Cooling Solutions of the Past Gallery

w1retap

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Jul 17, 2006
Messages
13,708
Post up some pictures of your old cooling solutions. Air, water, extreme -- CPU, chipset, GPU coolers -- doesn't matter. I'll get us started with some pictures from my collection.

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Thermoelectric x58 build. Got me hooked on using heatercores for a cars as rads. Used this build for quite awhile after killing the mobo and upgrading to a x99 board in the same case. cpu stayed 20-30c
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Pumped water directly over the cpu die. Deliding soldered x58 cpus is fun :p eventually the epoxy gave up on the fittings and killed said x58 motherboard. (hence the need for x99 upgrade) cpu ran ~40-50C

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I know some chipsets of the past ran extremely hot, esp if you really pushed the memory really fast.
 
x58 northbridge was like having a 2nd cpu on your board by itself lol
 
How about an oldie in a newish computer? My Xigmatek Thor cooler from I think 2007?

Fits nicely on my MSI B550 Tomahawk with adequate pressure using an AMD cpu clip. Running a Ryzen 3600.

I have old cooler photos from years ago, will post more when I find them.
 

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Quite possibly one of the worst coolers I ever bought back in the late p3/ early athlon days, the CPUfx CORE heatsink. It was supposed to be an awesome heatsink made from a drilled and cut block of aluminum with a 60mm delta black label fan on it. I dont remember exactly how much I paid for it back then, but it was pretty expensive.

I used it for a while on my 1ghz P3 and it did okay if very noisy compared to the stock heatsink I had used before. Eventually it broke the tabs off my socket due to how heavy it was, and fell out the side of my case while I was using my computer. I was in the process of upgrading to AMD at that point, so I ended up moving it forward to my 1.4 Tbird...where it barely kept it from overheating. Wise me decided I just needed more Delta fan to solve the problem, a common solution to cooling back in the day. I ended up looking for the biggest delta fan I could strap to this heatsink, and ended up with the fan pictured below, the 60X40mm 9k rpm delta fan blasting out an ear splitting 60 db.

Needless to say this ear destroyer didnt really help much with cooling as the heatsink design was already poorly designed, and barely made any diffrence in keeping my cpu cool. About all it did was give me a massive headache from the noise this thing put out, and I lasted about a month before I went looking for a better heatsink with a quieter fan. I think I ended up going through about 4 or 5 more crappy heatsinks before finally getting an Alpha PAL 8045. I did end up slapping another fast delta on it, but being it was 80mm and not 9k rpm I was able to live with the noise and it made the heatsink perform really well.
 

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Here's my old Slot-A cooling setup. This is the waterblock, soldered together from bits of brass and copper, with Peltier heat pumps underneath:
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I don't have any photos of the whole thing, but this is what it looked like while I was testing it. I used a car radiator, as there were no PC water cooling parts available off-the-shelf then:
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EDIT: With a bit of digging I found a photo of the waterblock in my PC, albeit without the Peltiers at the time. There's also a DIY heatsink on the GPU, made of thick copper wires soldered into a brass plate. Ye gods! The cabling!
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Here's my old Slot-A cooling setup. This is the waterblock, soldered together from bits of brass and copper, with Peltier heat pumps underneath:
View attachment 435991

I don't have any photos of the whole thing, but this is what it looked like while I was testing it. I used a car radiator, as there were no PC water cooling parts available off-the-shelf then:
View attachment 435992
The hardcore days.
 
Darn, I think I don't have the pictures of my contraptions anymore... I wanted to post the one where I used toothpicks to fasten a rad onto a K8 that had no backplate. Can't find it.
Pumped water directly over the cpu die.
I've been meaning to try this for a while now. However, those little SMD components around the die would be a pain to work around?

Edit - found a few, friend of mine, not me. I got into the game a bit later. He got me hooked.
CPU was a JIUHB, GPU can't recall.
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September 2004
 
I always wanted to build my own shower head "bong" cooling tower, but I never got around to it.

Here are some pics from a guy who went by "Naja002" on the Xtreme Systems forums years ago. The links to the pics were dead, but luckily the Internet Archive saved them.

So here is his Dual Bong Cooler hard lined into the guys house, which reportedly kept the water about 6-12F subambient, even after cooling 3 PC's. He even hooked up a floater valve to auto-fill the thing. (I guess he was running tap water???)

Here are a couple of pics, but the rest are on the Internet Archive which did an unusually good job on this post saving just about all the images.

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I feel like we have lost something in our modern era of off-the-shelf manufactured water cooling parts. The old DIY stuff was WAY cooler.

I'd still love to do something like this some day if I can get it passed the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor)

I'd do things a little bit different through, and maybe even isolate the PC side from the open air side by using a water to water heat exchanger (wither the spiral kind or block kind) as open loops are prone to growth and evaporation. Maybe run tap water on the open loop side, and a modern protective coolant on the other side
 
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So many fun memories from the mid-2000's.

I think this was an AC Freezer 64 Pro with a Zalmaan cooler on a 7600GT plus a PCI exhaust fan for those hot BF2 nights.

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Infamous Tuniq Tower

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Good ol D-TEK S939 block, swifttech res, and probably an aquarium pump.

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I moved that to an old socket 478 system after upgrading. Not sure what I did with this computer.

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I always wanted to build my own shower head "bong" cooling tower, but I never got around to it.

Here are some pics from a guy who went by "Naja002" on the Xtreme Systems forums years ago. The links to the pics were dead, but luckily the Internet Archive saved them.

So here is his Dual Bong Cooler hard lined into the guys house, which reportedly kept the water about 6-12F subambient, even after cooling 3 PC's. He even hooked up a floater valve to auto-fill the thing. (I guess he was running tap water???)

Here are a couple of pics, but the rest are on the Internet Archive which did an unusually good job on this post saving just about all the images.






I feel like we have lost something in our modern era of off-the-shelf manufactured water cooling parts. The old DIY stuff was WAY cooler.

I'd still love to do something like this some day if I can get it passed the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor)

I'd do things a little bit different through, and maybe even isolate the PC side from the open air side by using a water to water heat exchanger (wither the spiral kind or block kind) as open loops are prone to growth and evaporation. Maybe run tap water on the open loop side, and a modern protective coolant on the other side
Open loop evaporator style coolers are awesome but have to keep the maintenance in mind.
 
Open loop evaporator style coolers are awesome but have to keep the maintenance in mind.
Definitely work better in lower humidity envioroments than high humidity ones. Did one in Denver Colorado and worked great, moved to England and it could barely keep system from throttling. Ambient temp in England was lower in summer but much higher humidity. ;)
 
So many fun memories from the mid-2000's.

I think this was an AC Freezer 64 Pro with a Zalmaan cooler on a 7600GT plus a PCI exhaust fan for those hot BF2 nights.

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Infamous Tuniq Tower

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That pump is a Laing d4 aka swiftech mcp-650, so yeah a repurposed pump. Now they're all d5, variable pump speeds with pwm and fancy heads, but you can still use the d4 on d5 pump mounts. I loved the tuniq tower and a64, both worked great!

Definitely work better in lower humidity envioroments than high humidity ones. Did one in Denver Colorado and worked great, moved to England and it could barely keep system from throttling. Ambient temp in England was lower in summer but much higher humidity. ;)
Were you only using a bong? Bongs can go subambient so usually it was best to do a radiator to cool the water from the cpu/thermal load before spraying it through the bong, then pumping back the cooled collection to the thermal load. Assuming i recall correctly... Trying to run a bong without the radiator is much harder. I've been wanting to build a new system lately too.



I just made adapters for my swiftech mcw5002 that was originally for socket A. It was the peltier model but works great as a normal block too. It took 3/8" npt barbs, I wanted to use g1/4 bsp modern fittings so I took 3/8 plugs, installed them, drilled out and then tapped them. I got an adapter for s939 back in the day, then got a universal adapter to use it on lga775 and lga1366, might try it on lga1700 too:
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Darn, I think I don't have the pictures of my contraptions anymore... I wanted to post the one where I used toothpicks to fasten a rad onto a K8 that had no backplate. Can't find it.

I've been meaning to try this for a while now. However, those little SMD components around the die would be a pain to work around?

Edit - found a few, friend of mine, not me. I got into the game a bit later. He got me hooked.
CPU was a JIUHB, GPU can't recall.
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September 2004
I taped off the die and just poured epoxy over the smd parts. The real [H] way to do it is cut grooves into the silicon for better dissipation. Or... Use something equally absurd like pumping a liquid metal over the die
 
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