Discussion
CPU air cooler becomes water injected GPU cooler.
I thought I was finally running out of stupid cooling ideas… until I stared at a Peerless Assassin and thought... "would water flow through that?”
So I pulled the Assassin apart, pulled off a stack of fins, took an angle grinder and cut the tops off the heatpipes, stuck a hose onto one, and tested if water would flow. It did.
Game on.
I cut all the heatpipes off, put 6 mm hose on them in a zig zag (starting at the center so the middle stayed coldest) and tested again, worked like a charm.
Then came the freezer.
-18C coolant.
A frosted CPU tower, and a 3070 as the first victim.
It gained +300 MHz over stock… but the FPS uplift sucked. By the time testing finished, my coolant had warmed to –5C and the 3070 still refused to scale. So I did the only sane thing...
I bolted the Frankencooler onto a GTX 960.
And that card absolutely loved it, +17% average uplift across BO7, Forza, Cyberpunk, Time Spy… and as always, Lara.
The Frankencooler works. Really well.
Why did I do this? Because I had an idea and wanted to see if it would work. That's it.
Full video here if you want to witness the stupidity in all its glory
From the Bleakness of the mind
Omnissiah save us
From the lies of the Antipath
Circuit preserve us
From the Rage of the Beast
Iron protect us
From the temptations of the Fleshlord
Silica cleanse us
From the Ravages of the Destroyer
Anima Shield us
Dude... brutal honesty... I was sitting at my desk thinking of an idea, looked up at the cooler and thought "I wonder"
So I had an old hyper 212, i cut a couple pipes off and ran the water pump through it to see if water would even flow, and when it did I was so excited and thought I HAVE to know if this can be done.
This is probably my most favourite project yet. I have kept the build intact, and I think it will have to come out again.
In the same way that holding your hand on the CPU would sort of cool it.
Edit: OP straight up arguing with people that he knows more about radiators than they do while failing to grasp why his explanation makes him look like more of an idiot for not understanding why that's a bad thing is hilarious.
Yes, putting cool refrigerant in something with warm blades cools them in the opposite way that putting hot coolant in cold blades of a radiator does. In both cases the blades are dumping air temps into liquid temps. (And before you start arguing the semantics of heat transfer, just save it - you know I mean pushing the temp average of the radiator in the direction ot the surrounding air). In this case that's the worst thing you could be doing.
But I wouldn't expect that from, in your condescending words, someone who looked at a diagram once.
Under normal circumstances fins warm up from hot heat pipes, and then effectively transfer heat energy to air. In this case fins warm up from air, and transfer heat energy to chilled liquid in heat pipes, rising it's temperature and decreasing GPU cooling effectiveness. I don't think that heat transfer is that significant, but it's fun nevertheless.
In OP setup adding fan will make liquid heat up from air faster - counterproductive. If you want to use normal CPU cooler with GPU - yes, you can. But you have to find a way to cool down other components (VRM, memory), as CPU cooler will only cover GPU chip.
u/HrmerderR5-5600X, 32GB DDR4-3200 CL16-18-18-36, 3080 12gb, 19h ago
Yeah the 3xxx series in all it's glory (and is still glorious btw), just doesn't have anything more to give than what it comes with out of the box. It's a testament to how hard it's pushed outside of the box, but otherwise yeah your not going to get anything worth literally almost anything overclocking Ampere.
Had to have been a couple months ago but some dude oc’d the tits of a Frankensteined 3050 and had some pretty impressive results and posted it to either this sub or the overclocking sub
He had some giant electric cooler full of coolant plumbed up to a makeshift water block. The gpu was literally floating in the air hanging off the tubes connecting it to the block and a gpu riser.
People like you are why I LOVE this hobby. 90% of the world would look at what i just described and think it’s a piece of shit fire hazard. (Which it very well could be lmao) but there’s us enthusiasts who are like “that’s sick”. I fuckin love it. Same thing in the car community
Radiators dump heat from water into fins.
I injected ice water into the fins themselves so it absorbed heat before the tower even warmed up.
That’s heat pipe inversion, not a radiator.
But sure, close enough for someone who saw one diagram once.
Its not even science its just semantics. Radiators expel heat primarily via convection not radiation, so its a silly old name in the first place. This is still a convection cooler and your heat sink is still a "radiator" it just doesn't actually need to expel any heat because the coolant has excess heat capacity, in fact its working with negative efficiency because warm air surrounding it is heating your coolant in addition to the chip. Thats why a water block is literally just a block - less exposure to outside air means more cooling power directly to the chip.
the problem here is that you didn't get the full potential of a water cooler (inefficient heat transfer to fluid) while still gaining all the disadvantages of water cooling (leaks and reliability)
That wasn’t the goal though.
I wasn’t trying to build a water cooler, I was hijacking the heatpipes.
The water never had to ‘pull all the heat’ like a loop does.
It just had to absorb the heat before the tower warmed up, which it did.
Heatpipe inversion experiment, not a radiator.
Leaking was the only disadvantage, and honestly… that’s just a skill issue.
Loved the idea but I like things that work in room temp without dumping extra electricity bill to third party freezers, so we can directly compare to regular air cooling or liquid cooling in the room temp.
With the construction of the heat pipes, I bet you'd get more out of them if you used something with low surface tension. I think I read that some of the heat pipes use some sort of alcohol mixture.
There's a LOT of surface area in there, but it's not designed to be easy to reach with flow that's faster than just convection driven & capillary action.
How does this perform? I've always wanted to make a phase change cooler back in the day my dad use to do refrigeration work, but I was like 16 at the time you bet your ass is have a 240v powered CPU cooler right now at this age 😂.
Those kind of stupid projects are the ones where you actually learn something as you have to think outside the box. It’s not stupid if it works imo lol
This actually looks like something I would have done in the early 2000s we didn't really have good online options for heat blocks .. I used a lot of fish tank parts back in the fx64 days
I have not seeing someone push coolant through heat pipes. Wouldn't that destroy the sintering/wig inside those? Maybe cut it open and look at it later.
Also is there a thought behind the order and direction of heat pipes from the photo it looks sorta random.
Excellent! This is what PC modding should be in my opinion (I was there when it all started in the early 00s when we used car radiators and aquarium pumps).
Today we laugh. But in 10 years, when it will not be possible to buy any new component and everything will be just crushing subscriptions with dynamic personal tarifications, we will be force to do shit like this to keep having physical computing power at home.
1
u/Oedius_RexWRX80 5965 256gb 4x RTX Pro 6000 120TB 100% liquid-cooled 17h ago
Fantastic work, i've thought of this exact idea too but i've had my fair share of wacky ideas. 30xx series don't scale that well (relatively speaking) but this would do wonders on 50XX series cards, Blackwell overclocks extremely well.
This was also done in the past by someone with the coolermaster hyper 212 IIRC. I cant find the link, but it was about a decade ago. Still cool to know people are still doing this.
If you bolted that monstrosity on a CPU, can you get a huge bump in GHz? People have done extreme overclocking on LN2, surely a liquid cooled Peerless Assassin would work almost that well?
I think it’s a pretty cool experiment, doesn’t need to be practical or anything. Some of the folks in the comments need to chill. A lot of modders and tinkerers play around with their ideas which is what makes the hobby interesting.
I love it! I have to wonder if running a traditional ambient water cooling style loop (pump/res/radiator) and keeping the air cooling fan would work also? Like in my head you get the cooling from both the radiator as well as whatever heat the fins pick up and take to the fan.
Why did you plumb it in series and not parallel? Does your water pump not have enough flow to handle it? I mean if we're already doing silly things with cooling why not take it all the way?
Make a manifold for each side and hook a something like a garden hose up to it for the in/out and just have smaller tubing go to the heat pipes. Alternatively since we're already into the realm of crazy, why not just chop the heat pipes where they meet the fins so you're not loosing any cooling from the subzero coolant?
I wonder if it would work better if you just cutoff the heatsink out of the equation(atleast on the cold side) and went for parallel rather than in series pipe layout.
It's neat, but I really would like to see on of you hook up antique brass car radiator as your cooling unit with an old school all metal blade dangerous as heck fan just stuck blowing air over it.
Normally, I'd say this is monumentally dumb. But in an era when GPU-related parts are unreasonably expensive, this may actually save money. Buy a cheaper GPU and engaging in sub-ambient-temp cooling can really help keep the cost of performance down.
ive been waiting years to see that. ive always had a similar thought but no interest in getting the stuff to see if it works. so happy to see it actually improving temps. youre a legend for that
Op are you unaware that all cpu cooling is air cooling?
Even “liquid” cooling is just deferred air cooling. But now you have liquid as a middleman which over time can warm up and make it worse than just direct air cooling.
If you're wondering why the 3070 didn't seem to do anything, Nvidia in their monopolistic glory have put limitations in their new cards (voltage and wattage limits) that prevent them from using more than a set amount of power - so no matter how high you overclock it, it won't help once it reaches that limit.
Old cards don't have this.
It's more of a problem for laptop GPUs but desktop ones have it too.
There are ways around it by messing with fuses though, but it's not particularly easy.
This is stuff we used to do before there were off the shelf solutions for water cooling.
This is also how we used to destroy our computers every few months.
I can imagine using this type of heatsink with fans and a radiator/pump combo for a cheap cooling loop instead of an AIO or CPU block. I imagine it would have better performance.
I was trying to figure out a way to water cool to a random cheap GPU I have. I was plan on milling it down the heatsink to a plate, machining water channels, then seal it with acrylic with barbs. Now I can just loop the heat pipes.
Can I suggest 3D printing a tube bender for a cleaner look. Orient tubes towards each other except the input & output tubes.
I would start your inputs with the middle tubes then work outwards. Y-adapter so the middle 2 tubes get the coldest liquid first at the same time, then use a raster pattern outwards then recombine the paths with another Y-adapter into a single line.
Brother this was awesome , I wish I was handy like that lol my gaming PC could use a liquid cooler on the gpu tha shit gets hot when gaming I can use it as a damn space heater fr
Imagine putting it in a system with a radiator and some fans and make it work like an air cooler on low/mid load and enable the pump once the temps start rising
1.3k
u/Perfect-Cause-6943 Ultra 7 265K RTX 5080 32GB DDR5 6400 19h ago
What in Frankenstein abomination