Digital Passion l First Hand
Let Your
Computer Chill
How many of us Mithun Kidambi
care about ost of us aren’t too bothered about the
cooling? Meet
someone who
M type of cooling equipment installed in our
computers. As long as the fan doesn’t
drone too much and create a ruckus, we’re fine
cares enough to with it. Also, overclocking one’s computer and
risk running a playing around with the latest and fastest graph-
ics cards is a very geek thing to do. There are many
liquid through among us who are happy seeing the screws on the
his PC cabinet PC cabinet tightly fixed: who’d want to meddle
around with the motherboard and increase its
working temperatures, bringing it close to
levels that could result in a processor burn-
out? Well, that’s what separates the über-
geeks from normal people: the urge to
push the limits of their personal
computers, to take its hardware to
the next level and eke out some extra
megahertz!
The Cool Guy
One such computer hack we came across is Sanjay
Rao from Mysore. This third-year engineering
student from Shree Jayachamarajendra college of
Engineering, Mysore, has taken to developing
better cooling methods for his PC with a vengeance.
The passion started with a trip to a computer shop
that assembled customised computers.
Sanjay says he spoke to the shop owner about
the prospect of designing newer cooling systems.
“I partnered with a friend in this venture. I
did the designing, while he went about
collecting all the information and equip-
ment. Most of our earlier designs were
rejected because they were either too
big or weren’t efficient enough.” But
those rejections did not deter Sanjay,
or Sunny as he prefers to be called.
“I wanted to make my own water
block;I spent almost five months on
research, but couldn’t get satisfactory
results,” he says. Then, with the help of
a friend, Sanjay got a DangerDen TDX
Photograph Sadeep Patil
Imaging Pradip Ingale

A64 imported from www.frozencpu.com. The
thing cost him $60 (Rs 2,700), including the ship-
ping charges. With a water block in place, Sunny
was all geared to rig up his own cooling system.
What’s In A Block?
A water block, the water cooling equivalent of a
heat sink, is used on several computer compo-
nents including the CPU, graphics card, and the
chipset on the motherboard. A typical water
block consists of two parts. The first is the base,
which makes contact with the device being
cooled. This is usually made of a highly-conduc-
tive metal, such as aluminium or copper, so that
heat is dissipated fast. The second part—the top—
ensures that the water (or the liquid used for cool-
ing) is contained safely inside the block.
If you want to jazz up your PC, you can use a
loop made of a transparent material such as
Perspex, or UV-reactive tubes that glow under UV
(ultraviolet) light.
The base and top are sealed together to form
a block with a channel inside. Each end of the
channel has connectors for the inlet and outlet. In
most cases, the channel is a spiral or zig-zag in
pattern, like in a refrigerator or air-conditioner.
Some channels also have heat sink-styled fins
so as to enlarge the surface area available for heat
dissipation. Care must be taken, however, so the
design of the channel does not impede the flow of
the liquid inside it. Most people who opt for water
cooling prefer to have the channels made of a
transparent material so that the flow of the liquid
inside is visible. Guess it adds to the rush of things!
The Geek Setup
Sanjay’s cooling system consisted of the water
block and a pump that pumped liquid at a speed
of 700 litres per hour. A stroke of genius was in
picking up a radiator from a Mitsubishi Lancer.
“The radiator was one foot high and 20 cm wide.
The dimensions were just right for my design,”
claims Sanjay. “I also needed a few tubes to create
the channels, some coolant, and water. My hunt
for the channels was the most exciting part. I was
looking for a UV-reactive tube, and these weren’t
available in India. A little bit of reading up made
me realise that these tubes were indeed available
here, only they were used for different purposes.
“These tubes were used in motorbikes. Later
on, people were amazed as to how I laid my hands
on them! The other important components were
the coolant and the distilled water. For the
coolant, I used a regular engine coolant from
Sanjay Rao, the whiz who did it
Digital Passion l First Hand
Check out the rig—with the water
block, neon lighting and all
Castrol. I did not, however,
trust the purity of the distilled
water found in garages, so I
borrowed two litres of it from my college labora-
tory. I, then mixed one part of coolant with four
parts of distilled water. I connected the rig,
screwed in the right parts, and voila—my water
cooling setup was ready,” he explains.
To test his cooling system, Sanjay did some
volt modding—increasing the voltage intake of his
motherboard—on his A7N8X Dlx nForce2 Ultra
motherboard. The cooling setup enabled him
touch a core voltage of 2.05 volts. The resulting
heat dissipation was around 146 watts. Compare
this to the normal heat dissipation of 65 watts at
a core voltage of 1.65 volts, and you know how
much cooling the system was doing! Of course,
running a motherboard at that voltage for too
long meant that you would need to replace it
within a few hours, so Sanjay settled down at a
core voltage of 1.7 volts, which is still significantly
higher than the normal 1.65 volts.
Let’s Talk About The Money
Sanjay’s constant experiments have led to moth-
erboard and processor burnouts. Not to say,
they’ve also burnt a hole in his pocket, but this
hasn’t deterred this Information Science student
from experimenting further.
His aim now is to design and build his own
water block. “Once my exams are done, I’ll get
down to developing my own water block and
make a Do-It-Yourself kit. I plan to sell these for Rs
4,000. That is significantly lower than what most
water cooling systems cost today,” he says.
Not for the faint-hearted or even the moder-
ately geeky, water cooling will remain niche
because of the level of customisation it requires.
However, you do get computers that have a
liquid cooling system installed, notably the
Apple G5. Remember, you can’t just slap a water
block on your processor and overclock it! If
you’re interested in water cooling, make sure
you know what you’re doing!
mithun_kidambi@thinkdigit.com
JANUARY 2006 DIGIT 53