Video idea for a super cool entirely new way to cool PCs far better than any existing solution, ready for super power hungry hot next generation tech

[TimLongson]

The ultimate "cool" idea for a video which could create an entirely new way of cooling PC's in a far more effective way that ANYTHING that currently is available to PC consumers. The pump which a mini-fridge uses is a heat exchange pump; it passes low pressure fluid through tubes inside the fridge to soak up heat, then when the fluid passes outside, the fluid is put under huge pressure by the pump, which forces the molecules in the fluid to move closer together, resulting in them releasing all their heat energy into the surroundings outside, the then greatly cooled fluid is pumped back into the mini-fridge, at a temperature far lower than the fridge contents, at a low pressure, so the fluid rapidly soaks up all the surrounding heat energy before being pumped back out again. And the cycle continues. In this way you can take heat OUT of the inside of the fridge, which may be say 5 degrees C, & disperse it outside of the fridge even if the room outside is considerably hotter (say 20 degrees C), in an incredibly power efficient way.

 

You could use this technology (pilot with a simple mini-fridge heat pump) to not only have TOTAL control over the temperatures in a water/fluid cooling loop in your PC, but if you were so motivated, you could even also channel the heat, via the heat-pump (mini-fridge pump) to either an external heater, or even use the heat to generate electricity. A setup like this could be used as a prototype for a commercially available PC heat-pump which would allow people to cool their PC components to considerably BELOW room temperature (in a very quiet & efficient way) even if they were overclocked & using lots of power! And heat moved in this way is 75% more efficient, if put to use externally, than generating heat from a dedicated electric heater! The developer would have a "hot" new product to sell & we consumers would benefit by being able to FINALLY cool our top of the range over clocked hardware so that if stabilizes it & massively extends the life expectancy - win win! Super cool aye?

[tkitch]

doesn't work.

Household fridges / freezers (even full sized) aren't meant to handle 1000W of cooling continuously in any way.

you'd need a much stronger cooling solution.

[thrasher_565]

who wants to use an 20 year old gpu? or pc for that matter pc parts all ready last long enuff. if it was back in the goold old days were you got manybe 4 years from parts then mabye but so far parts last too long as is i mean compareted to evrything els we buy... cars have gotten better too despite having to plug it in to find the problem...

 

so 20 years  ago would be like 2002 using a ATI Radeon 9700 Pro gpu today... not gonna happen.. even if we do 10 years ago GTX 690...

 

even if you got a 4090ti today and wanted to use 10 years from now if anything the power draw would be a problem alone.

 

there are pump less options and other options better than a fridge. 

[Somerandomtechyboi]

Phase change is not new and no fridges are not powerful enough to cool a cpu but it may atleast get ram to subzero (ram > cpu overclock benifits)

 

I actually do plan on buying a used 100w ish fridge that ill use to subzero my rams or my nb for 775 shenanigans but in the form of a waterchiller instead of a phase loop cause easier, but this will be quite abit later info the future

[Needfuldoer]

So this, except using the compressor and condenser from a fridge instead of the compressor and condenser from a mini-split?

 

 

[Thaldor]

As said phase change cooling isn't anything new, more or less it seems to be a topic to pop-up from time to time and always ends up with being either too little or just the other downsides are bigger than the gains. LTT even has couple videos about LD Coolings PC-V10 case that was made for phase change cooling and included compressor based CPU cooler, then there's couple videos about the old AC chiller Linus made over a decade ago and probably few others.

 

Kind of short version why these doesn't work outside of some showcase or very limited use:

 

-Directly mounting the cold side of the fridge loop to the CPU doesn't cool enough because the system isn't designed to cool small area fast. You would need extremely expensive custom CPU block that could handle the spread of the cooling and even then the freon isn't that good at moving heat away.

 

-Chiller style build where you have a reservoir of water or other good cooling liquid that can handle the cooling and keeping the reservoir cold with the fridge loop needs the reservoir. As in now you don't just have a PC case but also cold bucket of water and the whole fridge cooler also.

 

-Connected to the last point using a lot smaller reservoir that could fit in the PC case, you need to keep cooling it constantly and that means a lot of noise, a lot of power draw and the worst most likely you end up going sub-ambient during idle moments...[continues]

 

-Condensation. You know what two things don't really mix well together? Electricity and water and that's what condensation is, things get colder than ambient temperature and the moisture in the air starts to turn into water droplets. To fight this you either need to insulate the cooling pipes, the block and the CPU backplate so no air gets to them, provide enough airflow so the air can dry the condensation at which point you probably can just use air cooling or waterproof your PC from the inside (you can go and watch some Jayz, GM and/or LTT videos about competition overclocking and cooling with liquid nitrogen to see how much work it is to fight against the condensation).

 

-Lastly temperature control. Phase change may be good to cool PC under load, it is extremely bad at cooling PC without load because it is in the extreme end of cooling. PC also does need some heat to work optimally, your CPU is designed to work around 30-90C temperature and over or under that it isn't actually working optimally, you loose performance. With phase change cooling you most likely end up with a ton of thermal mass (stuff that is cooled or heated) and because it kind of can't be direct cooling a lot of that thermal mass will be in different temperatures at different times and affect each other constantly; like the fridge cooling loop can be -20C easily and have pipes and liquid worth of few kg's, with chiller you have that connected to few liters of water that most likely is somewhere around 5-10C, then you have the cooling loop and the CPU block which probably start to be around 20-40C and finally you have the CPU under load around 50-60C (numbers are just thrown out of my head might be right might be wrong but I think they are around in the right post address), the problem is when you go to eat your dinner that CPU won't be under load anymore and even if you turned the compressor off there is still a ton of mass in way lower temperatures than your CPUs working temperature and that will still cool your CPU at the same rate it did under the load for quite a while.

[_crazy_crazy_]

Asetek VapoChill LS ... been done before .... comercially even

[TimLongson]

8 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

So this, except using the compressor and condenser from a fridge instead of the compressor and condenser from a mini-split?

 

 

Yes a BIT like that, only FAR FAR less power needed, so a MUCH smaller & MUCH cheaper solution - it would only need to lower existing cooling temps to between 10 & 20 degrees C, not -40 degrees C lol.

 

Seriously though, it should be possible to make a realistic prototype which could fit in/on a PC case, make no more noise than, not use more power than, a mini fridge, & still achieve CPU & GPU temps below 20 degrees even when overclocked. 

 

Maybe create a "new PC case", with the similar concept to the cases which have water blocks built into them, but instead build a heat pump into the side of the case, so people could buy a "heap pump PC case" for incredible cooling. The fact that people are happy to spend over $650 for a Cool Master HAF 700 Evo, etc.. proves there is a market for people willing to pay for what is currently considered overkill cooling.

[TimLongson]

Seriously though, it should be possible to make a realistic prototype which could fit in/on a PC case, make no more noise than, not use more power than, a mini fridge, & still achieve CPU & GPU temps below 20 degrees even when overclocked. 

 

Maybe create a "new PC case", with the similar concept to the cases which have water blocks built into them, but instead build a heat pump into the side of the case, so people could buy a "heap pump PC case" for incredible cooling. The fact that people are happy to spend over $650 for a Cool Master HAF 700 Evo, etc.. proves there is a market for people willing to pay for what is currently considered overkill cooling.

[Echothedolpin]

Most mini fridges are only capable of 50-100 watts of cooling in addition to being sealed, insulated containers.  Not only would it not cool your system, it would actually cause it to overheat and shut down very quickly.

 

I hate to rain on your parade, but the PC in a mini fridge idea has been floating around since at least 2004 2005 when I first started building PCs. There’s a reason you would need a much larger phase change system that has a higher capacity.

[Thaldor]

1 hour ago, TimLongson said:

Seriously though, it should be possible to make a realistic prototype which could fit in/on a PC case, make no more noise than, not use more power than, a mini fridge, & still achieve CPU & GPU temps below 20 degrees even when overclocked. 

 

Maybe create a "new PC case", with the similar concept to the cases which have water blocks built into them, but instead build a heat pump into the side of the case, so people could buy a "heap pump PC case" for incredible cooling. The fact that people are happy to spend over $650 for a Cool Master HAF 700 Evo, etc.. proves there is a market for people willing to pay for what is currently considered overkill cooling.

It has literally been a product over a decade (the mentioned Asetek VaporChill LS) and even the LD Cooling PC-V10 starts to soon close in decade old product. Here let the young Linus show you how fun it is to build a phase changing cooling right out of the box:

Here's also not-that-young-Linus showing his then already a decade old DIY version:

They did made that one a little bit less sketchy just couple years ago:

 

Why people don't talk and want these?

The condensation kills and that was just from missing dielectric grease from under the CPU for 45 days.

 

For a testbench that you want to run a bit longer than for the few minutes you can with liquid nitrogen, phase changing is good. But for 24/7 machine, no, just no. Maybe if you are especially OCD about your build and want to change grease and make sure everything is dry as a desert and want to have the the anxiety about did you put everything back just the right way after every monthly maintenance you need to do. But even then just make a custom water loop, maybe dip your toe to the old-school external water cooling or other bit more exotic stuff that may or may not perform better than common ones but still don't go sub-ambient (that's the point where a ton of problems start to realize).

[Beerzerker]

On 7/22/2022 at 6:10 PM, Echothedolpin said:

Most mini fridges are only capable of 50-100 watts of cooling in addition to being sealed, insulated containers.  Not only would it not cool your system, it would actually cause it to overheat and shut down very quickly.

 

I hate to rain on your parade, but the PC in a mini fridge idea has been floating around since at least 2004 2005 when I first started building PCs. There’s a reason you would need a much larger phase change system that has a higher capacity.

Yes.

In reality it takes a compressor from a freezer/deep freeze to work suficiently, a compressor from an AC unit works too but you must know how to set it up AND the unit you get it from must be of a certain BTU capacity or higher.
There was a guy over at EOCF called "Drewmeister" that made his own setups based on this idea and he knew what he was doing, what's being described here is also called an SS (Single Stage) or if liquid is in use, it's called a chiller. 

Regardless, in order to build it you have to know about things concerning all that from what compressor to use to the actual freon to use, also there are "Blends" of freon these guys use and not every freon type will be compatable with another.
If you don't know how to build one or know someone that does, it's best to seek another means to cool things with.

[Bryan-10EC]

Refrigerators are good at keeping a small well insulated space cool.

Think about it- refrigerators kick on and off all the time just to keep that highly insulated space cool without an active heat source inside.

They are designed to be efficient at just that.

There is no way they are powerful enough to offset an actual heat source.

If we have hit the bottom of what's possible with node shrinkage, then it's time to rethink the hardware basics if we need more performance- be it moving away from the bloated X86 CPU architecture, to even unloading some work to specialized remote cloud servers or even a return to coprocessors so you can streamline the system to what you actually need. 

It's insane to think that a good PC will need 1500 watt power supplies.

Or we could just cool the PC with water and use that water in an enclosed steam engine system to create power.

-

[Guest]

I know Drew. He helped Luke build his first couple SS units. Think Luke made a cascade unit at one time also. Pretty impressive temps. I know he was rocking at least -65c or colder. Made a few of his own blocks too. Pretty much everything from scratch. 2/3 hp pumps at least.

[Roswell]

Will never be viable. Anything that goes below ambient temperatures will create condensation. Condensation isn't good for electronics.

 

 

[SimplyChunk]

Can't believe noone has posted this LTT vid on THIS VERY IDEA from 7 years ago...

Come on people..I can't take up all this slack XD

[LogicalDrm]

 -> Moved to Cooling

 

For video suggestions (in future), please use official thread https://linustechtips.com/topic/1046558-thread-for-linus-tech-tips-video-suggestions/

 

As said, LTT has covered this multiple times already. So not really new. Besides that, most minifridges and portable chillers use peltier elements. While effective for small thermal loads, they aren't very efficient (= power drawn vs cooling performance). Peltier coolers have also been used for PCs about 2 decades.