I have building a home made water cooler for my two cluster sawtooths.

Some might remember from a older thread that I was building a two node cluster server from two sawtooths. I got boths systems up and running but now im going to cram them into one case and add water cooling. I'm going to build the case from scratch and also going to build a water cooler from scratch.

Anyway from my boredem I found some copper tubing laying around in the garage (left over from my new A/C unit.) I have made a spring coiled raiditor out of it. I'm going to make another one so each CPU will have a raiditor.

Heres how I made the raiditor. Took a empty can of WD-40 and spun the copper tubing around it. After that I pushed it down so there was a quarter inch gap between each tube.
After I was done with that I took two 80mm fans and mounted them on each side to pull heat from it. In all the raiditor is 6inches long and has 12 passes. Should be more then enough for cooling a CPU and GPU.

I might just use one for cooling the CPUs and have the other used for the harddrives.


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I have built a little nice hard drive cooler from some copper tubing. Not as simple then the raiditor build but it's easy. To make it though you wouldn't want to do this with your current/good harddrive. You will find out in a minute.

Tools used:
Small hammer
Old harddrive

Copper tubing

Take the copper tubing and bend about a inch and a half for the hose connection. Then take the harddrive and make the tubing and follow the right bottom side of the harddrive.
When you get to the end bend it up to the top and lay the tubing so it goes diangle to the top left side. Take the small hammer and ever so gently tap the copper tubing into place and so the tubing can contore to the drive. After that lay the tubing to the bottom left of the drive and when you get to the end make a horse shoe like shape and make it go to the center of the drive. After that make the other hose connection end but make it so you have enough room for the IDE and Power connections. Once again take the hammer to it and tap it into place. When you're done you should beable to pull out the drive and hook it up. Might be better if you fliped the cooler upside down so the horse shoe shape sits on top of the drive.

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More to come on this mod. I will be working on the water tank next and save the pump for last.

any idea how effective it is yet? how thick is the tubing? (I've got an image in my head of huge 3/4 inch central heating copper pipes, but I'm assuming you have something a bit smaller!) Just a thought but if your building a case from scratch have you considered getting a car radiator and fitting that into the side of the case? I've heard stories of people using them to great effect. I assume that they can be run without fans I due to sheer size.

The tubbing is what they use for making coils.

A car radiator is too big. But a car automatic transmission cooler would be perfect, they come in diffrent sizes and such. But they cost too much. I made a budget for this mod. No more then 150 bucks in the build. Pretty much enough to build the water cooler and the case.

I tested out the radiator I built and it works better then the one I bought for my PC. I ran Counter-Strike: Source for two hours with the old radiator and the top temp was 98.4*F while the home made radiator got 82.2*F with two hours of playing the same game.

The harddrive cooler mod doesn't work. Although I have a idea for a passive cooling idea for the Harddrive.

The best coolent setup I have found is what I use for my car. Toyota red antifrezze and water and with a mix of royal purple: purple ice. So it's 10%/70%/20%.

Nice job on the radiator then! I have no idea what sort of tubing they use to make coils, apart from the server rooms at work I don't have any experience with air con (not much call for it most of the year in the UK) I'm guessing small cheap car radiators are harder to come by in the US, in the UK you could most likely find a smallish one without to much of an issue at a scrappy, but then their are a lot more small cars this side of the pond (sub 1 litr engines)

I think the tubing is 6mm or 9mm. The only radiators i've seen are way to big for the case I had planed but oh well.

Today I started on the water tank. Pretty simple really, just small peices of plexi glass 8x10 in size. Just having a problem on gluing it together, keeps falling apart. Just have to do trial and error testing until I get it right.

This week end I'll post some pictures of the raditior and a few other things I have been putting to work on this little project.

I killed the water cooler. Damn thing kept leaking and the pump only worked when it wanted to. I think the leaks were from too much presher and the pump just has some bad wireing.