Cooler Xtreme : Coolers
: Water Cooling : Senfu PC Water Cooling Kit
Senfu PC Water Cooling Kit
What you're looking
at is, essentially, what's lurking inside the beige boxes on and under a
million desks. A motherboard, a video card, a processor, some drives - the
usual. They're just getting some air, because they're sitting in a simple
frame which glories in the name "DIY Overclocking House."
What? You want
to know about the pipes?
What pipes?
Oh, those pipes.
Well, they're
for the water.
The processor
cooling water.
See - there in
the reservoir. With the pump in it. Next to the radiator.
Honestly, it's
all perfectly logical if you just think about it.
Liquid cooling
has always been the simplest way to go when you want to extract heat from
somewhere, and don't mind putting a radiator somewhere else to get rid of
it. If it works in cars, it can work in PCs. And the principle is exactly
the same - tubing, pump, radiator. Indeed, some intrepid users have employed
automotive cooling componentry - witness this effort, employing a Holden
transmission cooler!
This particular
bizarre, bolt-through-its-neck creation comes to you thanks to equipment
made by Senfu, a Taiwanese company that's doing a reasonable job of bringing
the esoteric technology of CPU water cooling to the masses. Or, at least,
to anybody who wants to crank their processor's speed up well beyond the
point where conventional fan-and-heatsink cooling systems just don't cut
it any more.
Water cooling
may make your computer look thoroughly extraordinary - even with a PC built
in a conventional case, you still need to put the reservoir and radiator
somewhere, and they're likely to attract comment - but, done properly, it's
a reliable, inexpensive way to get substantially more speed from a CPU.
Many modern processors,
even running at stock speed, pump out rather a lot of heat - 50 watts, for
instance, for a standard 850MHz Athlon. If you leave any current PC processor
running without some sort of cooling device attached, it'll be too hot to
touch in a few seconds, and shut down to protect itself (crashing the computer)
a few seconds later. Intel's current processors run rather cooler than AMD's
Athlons, but older Intel P-IIIs and P-IIs were hot little numbers, too.
