Extra cooling additives

[rockyroller]

I watch some videos recently of LTT doing a watercooling vs air cooling and ended up wondering this. Motorcyclist enthusiasts have been using additives in the coolant to make hot engines run cooler, for instance 'Water Wetter'. I was just wondering if anybody has run tests on a CPU water cooler to see if these same additives make water coolers run better as the coolant is the same isn't it?

[8tg]

Negligible difference, the heat output of a 2 cylinder engine vs a desktop processor is orders of magnitude apart. Stuff like this has been tested before on enterprise scale systems, server farms. Whole building water cooling, and heat transfer barely gets any better with anything beyond just regular old water.

The reason being that water alone is a really good thermal conductor, and the next step up is something like liquid mercury which is a whole other ordeal, yeah it would be fantastic for a liquid cooled system, the entire loop would effectively work the way copper heat pipes do, but it would require a stupidly high power pump and then youre dealing with a half gallon of extremely toxic metal that would kill you, and a spill would likely poison your nearby water table for the next year.

 

Most of the things engines use as coolant additive arent for thermal transfer, theyre for corrosion protection, gasket health and resistance to viscosity changes with temperature.

[camieabz]

11 minutes ago, 8tg said:

Most of the things engines use as coolant additive arent for thermal transfer, theyre for corrosion protection, gasket health and resistance to viscosity changes with temperature.

Primarily anti-freeze, which shouldn't be a thing with PCs.

[rockyroller]

OK, I think I get it, engines vs CPUs the ways to cool just don't carry over. But I have looked at the Overclockers UK shop, and it does sell a coolant which isn't plain water, but some chemical added liquid. Obviously the makers don't want to tell the buyer what it is as it might be easy to make???

I'm adding the url so you can look at the product information to see it isn't sold as plain distilled water

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/ek-water-blocks-ek-cryofuel-mystic-fog-1l-premix-watercooling-fluid-1-litre-wc-a1u-ek.html

 

My follow up question is;

If there are more than one brand of coolant as above, has anyone tested them to find out if they make a difference and if so by how much?

 

[T06afre]

27 minutes ago, rockyroller said:

OK, I think I get it, engines vs CPUs the ways to cool just don't carry over. But I have looked at the Overclockers UK shop, and it does sell a coolant which isn't plain water, but some chemical added liquid. Obviously the makers don't want to tell the buyer what it is as it might be easy to make???

I'm adding the url so you can look at the product information to see it isn't sold as plain distilled water

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/ek-water-blocks-ek-cryofuel-mystic-fog-1l-premix-watercooling-fluid-1-litre-wc-a1u-ek.html

 

My follow up question is;

If there are more than one brand of coolant as above, has anyone tested them to find out if they make a difference and if so by how much?

 

Have you read this

https://www.overclockers.com/pc-water-coolant-chemistry-part-i/

[T06afre]

1 hour ago, rockyroller said:

OK, I think I get it, engines vs CPUs the ways to cool just don't carry over. But I have looked at the Overclockers UK shop, and it does sell a coolant which isn't plain water, but some chemical added liquid. Obviously the makers don't want to tell the buyer what it is as it might be easy to make???

I'm adding the url so you can look at the product information to see it isn't sold as plain distilled water

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/ek-water-blocks-ek-cryofuel-mystic-fog-1l-premix-watercooling-fluid-1-litre-wc-a1u-ek.html

 

My follow up question is;

If there are more than one brand of coolant as above, has anyone tested them to find out if they make a difference and if so by how much?

 

Also "Water Wetter" has a much higher higher viscosity than water. This will reduce the flow in the radiator and through the micro-fins in the water block. And put a lot of strain on the pump. You may risk a pump burn out quite early. I also guess you will have more noise from the pump. By the way "Water Wetter" is probably 100% glycol, or 100% propylene glycol, But they can also be a mix of propylene glycol and ethylene glycol 

[bowrilla]

5 hours ago, rockyroller said:

I watch some videos recently of LTT doing a watercooling vs air cooling and ended up wondering this. Motorcyclist enthusiasts have been using additives in the coolant to make hot engines run cooler, for instance 'Water Wetter'. I was just wondering if anybody has run tests on a CPU water cooler to see if these same additives make water coolers run better as the coolant is the same isn't it?

The bottleneck is not the water, it's the small area of the die that's producing heat, then going to the heatspreader (which is inefficient) and then going to the waterblock (which is inefficient) and then going to the water (also inefficient). The more media the heat energy needs to go through the less efficient it is.

 

The waterblocks with their micro fin structure are a solution to increase the surface at least between block and water. But there's still too little surface area between die and IHS and between IHS and waterblock. 

 

Most custom loops run water temps ~30°C +- a handful. That's maybe a ΔT of ~10K over ambient. 10% difference would be 1K. The result on your CPU or GPU temps would most likely be around the margin of error.

 

Car or motorcycle engines run their coolants A LOT hotter and they have A LOT more surface area with A LOT LESS media changes.