Multi-computer Water Cooling

[Alphy13]

This thread is for sharing ideas and projects for water cooling multiple systems. This was inspired by LTTs old "Whole Room Water Cooling". If you have any crazy ideas or success with similar things in the past, please share it here. 

[Wh0_Am_1]

 

[Alphy13]

LTT's new LAN party room inspired me to put to paper an idea that I have had for quite a while:

 

Whole room water cooling, revived.

Each PC has a 2 blocks, and a pump. The pump will be independent for each system so it is only running when the system is on. The GPU can use a regular CPU block, minimal air cooling will be sufficient for the rest of the PC. (Consider something like the NZXT G12). The Heat exchanger can then only worry about maintaining the temperature of the aquarium. 

[Enderman]

Hopefully you don't put any fish in that aquarium..

[manikyath]

there's an entire DC in canada that's watercooled, the linus man even visited them:

 

[Alphy13]

3 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Hopefully you don't put any fish in that aquarium..

Definitely not!! but its a cheap way to get a big reservoir. I think you will need a relatively large thermal mass to make this work. An aquarium will be cheap and easy and should make maintenance easier. 

[MaratM]

10 hours ago, Alphy13 said:

LTT's new LAN party room inspired me to put to paper an idea that I have had for quite a while:

 

Whole room water cooling, revived.

Each PC has a 2 blocks, and a pump. The pump will be independent for each system so it is only running when the system is on. The GPU can use a regular CPU block, minimal air cooling will be sufficient for the rest of the PC. (Consider something like the NZXT G12). The Heat exchanger can then only worry about maintaining the temperature of the aquarium. 

it is probbably better to use heat exchanger on every pc and run them paralel with antifreeze as coolant

https://koolance.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=119

this way you will avoid any risk of galvanic corosion

[Alphy13]

6 hours ago, MaratM said:

it is probbably better to use heat exchanger on every pc and run them paralel with antifreeze as coolant

https://koolance.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=119

this way you will avoid any risk of galvanic corosion

Using heat exchangers between the fluids would allow you to use a different type of block between systems, and I think it would be safer for the system. However, it would add a tremendous amount of cost and complexity. The exchangers are expensive themselves and they removed the advantage of the aquarium in that now you need a reservoir for each PC which adds to the maintenance complexity. As long as you know whats in the "radiator" for lack of a better word, you can avoid galvanic corrosion. The radiator is probably copper and using copper blocks on your PCs would solve that. Thanks for bringing this up, as galvanic corrosion could easily become an issue in any project like this. 

Using antifreeze is difficult because it is glycol based and will eat up flexible tubing and plastic pump parts. I would hate to lock each of those stations into place relative to each other by using hardline tubing.

[AnonymousGuy]

I have a whole-house multi-system loop deployed right now.  You want to use heat exchangers from a cost and maintenance perspective.  7 gallons mayhem X1 (which would be a small reservoir) is going to cost nearly $200 and is a pain in the ass to mix.  It gets contaminated and you're going to cry.  Also leaks...water leaks it's a problem, coolant leaks becomes a disaster of sticky staining mess.  

 

PCs also don't need any airflow inside of them; natural convection works.

 

By far and away is keeping the main reservoir from going to shit.  One of my biggest errors was using an open-air (error .... air...haha) reservoir.  Evaporation is a significant issue, it gets contaminated with algae all the fucking time, and occasionally some bugs find their way into it too.  Sure I have filtration and UV sterilization but they're solutions to a problem that shouldn't exist.  Version 29 of my loop is in progress with a sealed reservoir, built by me.

 

Also, this whole thing is expensive as fuck to implement.  You're basically dabbling in an area where no one else goes outside of commercial environments.

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

23 hours ago, Enderman said:

Hopefully you don't put any fish in that aquarium..

Filters and a lot of PT-Nuke

[ninbura]

I've got one running, turned out pretty good:
https://pcpartpicker.com/b/ZrWD4D
https://imgur.com/a/ZinwY
https://imgur.com/a/yLcZ3

I've since swapped the Corsair 270R for a Riotoro CR1080, switched one of 1080's for another 1080 with a different water block (GPU-200), removed one of the pumps, lost a radiator due to leakage, and made a few other changes to the setup as a whole but the methodology is all the same.

I've got another radiator and a new camera on the way to get some new pics / get everything updated.

[Alphy13]

19 hours ago, TheAgnda said:

I've got one running, turned out pretty good:
https://pcpartpicker.com/b/ZrWD4D
https://imgur.com/a/ZinwY
https://imgur.com/a/yLcZ3

That's some impressive cable management...

How long is the run from the PCs to the radiators? Have you had any issues with the coolant? @AnonymousGuy seems to have had some issues with his but @AntVenom didn't seem to have too much trouble with it. 

 

[ninbura]

1 hour ago, Alphy13 said:

That's some impressive cable management...

How long is the run from the PCs to the radiators? Have you had any issues with the coolant?

 

Thanks!

I've got around 80ft of tubing in the system as a whole so systems are around 40 feet from the radiators.

I've had a few issues: 

• With 3 pumps at full speed, considerable pressure, and cheap tubing from Newegg I found that the tubing down stairs was expanding.
• I had some leaking with the brass joints at first so decided to use tape and calk to seal them and some of the calk got in the system gumming my blocks.
• One of the radiators sprang a leak while running the loop with only one system attached.

After adding speed controllers to the pumps and replacing the tubing downstairs with some thicker stuff from Home Depot nothing is expanding. After dismantling each pc, water block, reservoir, and cleaning them out / flushing the system several times there is no more blockage. And after removing one of the pumps from the system and RMA'ing the defective radiator (that really shouldn't have leaked regardless) I haven't had any other issues, flow rate still great.

[AntVenom]

Just don't mix metals, and use the right amount of PT-Nuke for the volume of water you have, and you'll be good. Nickel and copper are fine, just keep aluminum out of ALL parts of the loop. (Coming from the guy who did basement water cooling w/ it still working)

And when it comes to pumps, its MOSTLY all about head pressure. I use a pump meant for a computer water cooling setup, but it has 20 feet of head pressure, and it has no problem comfortably pushing about 6 feet of water vertically. It churns along day in and day out. I wouldn't use the pump inside of my computer, because its uncomfortably loud for that, but it's FAR quieter than something overkill like a Little Giant pump, which I used in the past. Little Giant pumps work, but are awful. Avoid them if you can. PURELY because they begin to audibly grind after the 2nd week, and never stop.

[ninbura]

1 hour ago, AntVenom said:

And when it comes to pumps, its MOSTLY all about head pressure. I use a pump meant for a computer water cooling setup, but it has 20 feet of head pressure, and it has no problem comfortably pushing about 6 feet of water vertically.

This was my biggest lesson, I got lost in these deep friction based head loss calculations only to find that you can run water horizontally for basically ever.

Looks like we're using the same pump, 2 doesn't seem like a terrible idea for redundancy, but you've been running for a 3 years no problem so...

[AntVenom]

19 minutes ago, TheAgnda said:

This was my biggest lesson, I got lost in these deep friction based head loss calculations only to find that you can run water vertically for basically ever.

Looks like we're using the same pump, 2 doesn't seem like a terrible idea for redundancy, but you've been running for a 3 years no problem so...

Like, if you're running multiple computers, but don't even have 2 feet of head pressure, one might be enough. Depends on how you run your tubing I suppose.

[ninbura]

5 minutes ago, AntVenom said:

Like, if you're running multiple computers, but don't even have 2 feet of head pressure, one might be enough. Depends on how you run your tubing I suppose.

RIP I meant horizontally, my bad.

I have 40' going to the computers from the radiators but only like 12' going up, so really I could have run the whole thing with 1 pump but opted for 3 at first because of misleading friction head loss calculators.

[AnonymousGuy]

4 hours ago, TheAgnda said:

RIP I meant horizontally, my bad.

I have 40' going to the computers from the radiators but only like 12' going up, so really I could have run the whole thing with 1 pump but opted for 3 at first because of misleading friction head loss calculators.

You will have some head loss from tubing and and hard elbows. I have 125 feet of hose and through 3 heat exchangers and a radiator I run it at 15 PSI to have about 10gpm flow rate.   My pump goes up to 30 psi.  You want to think of the loop as requiring a fixed psi to overcome resistance. Then you look up the pump flowrate at that psi. 

 

Also so you don’t need to worry about redundancy. I’ve never had a pump failure and the whole shebang will run for a long time before water starts getting hot with the big thermal mass. At some point the heat exchangers themselves also act as radiators so the whole thing doesn’t go meltdown (I guess heat exchangers are redundancy because the desktop loops remain running)

[ninbura]

1 hour ago, AnonymousGuy said:

You will have some head loss from tubing and and hard elbows. I have 125 feet of hose and through 3 heat exchangers and a radiator I run it at 15 PSI to have about 10gpm flow rate.   My pump goes up to 30 psi.  You want to think of the loop as requiring a fixed psi to overcome resistance. Then you look up the pump flowrate at that psi. 

 

Also so you don’t need to worry about redundancy. I’ve never had a pump failure and the whole shebang will run for a long time before water starts getting hot with the big thermal mass. At some point the heat exchangers themselves also act as radiators so the whole thing doesn’t go meltdown (I guess heat exchangers are redundancy because the desktop loops remain running)

Yeah I don't mean to say there is zero head loss due to friction but everywhere I plugged my numbers in it made it sound like I'd lose 30'+ of head pressure.

It became pretty apparent that wasn't true as soon as I started the system, been running 2 pumps at their lowest possible RPM for a while now no issues.

That's a really good point with the use of heat exchangers and pumps on each side in terms of redundancy, but wouldn't that only apply if the pump on the other side dies? What if only the pump running the computers loop died first?

[AnonymousGuy]

11 hours ago, TheAgnda said:

That's a really good point with the use of heat exchangers and pumps on each side in terms of redundancy, but wouldn't that only apply if the pump on the other side dies? What if only the pump running the computers loop died first?

D5 pumps are considered pretty much perfect reliability.  I've never heard of anyone suffering an outright failure of one of them.  In any case, even if the desktop-pump dies it's not like the system will kill itself...the CPU will eventually reach TJmax and throttle itself or shut down.   When I do server loop maintenance I just turn off the pump and leave the system running.  If I get done in 10 minutes then everything is still OK.

[ninbura]

35 minutes ago, AnonymousGuy said:

D5 pumps are considered pretty much perfect reliability.  I've never heard of anyone suffering an outright failure of one of them.  In any case, even if the desktop-pump dies it's not like the system will kill itself...the CPU will eventually reach TJmax and throttle itself or shut down.   When I do server loop maintenance I just turn off the pump and leave the system running.  If I get done in 10 minutes then everything is still OK.

Yeah, a lot of the time when I'm away from my PC I'll mine Crypto, when that radiator I mentioned earlier sprang a leak my computers overheated and shut off.

There can be repercussions to hard drives and such with random shutdowns but typically your fine.

I can definitely see some benefits to running two separate loops with a heat exchanger, if I did it I'd have to keep the pump and exchanger out of the room to keep the room silent and cool as it is.