# Water cooling vs submersion cooling?



## 1zacster

I want to look in to either submersion cooling or liquid cooling. So far all I know is liquid cooling uses water inside tubes that run near hot components to a heat sync near the outside of the case. All I know about submersion cooling is you dump your computer in a fish tank and fill it with mineral oil. Now the few limitations I know are that the hdds and ports and cd drives must be kept watertight but other than that can mineral oil cool without pumps or anything? How about extreme conditions?


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## GoNoles

Excellent, excellent question. I too have thought about both setups.

We need to think about the pros, cons, and costs. 

With water cooling, you need to buy expensive, proprietary cooling blocks for your individual components. You can cool just your processor, or you can add extra water blocks for your ram, graphics card, hard drive(s), etc. Each additional water block costs extra.

With submersion cooling, you can cool everything on the computer without having to buy extra water blocks. (with the exception of a magnetic hard drive, which has to stay out of the liquid). But you can still cool the hard drive by getting a water block and plumbing it into the system. 

You can cut the lid of the tank so that all the ports plug in to the top of the tank. You just have to be careful with wires coming running out of the tank, because the oil will run up the wires like a wick and creates a mess. So, you'll want to make as many connections at the top of the tank as possible.

Now, with submersion cooling, you don't even need to cool the liquid, you can just have the tank and be done with it. 

Or, you can wire up a pump and a radiator and an external reservoir. With a water cooled system, you'll usually need an external radiator regardless.

But even with a radiator, the coldest you can get the system is ambient room temperature. I guess that's a lot better than 150-175 degrees or whatever the CPU temp gets up to.

But the real advantage of a liquid cooled or a submersion setup is to be able to cool the liquid below ambient temperature. 

I've seen some very interesting setups. 

1) During the winter, I saw a submerged fish tank setup with tubing that led out through a hole in the wall out to a large automotive radiator from a junkyard with a cooling fan on it so cold winter air was always running through the radiator. He used an electric fluid pump to circulate the oil through the system. He was able to get the oil temps down to below 40 degrees F. He had a smaller pump that circulated 40 degree oil from the fish tank to the externally mounted hard drive cooling block. (but now, with SSD's, you can now mount them in mineral oil. Although, I don't know how heat affects their performance. He also had a big finned cooling block on the CPU and other components on the motherboard to help dissipate heat. There were a number of cooling fans inside the tank to circulate fluid around. 

2) I saw a water cooled setup that also used one of those huge deep freezers. It had a 10 gallon reservoir in the freezer that used antifreeze in the system. Since he used straight antifreeze, he was able to get the liquid temps down about 10 degrees F, especially after letting it sit overnight. When it was running, even for a few hours, the temps rarely went above freezing because he used such a large reservoir in the freezer. If he really wanted to bring the temps down, he could go to the local supermarket and buy chunks of dry ice for like $1.50/lb. Crush up the dry ice and throw a bunch of it in the antifreeze and it'll bring the temps down to below 0 degrees F. 

3) During the summer, I saw the same submerged fish tank setup as #1 that had a closed loop mineral oil cooling system with the automotive radiator, but instead of sitting outside in the cold snowy weather, it was submerged in a vat of automotive antifreeze in a big deep freezer It had an electric pump to circulate the liquid through the radiator. It also had a smaller pump


The only problem was with condensation, so he had to coat all the tubing with thermal coating.



It's up to you. Personally, I'd go with the submerged mineral oil setup because there are less expensive specialized parts that you need to buy. You can create it using more off the shelf "yard sale" parts.


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## 1zacster

Wow thank you for all this information! I thinking I might buy a mini fridge(MINI MINI MINI FRIDGE) and modify that into a cooling system! I'll just have to watch out for moisture.


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## Tyree

Liquid cooling, of any type, offers little advantages and has no benefits for the normal user.
Sufficient cooling can be had using air.


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