Do you have experience doing it?

[Enderman]

6 minutes ago, Dash Lambda said:

There can still be other sources of noise, though I do realize that most other noise is negligible... So good point...

 

Yes, performance does depend on the surface area, but I would think it would need to be considerably larger than a typical radiator to get the same performance. So what I'm asking is how it compares to normal liquid cooling.

 

And I find it hard to believe that it's the same level of difficulty as building a normal loop. If anything, it should be a lot harder just to mount the radiator... After all, they don't seem to fit on standard radiator mounts.

... Do you have experience doing it?

i havent done passive but i have researched it a lot

 

if you look at the link i posted, passive radiators are huge, like one section is half a meter long and you usually want 4-16 sections depending on your components in your PC

you can buy as many modules as you need and can expand it to get lower temps

 

thats how you get silence while getting about the same temps as a regular liquid cooled PC

 

but 99% of the time, passive radiators go outside the case, either mounted to the case or the wall

you cant fit them inside

 

and yes, to have near silence your GPU also needs to be liquid cooled and you need either no case fans or extremely quiet case fans

and a large wattage PSU with high efficiency to keep the fan off even under load

[Jidonsu]

Martinsliquidlab actually did a test a few years ago. See here.

 

https://martinsliquidlab.wordpress.com/2012/02/04/passive-0-rpm-fans-radiator-test/

 

He used a thick 480 radiator. I think you'll need more than that to make it doable. It basically failed in his test.

 

You don't need passive water cooling to be virtually silent though. My build is using Black Ice Nemesis GTS radiators, and I'm running Fractal Design Venturi HP fans. I can't hear them over the faint hum of my D5 pump. I think the only reason why I can even hear my pump is because I broke the rheostat, and it's running at 3600 rpm instead of the mid 2K I wanted. 

[Tiwaz]

On 25.2.2016 at 7:33 PM, Enderman said:

i havent done passive but i have researched it a lot

 

if you look at the link i posted, passive radiators are huge, like one section is half a meter long and you usually want 4-16 sections depending on your components in your PC

you can buy as many modules as you need and can expand it to get lower temps

 

thats how you get silence while getting about the same temps as a regular liquid cooled PC

 

but 99% of the time, passive radiators go outside the case, either mounted to the case or the wall

you cant fit them inside

 

and yes, to have near silence your GPU also needs to be liquid cooled and you need either no case fans or extremely quiet case fans

and a large wattage PSU with high efficiency to keep the fan off even under load

watercooling hte gpu makes more sense, cuz gpus have a way giher power consumption

[Nup]

Hasn't @tmcclelland455 make a fully passive build? 

[flibberdipper]

1 hour ago, Nup said:

Hasn't @tmcclelland455 make a fully passive build? 

Nope. I know that there is someone on here who made a passive PC before (not liquid cooled obviously), but the username is escaping me.

[Nup]

13 minutes ago, tmcclelland455 said:

Nope. I know that there is someone on here who made a passive PC before (not liquid cooled obviously), but the username is escaping me.

Yeah me too. I remember someone mentioned they had a shit-tone of radiators for near passive cooling. But i very well may be remembering wrong

Spwath? and we have Stefan1024, but thats not a "traditional radiator", so to speak. 

[flibberdipper]

23 minutes ago, Nup said:

Yeah me too. I remember someone mentioned they had a shit-tone of radiators for near passive cooling. But i very well may be remembering wrong

Spwath? and we have Stefan1024, but thats not a "traditional radiator", so to speak. 

Stefan was the one I was trying to think of. But yea, not a "normal" radiator dealio.

[Enderman]

7 hours ago, Tiwaz said:

watercooling hte gpu makes more sense, cuz gpus have a way giher power consumption

Maybe you never realized this, but GPUs have more than enough cooling with a single 120 radiator, but CPUs usually need 2x120 or 2x140 or sometimes even 3x120 to reach good temps.

 

BTW necroing threads is against the rules....

[Tiwaz]

3 hours ago, Enderman said:

Maybe you never realized this, but GPUs have more than enough cooling with a single 120 radiator, but CPUs usually need 2x120 or 2x140 or sometimes even 3x120 to reach good temps.

 

BTW necroing threads is against the rules....

that doesnt make sense, only when people have like a fx8350 @ 5ghz or something, but otherwise not, people just tend to accept higher temps on gpus

[Enderman]

3 minutes ago, Tiwaz said:

that doesnt make sense, only when people have like a fx8350 @ 5ghz or something, but otherwise not, people just tend to accept higher temps on gpus

Well, a single 120mm radiator like the hybrid cards you see everywhere can bring a GPU down to like 50-60C.

With a CPU, a single 120mm radiator is the same as a crappy air cooler and that's why it's only worth getting an AIO if you go 240mm or bigger, and even then it's hard to get below 60C.

[Tiwaz]

16 hours ago, Enderman said:

Well, a single 120mm radiator like the hybrid cards you see everywhere can bring a GPU down to like 50-60C.

With a CPU, a single 120mm radiator is the same as a crappy air cooler and that's why it's only worth getting an AIO if you go 240mm or bigger, and even then it's hard to get below 60C.

those hybrid cards can get the same cooling with less rpm --> less noice

IF you want bigger rads then you need a bigger case and a custom loop which is really  expensive and a lot of work to do where also leaks can happen with all the modular parts, so its not worth just performance wise, only if you really care about looks

[Tam3n]

Cpu and gpu can have quite similiar power draw, depending on the overclocks and workloads. I think the reason why it's seemingly easier to water cool gpus, is the fact that with gpus you have a direct contact and maybe more surface area to the die, which helps with conducting the heat away. The waterblocks for gpus also tend to be larger, which aids with the heat transfer to the fluid. Lastly, the gpu temps are probably measured in a different way than cpu core temps.

 

Addition: I might add that you see this difference in thermal conductivity by observing how much the temps jump when you start a load from idle. With cpus the core temps usually jump up much more than with gpu, around 2x more for me. But of course it all depends on the load.