I Water Cooled My Air Cooler AND..........

So as long as I can remember, there's always been two options for cooling your CPU. You could either A, water cool or B, air cool. That's it. Never really been any other option. But what if there was? What if you could do, say, both? What if I could water cool this air cooler? Would that, uh, would that even work? We're gonna find out. So let me show you the plan because I don't know if this is gonna actually work out, but I'm gonna show you what my plan is and then we can see how it turns out in the end. So here we go. So this is a 3D PDF of the idea that I have floating around in my head where we, uh, try to water cool this 212 Evo. And the idea is to build kind of like a glorified fish tank around said air cooler where the water will come in from one side, pass through the cooling array, and out the other side. Um, I might add a divider right here just to keep water from skeeting over the top, but for the most part, this is it. That's the idea. And this is kind of the detailed plan here. So I think the best way to go about this is to build this bottom part first because this is going to slide over the, uh, cooling block and then we're going to fix it to the bottom side of the cooling fins. And we're going to build this tank around it. And that's it. Will it work? I don't know. Are we going to try? Of course. Okay, so it's been a couple days. We had some issues trying to cut the acrylic. Um, originally I was trying to cut this with a jigsaw and, well, when you try to cut light gauge acrylic with a jigsaw, it tends to crack easy. So I had to get a different tool. But we've made the bottom plate so far. And this is the idea here is we're going to slide this over the cooling block here, the cool plate. Uh, I got to do some work here to open it up and it's going to just sit flush to the bottom of this last aluminum fin. And we're going to try to glue it in place using a silicone glue. And that's where we're going to build the rest of the box around. So let's see if we can get that to fit better. Okay, so now we've got all of our shapes cut out. We need to do our best to make sure that all the edges are as smooth as possible and try to make them, you know, as flat as possible. So when we glue these together, we don't have any leaks because leaks are bad. So what I've done is I've kind of run this exacto knife down the edge here, try to shave off any little pieces that are sticking out. And then obviously I've been using the sandpaper to try to square up all these edges so they're as flat as possible. Essentially, you know, we're just going to make an acrylic fish tank. And if you watch somebody like the king of DIY, who makes acrylic fish tanks all the time, you'll understand how to make a little plastic tank. So let's try to get everything squared up and flattened out. So I've cleaned all these pieces with a little bit of isopropyl alcohol to get all the dust and everything off of my edges as flat as I can. And the way we're going to try to connect everything together is using this. This is a Weldon 4, which is basically glue for acrylic and it should, if everything is flat and cut perfectly, which it's as close as it can get, it should make a seam that's waterproof and you know, just as strong as the rest of the acrylic. I'll probably end up putting some silicone on it because, you know, I did cut this with an oscillating tool. So it's not perfect, but this should hold it all together and it sets really quickly. So we're going to get it all. I've already put it together with some painter's tape to make sure everything fits over the cooler and everything seems to be good to go on that. So I want to build the box first, then I'm going to attach this plate to the bottom of the air cooler like so. Then the box will then slip over the top where we'll then glue the bottom down and then we'll do the top to make a fully enclosed cooling loop. That's all there is to it. Now we just wait until it sets. We should be able to move it. So back that edge up again. Here's our next piece. So now our box is time to set up and for the most part it should be waterproof. We look at our seams and everything looks nice and clear. So we should have good seams here and no issues. And, you know, obviously it's set up now and it'll take about, I don't know, 24-48 hours for it to reach, you know, 80% strength. But now we need to figure out what is the better way of going forward. So first let's make sure this fits like planned. Okay, so we want that in there like so and then this is going to be our bottom plate. And the question is, is this bottom plate better to try to glue together now or attach it to this air cooler and then try to glue it? And I think the best way to go about it is gluing it to the fin stack and then after that's set up, lower it into the box, position it where we need to, and then run a bead of the Weldon 4 around it. I think that'll give us the best shot. And then while that's setting up, it'll give me time to finish these edges. I have to sand everything down, make sure everything's as flat as possible so we can get the best possible seal. And I might also put a bead of, you know, just silicone on the inside. It's not necessary. I mean, if you had perfect edges, you would never need to put silicone on acrylic if you're using Weldon 4. But the fact that I cut this with the oscillating tool and then hand filed it to get it as flat as possible, I mean, there is the possibility that there's gaps in there. And a bead of silicone, I mean, the silicone won't hurt. Let's just say that. So I might just run a small bead down each edge here. And then when we glue this down, so I'm planning on gluing this with silicone adhesive. So it's not just silicone, but silicone adhesive to try to bond these, try to bond this plastic or the acrylic plate to the aluminum fin stack here. And that's the plan. So let's give it a shot. So after some further consideration, I decided that maybe I didn't trust using silicone cement or silicone adhesive. So we're going to use some epoxy instead. So this is Gorilla Glue Epoxy. Basically, I just want something that I can at least, you know, hope that it's going to hold the load of this, you know, because this water block, water block, this water tower, I don't know, whatever you call it, is going to be holding, you know, this main structure here is going to be holding the whole weight of all the water. I plan on putting a little support here as well. But if it comes loose, we all know what happens to Mr. CPU. So we're going to use this instead. So I'm going to roughen up the surface a little bit and the cooling array here. And we're going to just try to bond it with some some epoxy. And I want to get it on the edge here because I still got to glue the box to it. So try to keep at least an eighth of an inch away from the edge is the plan. There you go. So it's a new day and we got this thing done and I will say that turned out pretty good compared to, I mean, it's obviously not as perfect as my CAD model, but given the complexity and the precision of the equipment I was using, it's not too bad. But the question is now, does it leak? Theoretically, no, it shouldn't considering, you know, when you bond acrylic using weld-on for it, it becomes, you know, just as strong as the acrylic around it. But, you know, mine's not as precise as say something that was laser cut. So there might be tiny little cracks or imperfections. Then I did try to cover with silicone. Normally, you don't use silicone when you use acrylic. Silicone is for glass aquariums and stuff like that. That was just an added measure to try to stop any potential leaks from any imperfections to getting through, but we'll see how that works. But hey, shout out to the king of DIY for his tutorials on how to build an acrylic aquarium because that's how we made this guy. So now it's the moment of truth. Let's find out if it leaks. Okay, so the setup is complete and by complete I mean I taped everything to this desk. I didn't want to install anything until we know for a fact it's not going to, you know, leak all over everything because let's be honest there's a good chance this is going to leak. But let's let's think positive. So this is how we got it working. So this is this is our reservoir slash pitcher. Water's coming out of here around the loop into our cheap pump from Amazon that was literally like ten dollars. So interesting. It's going to come out of this pump into our water box through our air cooler and then out the top back into our reservoir and we're just going to keep the loop going. We're going to see we're going to see if it holds water I guess and then if it doesn't we'll move forward from there, but let's let's hope that it does I guess. All right, let's see what happens here. So far we seem to be doing good here. Would you look at that? Oh, I think I saw something leaking. Oh, yeah, we got a leak. It's coming from the heat pipes. So the only leak that I could see appeared to be coming out around one of these heat pipes. It was only a few drops, but it only takes a few drops to make my motherboard a brick. So what I'm going to do is just cake the bottom of this thing in silicone and then we're just going to hope that we get whatever holes in there because I can't really actually see a hole. But what I assume is that one of the pipes has this tiny little hole around where it goes into the fin stack where the silicone it wasn't, you know, didn't make. Therefore it's leaking through the through the fin stack. So we're just going to we're going to coat the bottom with it with as much of this crap as we can get in there. Then we're going to try again after it dries. So okay, so we're back we put some more silicone on the bottom of this thing give it some time to cure and we're going to give it another shot. See if the leak's gone. Hopefully it is. If not, then we're going to have to try a bit of more extreme measure by I don't know coating the whole bottom of it in epoxy and hoping we seal it off that how and if that doesn't work we're just going to have to go for gold. So here's the hoping that we got the leak under control and if not, maybe I can get a better look where it's at and then we'll move on from there. So here we go. So far so good. I think we got it. Nice. You don't see any water as of now. We'll let it run for just a little bit just so we can just we can make sure. All right. So this contraption has been test running for about 10 minutes, 5-10 minutes. So we look like we're good. I don't see any leaks on the table which is astonishing to say the least but we did it and there's no leaks. So now we're going to take this air water cooler. We're going to mount it on my test bench cross our fingers and see if if it cools good, I guess. I don't know. We're going to we're going to see what happens here. So far so good. I don't see anything leaking as of yet. So let's let's get it hooked up. I got everything plumbed and ready to go. The only thing I did is I added a little iceless bucket because if you're going to do something weird like this why not go why not go for broke? I don't have a radiator in the system. So in order to keep the water cool for longer, we're going to put some ice in there. And we'll just see what happens. Everything looks to be functioning. The pump's not on right now, but getting everything set up. We're going to run some stress tests on Ida and see what our temperatures are. Let's take a look and see what they are right now. So we can go to the computer and check out the sensors and right now we are sitting at oh for the package about 47 degrees celsius. So that's our package temperature 49 50. So let's turn on our pump and see if that goes down any. Oh, yeah, 45. 41. And I can actually see it's very very hard to see but you can see if you look through if I look through the tank I can see, you know, if you ever look out on the horizon, you can see heat waves racing off the road. I can see heat waves kind of distorting the light passing through so I mean it's gone now since the water's kind of turned over but there was actually convection and going on. All right. So now our cpu package temperatures are at 33 degrees. So let's let's run a let's run a little stress test and see what see what they go to here. So we'll hit it with a full load and we're still sitting at 35 degrees 34 degrees on our package under full load. Most importantly, let's uh, let's check for leaks here. And everything looks still everything looks to be dry. So very impressed with how well this thing's holding together. There's a lot of air bubbles stuck in the fin stack. I tried to get some of them out, but you can only do so much. I didn't want to shake it too much since this is just a prototype. It could have could come apart on us. But if this you know if this video does well and this I mean this looks to be working quite well um, I would like to do an actual loop where I build one of these around maybe a larger cooler or a more high-end cooler and uh use a good radiator and whatnot and see how it works if it was actually set up like an actual cooling loop. Right now a bucket of ice water is going to keep our temperatures quite low. As you can see our package temperatures are still actually going down. So we're at 32 34 degrees celsius and we're under full load. So we'll just let it tick away here and see what happens after a while. The best part is it's pretty quiet. I mean this little cheap pump off amazon is pretty loud, but but it's definitely quieter than like that uh, what was it the cooler master fan that thing was loud the fan that came stock on this uh 3 2 2 12 evo. Our temperatures look to be still going down. So we're at 30 degrees celsius. Okay, so it's been just over six minutes Um, obviously our melt is our ice is melting away, but that's to be expected Um, our package temperature is 29. So we're really just going to get lower and lower until we saturate this You know water with heat so we don't have a white radiator way to get out. Uh, we're only running at stock speed So let's let's try to do a little overclocking see how it can handle, you know a bigger load and then we'll we'll call it a success as long as Nothing gives way but for right now, we're looking good. So guys believe it or not We're still chugging along here on AIDA64. I did do some overclocking So now we're sitting at 4.6 gigahertz on this old i5 2500k And it's run stable I mean we've been running AIDA64 for just on 11 minutes now and our package temperatures are sitting at 44 degrees celsius So that is great. Obviously our ice has all but disappeared, but the water is still cool but we're slowly going to heat soak this loop until we have to shut her down, but For the most part, this is just a proof of concept I wanted to be able to design something that was able to cool an air cooler and do it Like in the least invasive way possible. I want to still be able to use my first, you know, pcie express slot I want to be able to use all the dim slots if I was you know wanting to obviously I only have one populated now because we had some boot issues to start with but I got to run with that one dim slot And I just said hey, we'll leave it at that But all four are still open to be used and you know width wise we're still within the motherboard So we're not really impeding on any usable space So I think that this could actually fit inside of a case at one point and if you threw in some rgb Well, we know that would be top-notch But I am just surprised that we are still not leaking 12 minutes into ida64 at a package temperature of 45 degrees celsius And I think that moving forward. I want to do a similar design Maybe on a more high-end air cooler With some better tubing obviously a more high-end pump that thing. Well, I got on amazon for like 10 But it's working great. It's a little loud, but that's about it But I think I want to do something like this inside of a case because I think this would make a really cool custom water cooling loop with something unique like this a water-cooled air cooler so and the fact that it works good is Actually pretty promising So if this is something that you guys think is pretty cool because I know I do Make sure to give a thumbs up leave me a comment down below to say what you think I should do next Maybe with this cooler or maybe then maybe a new one. What do you think? Should we do a pc build? Should we should we do some more testing? Do you have any other ideas? Let me know in the comment section down below And again, thank you all for watching. This has been a lot of fun making this happen Even though we had some little leaks to begin with we seem to got her all sorted out So thank you for watching. Make sure to hit that subscribe button. We'll see you in a future video