I’ve been putting off water cooling my PC for quite a while half because I’m lazy and half because finding water cooling blocks is a tad troublesome.
A water cooling block is basically just a machined piece of metal with something sandwiched on top of it to keep the water from leaking though so surely I can make one on my Nomad?
Does anyone have any preliminary thoughts? I’m guessing I’d want a machineable copper alloy with channels that are as narrow as I can manage while still letting water flow though, so I’ll need a very delicate endmill.
I can’t recall if he’s on the forums, but Savant PCS on instagram does stuff similar to this. Might be worth taking a look at his feed. https://www.instagram.com/savant_pcs/
Not sure that you need to make the entire housing out of copper. I’ve seen plenty of banks that are acrylic, and you could likely just toss a few heat sinks in acrylic to pull out some of the heat. Not an expert on that topic though. Also aluminium would be a good option here as well since it’s pretty good thermal conductor (and cheaper!).
On the topic of machining copper, Winston did a helpful video that should be a good spot for feeds/speeds.
I wasn’t a fan of the idea of Aluminium but after seeing the price for copper, I might have changed my mind… Around here a small 50x20x100mm bar of CW004A copper is ~$27.
But that thermal conductivity is really appealing…
It’s a fun and interesting project you are proposing and it can be done!
But are you willing to risk the possibility of destroying your pc rig for a minor gain when a Noctua NH-D14 will keep anything cool and stay almost silent, never leak, or need to be flushed. I put a Noctua NH-D15 in my rig and you couldn’t pay me to swap to liquid. It is a massive cooler though but I love it.
I know, but I’m old fashioned, I don’t do social networks (much). It’s difficult enough to keep up to date with what you guys are posting on the forum, if I have to check Instagram and FB too, I’ll end up spending NO time on my machine
