so the thing with water cooling is there's a few different reasons people do it some do it for performance you
know getting them over clocks some people do it for looks although that
clearly wasn't the case here and some do it for silence
now here's the thing though no matter how
many radiators you throw at your system like you could put like six radiators on
this thing you could take all the fans off and it would easily dissipate the
heat from a CPU and a graphics card you are still going to be stuck with at
least one moving part and that's your pump now sometimes pumps take the form
of like a big standalone piece like this like with a custom loop while other
times you're gonna have it kind of built in or integrated into something else so
this aio from nzxt has the pump built
into the CPU block while others i believe ek does this for example build
it into the radiator but you're always going to have that
moving part which is a point of failure and a source of noise
unless you don't
this right here is a prototype
water cooler with no pump
how on earth does that work how well does it work
i guess there's only one way to find out isn't there
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so i first got turned on to the idea of pumpless water cooling when i was
reading a post on extremesystems.org
that's a blast from the past uh way back in 2008.
so a user by the name of ocz tony who
worked at you guessed it ocz at the time was doing some experimentation with
their upcoming CPU water block which i'm not sure if it ever got released or not
but it's hardly the point and he posted
that he had figured out a way to use convection just the natural convection
of the heat of the CPU warming the water
causing it to rise up one tube and then get cooled by the radiator causing it to
fall down the other tube in order to achieve enough circulation to get a
functional like custom grade water
cooling loop all without any risk of failing components and without any noise
whatsoever tony's approach had a couple of fatal flaws though so for one thing
it wasn't possible to get a ton of circulation so modern cpus like the 18
core one in here we're going to have no chance of moving enough water to carry
all that heat away and number two is that it relied on a very
specific layout of the entire system so that the
convection action could get started in the first place so the radiator would
absolutely need to be above the CPU
socket and then once you started to add multiple heat sources like you know a
graphics card or something well then life gets really confusing
fortunately there are other ways to move fluid around inside a closed system take
this for example this looks like an ordinary pc tower cooler but inside
these heat pipes are tiny capillaries
that allow the coolant to flow up and
down the heat pipe in order to allow it to transport heat much more quickly than
just solid tubes of metal would be able to do
that's part of what makes these things so efficient so in a nutshell then
capillary action is the phenomenon that you would observe if you took a cup of
water and then something thin like a straw for example and stuck it in you
would actually see that the water level inside the straw would rise a little bit
even though the force of gravity is working against it it's partly caused by
surface tension and it is the exact principle that our cooler here works on
now i only gave you guys a really brief look at this before but now we're going
to take a bit of a closer gander so first we've got a bog standard radiator
i think it's made uh i think it's made of aluminum and then we've got our CPU
block here which looks pretty normal you've got your flat copper base and
there's only really a couple things about it that strike me as
not ordinary so one is this little
kind of looks like a fill port of some sort that's been terminated by pinching
it shut kind of like you would do with a heat pipe and two
the fact that the fittings the block itself everything about this thing is
like soldered shut rather than using o-rings and screws in
order to seal it they they are serious about keeping whatever's in here
inside but will it work
now this is 10 out of 10 engineering
sample stuff uh ragin tech sent it over
but this is like this is not to be evaluated for its
performance or the packaging or anything like that this is
just a concept stage device
which means that mounting this is
probably not going to be that simple there's no instructions so
that kind of looks like it goes there
that kind of looks like it goes there and there
and there this really does just look like cobbled together from
scrap metal they found in the warehouse or something
are these thumb screws or just spacers these are these are thumb screws
uh well
you only live once especially if you're this poor CPU this
is my favorite thing about oh no did it go in the power supply
a screw in your power supply is a bad freaking time
one of the nuts appears to have gone missing well
hopefully we have an alternative nut oh heck yeah the nuts from my test bench
work that was easy i didn't have to go very far at all
we're also going to need a couple of cooling fans
did they say something about it needing to be above trying to remember
yeah now there's some for sure so because this process is heat assisted
we're not actually expecting it to start flowing right away like how would it do
that what would power it so we're actually waiting
for the heat output from the CPU
to move the water around we're converting heat energy into mechanical
energy but that means if there's no load on the
CPU then it's going to take a while for it to get hot enough down here to begin
that process i mean you can see here our CPU is clearly not putting out a ton of
heat and that is a hefty copper block on it
so it's going to take a while for it to appreciably heat up now that CPU is
pretty toasty at this point you can actually see we're getting some
more bubble arch we're getting some real bubble action here there's a big there's a big bubble
look at it go see that
it's actually starting to flow now now what's interesting is you actually see
bubbles flowing out of both sides
now why would that be
so you can see we're getting a little bit of kind of jerky coolant flow but
CPU temperatures are actually well within spec it seems to kind of
correspond actually to little bits of coolant kind of dripping
down into the block so i actually may have recalled
incorrectly this one may rely on some gravity assistance here so
let's go ahead and
provided so now this is kind of like having your radiator installed in the top of your
case oh and CPU temps are way down they were
up near 90 now they're in this upper 60s and they're more consistent
okay so theoretically we're all set up properly ish now you can see that our
CPU temps have settled in at around the
low 60s and that's not great obviously this is an 8700k by the way that's not
great for idle temperatures it's not even doing anything right now but you
got to remember that this doesn't work unless we add enough heat and it's
clearly working well enough that even though that's a high idle temperature
we're well within spec so in order to get our coolant flowing
more rapidly and to get the cooler working better we actually have to hit
it with a load so why don't we go ahead and do that
sure small fft 12 thread oh that's probably going to
crush this poor thing but let's give it a shot whoa okay so our temps
shoot up to 100 degrees basically instantly but what's interesting is you
can see there's a lot more action down here at the cooler we're also going to
want to check out what kind of clock speed we managed to maintain throughout this so we're still at 3.7 gigahertz
which means we're getting enough coolant flow that the thing's not just like
gonna immediately die we hope
now let's have a look at our coolant flow here so what's weird is we've actually got
liquid returns
on both of these
which would suggest that it's turning to vapor to move up to
this radiator so maybe the configuration
can be tweaked once more just trying to remember what their
instructions were i could have i could have looked this up before we started
but what fun would that be sorry i'm leaving now
it's possible that the design expects the motherboard to be oriented the way
it would in a typical tower case so why don't we go ahead
and do that just hold the board in place there we go
all right now let's see how she goes
oh interesting our temps are down in the high 90s range
now also our speed which had fallen down to
about 3.5 gigahertz is up to 3.63 we're
clearly turboing higher what's weird is that it appears as though it's operating
more like a heat pipe cooler right now with the thick tube
doing most of both the liquid and gas
movement why use only capillary action
when you can use convection as well we could tell that all the action was in
our top tube here but the top one was the thick one
so if we were to change it around and use our skinny one as the top instead of
having those two forces work against each other
we could hopefully have them work together
we can't use temperatures to differentiate our orientations here
because they're all going to hit 100 degrees in thermal throttle
but what we can see is how far it throttles and this actually throttles
much worse than our previous configuration
now we're back up to now now we're up to 3.8 gigahertz
what is your logic so this is clearly the hot side
this side is pretty hot too um
okay so i gave in i consulted the materials they sent over back when they
provided this unit and it appears as though this was the correct
configuration with the small tube on the bottom the big one on top and the
radiator up above so let's go ahead
and try it one last time
so this is the best result we've gotten so far we've only got one core that's at
100 degrees and we're turboing up to about 3.8 mid to 3.8 high gigahertz that
is not a bad result now it's obviously
not a perfect result which is probably a big part of the reason that this even
though they've shown samples of it as long as like
a year and a half ago hasn't turned into a commercial product
yet because there's a lot of fine tuning to make this work for one basically
endless tuning and tweaking could be done on the diameter of the tubes in
order to allow for better coolant flow for another there's all kinds of
different fluids with low boiling points which is part of what actually allows
this rapid movement that could be used to charge a system like this we don't
know what they're using inside i'm sure once they figured out a formula that
works they would hold that as a very closely guarded trade secret for another
thing remember how we showed that this whole
system was sealed up well maybe they're
maintaining it at something other than atmospheric pressure that could also
affect the characteristics of the entire system so
nothing like this is available from you know
any household brand that you'd recognize at this point in time but
i would say that this works well enough
that there is still potential for this technology and i'm personally very
excited for the truly silent water
cooler i mean ignoring that this particular one
has fans on it and that it'd be very difficult to diy something like this but
details details details
oh yeah and the bubbling does actually make noise
you can probably hear it
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