[Build Log] Passively Cooled 400W/300W TDP System Under 100$

[iamdarkyoshi]

On 2/5/2016 at 10:05 PM, Stefan1024 said:

Instant follow

 

Actually I thougth about doing this approach way back for my first build. But we don't have such an awesome store here and with >25$ per CPU heat sink it's no feasible.
When you heat up the heat pipes over 150-200°C they will burst and get destroid. Therefor you need very specialized equipment for welding. However welding is not required as you only dissipiate ~20-40 watts per CPU cooler. Just srew them firmly down onto the plate and use thermal paste.

 

For the heat sink itself, get the once with the most distance between the finns (>2 mm would be perfect). Dispite having less surface area than the close stacked once, they have better perfromance in oassive cooling. Also overbuil the cooling solution rigth from the start. You will need the headromm for impurities, thrust me.

Looking through these posts, I kinda forgot about this lol

 

I exploded a heatpipe trying to get it out of a heatsink, but I had plenty of others that didnt blow up. They sound like a bottle bomb though. I imagine that I went beyond 200 degrees though, as I needed to melt solder on these.

 

I am kinda wondering if the thermal storage capacity of these heatsinks will be enough for my gaming sessions

It is going to take a LONG time to heat up these plates...

[Stefan1024]

10 minutes ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

Looking through these posts, I kinda forgot about this lol

 

I exploded a heatpipe trying to get it out of a heatsink, but I had plenty of others that didnt blow up. They sound like a bottle bomb though. I imagine that I went beyond 200 degrees though, as I needed to melt solder on these.

 

I am kinda wondering if the thermal storage capacity of these heatsinks will be enough for my gaming sessions

It is going to take a LONG time to heat up these plates...

A heat pipe is like a gas bottle: sealed metal enclosure and when you heat it up the preasure rises untill it bursts. Lucky you, the strength of the heat pipe is rather low, so the burst preasure was not extraordinary high.

But this is the reason I didn't dare to solder

 

It takes about 1 hour for the heat sinks on the GPUs to reach equilibrium from "cold start". But that's because they start to dissipate a considerable amount of heat once they get hotter. To heat up the metal alone, it wuld only take ~15 minutes.

 

EDIT: Also I odered my heat sinks today

[iamdarkyoshi]

13 minutes ago, Stefan1024 said:

A heat pipe is like a gas bottle: sealed metal enclosure and when you heat it up the preasure rises untill it bursts. Lucky you, the strength of the heat pipe is rather low, so the burst preasure was not extraordinary high.

But this is the reason I didn't dare to solder

 

It takes about 1 hour for the heat sinks on the GPUs to reach equilibrium from "cold start". But that's because they start to dissipate a considerable amount of heat once they get hotter. To heat up the metal alone, it wuld only take ~15 minutes.

 

EDIT: Also I odered my heat sinks today

It was still a pretty considerable bang though. I wear gun range headphones and safety glasses in case I make another pipe bomb...

 

Also, I cannot wait to see your oil cooled rig! Next challange: Build one inside of a powerline transformer:

 

[Stefan1024]

13 minutes ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

- snip -

Yes savety is important. Makeing yourself deaf is not a resommended method to silence you PC. But it's still an effective way

 

Actually it's not that hard to put the PC inside a powerline transformer. They are often made for >1 kW heat dissipation and you can litteraly take the windings out and put the PC in. But they are quite huge und heavy

[vanished]

32 minutes ago, Stefan1024 said:

A heat pipe is like a gas bottle: sealed metal enclosure and when you heat it up the preasure rises untill it bursts.

oh, what?  Wow, I never knew that.  I always assumed they were solid copper

 

But this raises more questions (for me at least).  What are they filled with that is increasing the pressure so much?  If it is just air or some other gas, taking the temperature from 20 C to 200 C should only increase pressure by ~60% - hardly anything really.  Is there a liquid or something that is turning into vapour? That would explain it, because otherwise I can't imagine how the pipe could be built so that it will explode when heated, yet is structurally sufficient for general use (physically holding a heavy heatsink, not getting crushed when you push on it, etc.).  Metal doesn't have to be very thick to hold pressure, and an extra 60 kPa is nothing to anything that doesn't dent when you touch it

[iamdarkyoshi]

3 minutes ago, Stefan1024 said:

Yes savety is important. Makeing yourself deaf is not a resommended method to silence you PC. But it's still an effective way

 

Actually it's not that hard to put the PC inside a powerline transformer. They are often made for >1 kW heat dissipation and you can litteraly take the windings out and put the PC in. But they are quite huge und heavy

Yah, you could make plenty of jokes about having a power hungry PC

 

2 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

oh, what?  Wow, I never knew that.  I always assumed they were solid copper

 

But this raises more questions (for me at least).  What are they filled with that is increasing the pressure so much?  If it is just air or some other gas, taking the temperature from 20 C to 200 C should only increase pressure by ~60% - hardly anything really.  Is there a liquid or something that is turning into vapour? That would explain it, because otherwise I can't imagine how the pipe could be built so that it will explode when heated, yet is structurally sufficient for general use (physically holding a heavy heatsink, not getting crushed when you push on it, etc.).  Metal doesn't have to be very thick to hold pressure, and an extra 60 kPa is nothing to anything that doesn't dent when you touch it

Pretty sure there is some sort of water vapor inside them. When I was stealing the copper plates off of a broken heatsink (heatpipes were badly damaged so I opened them up before I heated them) and after I opened them and heated them, it looked like water vapor or something was coming out, it was pointed at a metal table and formed condensation on it. 

 

Steam is a powerful thing

[Stefan1024]

4 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

oh, what?  Wow, I never knew that.  I always assumed they were solid copper

 

But this raises more questions (for me at least).  What are they filled with that is increasing the pressure so much?  If it is just air or some other gas, taking the temperature from 20 C to 200 C should only increase pressure by ~60% - hardly anything really.  Is there a liquid or something that is turning into vapour? That would explain it, because otherwise I can't imagine how the pipe could be built so that it will explode when heated, yet is structurally sufficient for general use (physically holding a heavy heatsink, not getting crushed when you push on it, etc.).  Metal doesn't have to be very thick to hold pressure, and an extra 60 kPa is nothing to anything that doesn't dent when you touch it

The heat pipe contans water and is unter low preasure so the water evaporates < 100°C.

It works like a phase change cooler: The water evaporates on the hot side and the vapor travels througth the pipe and condense on the cold end.

[vanished]

Just now, iamdarkyoshi said:

Pretty sure there is some sort of water vapor inside them. When I was stealing the copper plates off of a broken heatsink (heatpipes were badly damaged so I opened them up before I heated them) and after I opened them and heated them, it looked like water vapor or something was coming out, it was pointed at a metal table and formed condensation on it. 

 

Steam is a powerful thing

That would make total sense then.  But yeah, there would have to be some liquid in them that boils when they are heated, because there is no way you'd build up enough pressure just by heating gasses

[vanished]

Just now, Stefan1024 said:

The heat pipe contans water and is unter low preasure so the water evaporates < 100°C.

It works like a phase change cooler: The water evaporates on the hot side and the vapor travels througth the pipe and condense on the cold end.

Oh, vapour chamber... yes, I've heard of that   I didn't realize that's what they all were though, I thought it was just some fancy ones

[iamdarkyoshi]

Alright guys, I have had a small change of plans. I am going to NOT use the 3/4in aluminum plates because the guy who has the rest of them is NEVER around, so (you apple fanboys are going to CRINGE, I hate apple and I still will probably regret doing this)

 

But... I grabbed a free Powermac G5 today and I plan on using the side panel and chassis. Obviously the metal is a LOT thinner, so I will need to do some thermal trickery to sink the heat well. But doing this should make it so my PC can actually be moved by one person. Oh its going to pain me to destroy such a beautiful piece of kit...

 

Also I bought two PCIe riser cables, the cheap kind. One 16x for the videocard and a 1X for my PCIe to PCI adapter and soundcard. I will try them in a crappy pentium PC with a TERRIBLE old ATI videocard that only scores in the double digits on passmark, no loss to me if they die...

[iHardware Shelden]

What is this "crappy old Pentium PC" you speak of?  

[iamdarkyoshi]

1 minute ago, iHardware Shelden said:

What is this "crappy old Pentium PC" you speak of?  

Its an OEM HP PC with a pentium D or pentium dual core... The stupid kind with the upside down motherboards. It has like 1GB of RAM. Also, the OEM PSU inside did not have sata, so they used molex to sata for the DVD drive and HDD. Stupid HP. And I know they are OEM because they have HP part numbers on them

[iHardware Shelden]

1 minute ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

Its an OEM HP PC with a pentium D or pentium dual core... The stupid kind with the upside down motherboards. It has like 1GB of RAM. Also, the OEM PSU inside did not have sata, so they used molex to sata for the DVD drive and HDD. Stupid HP. And I know they are OEM because they have HP part numbers on them

Weird, I have never been a fan of HP but I do like there Porlient and Compaq line (No longer have the Compaq line) that workstation you have is quite nice but yea you get what I am saying  

[iamdarkyoshi]

7 minutes ago, iHardware Shelden said:

Weird, I have never been a fan of HP but I do like there Porlient and Compaq line (No longer have the Compaq line) that workstation you have is quite nice but yea you get what I am saying  

Oh my WX4600 test bench?

[iHardware Shelden]

Just now, iamdarkyoshi said:

Oh my WX4600 test bench?

Yea that's it, I have a Compaq 6515b for my laptop and I love it but ya for the most part I dislike HPs products

[iamdarkyoshi]

7 minutes ago, iHardware Shelden said:

Yea that's it, I have a Compaq 6515b for my laptop and I love it but ya for the most part I dislike HPs products

I used to work IT. Dells man, they always fail. I built a box fort out of optiplex towers in my shed once. Then we moved to HP and didnt have issues with premature failure.

[iHardware Shelden]

9 hours ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

I used to work IT. Dells man, they always fail. I built a box fort out of optiplex towers in my shed once. Then we moved to HP and didnt have issues with premature failure.

It is weird how it seems to be all over the place with certain companys, personally I have loved almost every Dell system I have owned (even the BTX era ones) for executive workstations like the Optiplex 760. I think why they are hated so much is because the power supply fans ran way to slow and resulted in the power supply over heating  Other than the just the ones in the capacitor plague like the 270s. But yea I like my dells, don't know why but I have had great luck with them    

[iamdarkyoshi]

5 minutes ago, iHardware Shelden said:

It is weird how it seems to be all over the place with certain companys, personally I have loved almost every Dell system I have owned (even the BTX era ones) for executive workstations like the Optiplex 760. I think why they are hated so much is because the power supply fans ran way to slow and resulted in the power supply over heating  Other than the just the ones in the capacitor plague like the 270s. But yea I like my dells, don't know why but I have had great luck with them    

The HP machines we use now are prodesk 600s. They are the size of a thin-client, but have a fully fledged PC inside, including a hybrid HDD and stuff. 

[Stefan1024]

13 hours ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

Alright guys, I have had a small change of plans. I am going to NOT use the 3/4in aluminum plates because the guy who has the rest of them is NEVER around, so (you apple fanboys are going to CRINGE, I hate apple and I still will probably regret doing this)

 

But... I grabbed a free Powermac G5 today and I plan on using the side panel and chassis. Obviously the metal is a LOT thinner, so I will need to do some thermal trickery to sink the heat well. But doing this should make it so my PC can actually be moved by one person. Oh its going to pain me to destroy such a beautiful piece of kit...

 

Also I bought two PCIe riser cables, the cheap kind. One 16x for the videocard and a 1X for my PCIe to PCI adapter and soundcard. I will try them in a crappy pentium PC with a TERRIBLE old ATI videocard that only scores in the double digits on passmark, no loss to me if they die...

How thick is the pannel? 1.5 mm? That's far to low.

You can try solder spare heat pipes onthe the plate to improve the heat transfer, but even the transport from one pipe to the next througth the pannel alone is terrible. I seriousely doubt this will work....

[iamdarkyoshi]

1 minute ago, Stefan1024 said:

How thick is the pannel? 1.5 mm? That's far to low.

You can try solder spare heat pipes onthe the plate to improve the heat transfer, but even the transport from one pipe to the next througth the pannel alone is terrible. I seriousely doubt this will work....

I am thinking about using more than just the single plate though. I was going to use that aluminum with the half circles in it. This stuff:

 

 

Planning on running it most of the way across the panel. I have more than what it pictured here.

 

Its all experimental. The store I got the g5 PC from has an old fermi/thermi card, I plan on buying it to test with instead of the 8800GTS >:)

[iamdarkyoshi]

Quick google search tells me the side panel is 3mm thick. Still not very good, but better than 1.5mm

[Stefan1024]

Yes this blocks can help a lot.

[Stefan1024]

Just now, iamdarkyoshi said:

Quick google search tells me the side panel is 3mm thick. Still not very good, but better than 1.5mm

I downgraded the base plate of my heat sinks from 15mm to 10mm to save some weigth. Calculations showed I'm already quite low, but the oil will help me move the heat.

But I hoped to be proven wrong by your measurements.

[iamdarkyoshi]

Just now, Stefan1024 said:

I downgraded the base plate of my heat sinks from 15mm to 10mm to save some weigth. Calculations showed I'm already quite low, but the oil will help me move the heat.

But I hoped to be proven wrong by your measurements.

Its all about experimentation, any result is a result, even if it is not the one I wanted

[iamdarkyoshi]

Well, if I can clean up my pile of crap in my room and garage, I should be able to try a jerry rigged run of the 8800gts passively cooled as I have my risers now