Storm-Chaser

Okay great! Just gotta grab my jacket and Ill be right over

Thanks for the tip! Where are you located? Im in upstate NY. So if I/Mr fox can get the DICE system dialed in we will have to run close to 100% methanol to prevent the coolant from freezing. DICE has a temperature of -109*F, and for methanol the freezing point it's:

I had the methanol sitting in the 5 gal bucket for the past three weeks in ambient conditions in the house and noticed no sign of evaporation but perhaps in your scenario you might need to stock the shelves with washer fluid LOL (due to your climate)

So I wanted to speak to one more point regarding my radiator setup (and talk about my conventional loop as well). It's a bit over the top for this case (which was never designed to be provisioned with a liquid cooling system) but somehow I was able to get everything to fit without a whole lot of effort including 3 pumps. Regarding pumping water through the "hot" side of the conventional loop and then through the heat exchanger, I don't have to remove or bypass the radiators because the PC is outside in ambient outdoor temps right along with the heat exchanger, so the radiators can stay on without any performance penalty. I suppose that if I try DICE I will have to bypass them. The added benefit of having the computer outside is reduced risk of condensation. Then again you are in a desert climate so you may not be able to run the configuration exactly like I am able to. I too am a believer in coolant volume being an important factor in achieving your benchmarking goals. A lot of people disregard this but like you said, it buys you time to tweak and tune to get a better result. I have two alphacool reservoirs in the 5.25 inch bays so that's about 1.5 quarts in total in reserve. This goes along with your idea. Except replace the stock air cooling heat exchanger with another liquid to liquid exchanger sitting in DICE (like you mentioned earlier) The other liquid to liquid heat exchanger could be used with conventional coolants, but again if you are going for broke you could ultimately set up both plate heat exchangers for DICE. That way you double down and can quite likely slay your competition. But I will be a close second!

You could also daisy chain a couple heat exchangers (each in their own 5 gal bucket) if you really want to pull out all the stops, so if I have my terminology down, like a cascading chiller. A chiller which is chilling a chiller which is chilling another chiller. lol Not to mention you would be adding a good bit of volume to the loop with every plate heat exchanger you add. Not really going to break the bank either. Most cost would be going into buying more heat exchangers. I think I paid $75 for my plate heat exchanger on ebay. But its a 60 plate model, which is a beast. So you can get a away with quite a few less plates and more compact designs but I wasnt going to skimp out on this cooling system so I found the optimal heat exchanger for the price / number of actual plates. But really, I have not done much testing with the computer indoors. I put it outside on cold nights just like the chiller (see pic above). So I cant say how it would run with the computer inside not being cooled by ambient (outdoor) temps.

Please forgive my potato phone

I just buy windshield washer fluid. Which is very cheap and good down to about -25*F. It's about 40 percent methanol.

Yeah, Im effectively chilling the chiller (not to mention its submerged so it's entire surface area is acting as a heat exchange as well, plus its 99% copper so it has good heat dissipation properties. Thats partly why I don't really have to run/circulate the cold loop. Even for 5.8 GHz runs.

Apparently I'm the one who has lost his mind lol. swear I was seeing 3.5 for some reason... but no you were right the whole time.

Yes I was pumping hot coolant from the conventional loop straight through the heat exchanger. Not the best pics, but you should be able to get a better idea of my setup. And the cold side is not attached, because it seems to be pretty effective by simply dropping the entire heat exchanger into the bucket, fully filling the cold side (but no circulation) ... So I would describe this as a passive chiller... In a perfect world you should run the "cold" side as well for best performance. And I may do that down the road. The plate heat exchanger set up and ready to be dropped into the supercooled methanol. Amazingly enough, these plate heat exchangers flow better than most radiators.

It's okay. storm-chaser gets lost once in a while.

Then where is your fourth digit?? Lol But in all seriousness, you can see from the picture the design pressure is 3.5KPA which when converted to PSI comes to 507.

Its a pretty stout little exchanger. No aluminum, if you are wondering about the barbs. They are stainless steel. Keep in mind I didnt even pump water into the cold side, just total immersion. 316L Stainless Steel Brazed Plate Heat Exchanger-PURE copper 4"x12" 1" MPT | eBay

If you replace the rad in the bucket with a plate heat exchanger it will be able to handle plenty of abuse at the hands of DICE. I think my 60 plate unit is good to about 500 PSI. It's a pressure vessel after all. So let me see here, Im trying to follow, are you saying you are going to immerse these blocks in the ice cold water? So does that mean you are effectively using them as a heat exchanger for something down the line? Just trying to get a visualization on what you are doing here. Good call on the 72L water tower. With that you should be able to bench indefinitely.

you just nailed it mr fox

Did you get 4GHz out of your 960T? That was about the limit for me on the 970...

Thanks for the comprehensive write up. Have any pictures on hand? Supposing I want to cool with dry ice? Not sure if you are familiar with my ghetto cooler but it's pretty effective (because I live in upstate NY I can capitalize on freezing conditions. I have a plate heat exchanger that sits in a super cooled 5 gallon bucket of methanol. This way, I cool the entire heat exchanger, not just the other circuit (cold side). Amazingly enough, I dont even pump water through the cold side, it just gets immersed completely and perhaps not doing the circulation thing is a performance penalty but that just means down the road I can fit it on and perhaps pick up a few more MHz. The plate heat exchanger was chosen because: a) it's superior to air, liquid to liquid b) it has exponentially more surface area than a radiator. So this heat exchanger is then graphited into my conventional loop right before the intake on the block. Back to the question on hand, can I utilize what I have already in place to create a good environment for that type of chilling? i.e. surround the plate heat exchanger with dry ice in the 5 gallon bucket? My Setup: LOL this was a run on a -14*F night. took about two hours to remove the heat exchanger because it was in a complete chunk of ice. Needless to say, it was performing very well that night.

That's the right attitude. It's not just about desktop upgrades Guess this is a computer forum so I might as well post this here... Oldschool: LOL: Upgrades

Maybe so but it still doesn't diminish the thrill of overclocking, at least in my opinion. I know with todays state of the art processors, overclocking is almost a lost, dark art because there is plenty of power right there in stock form. Regardless of their media sensationalism I still have plenty of respect for AMD and Intel. Competition drives us all, right? EDIT: And let me be clear, I hold nothing against either company. They are competent and every commercial enterprise including IT do the same things. So I was wondering about your chiller. I wanted to get details on that run. Are you ambient cooling or do you have an actual chiller like proper.

Yeah, tell us all about it. For me, it's got to be the Phenom II. I selected the OEM 970 (known as Zosma) but is basically a thuban with two cores disabled. I've never had a thrill quite like unlocking cores and having it run stable. Being in the earlier part of my overclocking hobby it really had a great effect and inspired me to keep pushing the limit. Thats why I say it's numba wan in my book. I got the latency down to 33.4 but will have to search for that screen shot. For now this will have to do. Amazingly enough, I could cool this thing @ 4GHz with a hyper 212. Another reason I love Phenom II chips is because they run pretty cool.

It's looking like Intel has us stuck in a real world matrix like scenario. Oh wait, we already are, they are just perfecting their craft. They do the same thing with sockets to make us go out and get new motherboards when we want to upgrade the CPU. Considering you can still get a single core CPUz benchmark score of 385 from an overclocked Q9650 @ 4.5GHz, I'm not impressed with their bad acting.

Probably wont be able to make anything happen but it's a bit colder this morning than it was the other day so I am going to give it a go. Report back later with results