How does water cooling work?

[Bajawoojie]

The title pretty much covers the question, but let me expand a bit:

Does water cooling just make cool water flow around the tubes in your computer, therefore cooling the air around the tubes? Just like if your holding your hand next to a cup of ice, you can feel like coolness. But in this case your hand is say, your graphic card - and the cup of ice is the tube of water?

[Cagedconnerman]

not quite, think of running around on a hot day, if you spray yourself down with water you get cooler, thats because water conducts heat better than plain air, in a water cooling system it's basically spraying down your heatsink to get the same principle, although it does this more efficiently, so you get tiny waterblocks instead of huge heatsinks.

[xmastree]

think of running around on a hot day, if you spray yourself down with water you get cooler, thats because water conducts heat better than plain air,

Or because the water evaporates, lowering your skin tempareture (that's how sweat works too)

in a water cooling system it's basically spraying down your heatsink to get the same principle, although it does this more efficiently, so you get tiny waterblocks instead of huge heatsinks.

The water does conduct heat better than air, so it picks up the heat from the hot bits via a small waterblock, and then it's transferred to the radiator. The key is the fact that the radiator has a much higher surface area than a normal heatsink, so you can pass more heat through it into the air.

[nil8]

It works very similar to the way a car's cooling system does.

A big fan on a radiator, a pump, and fluid in a sealed system comes in contact with a heated surface, absorbs the heat & transfers it back through, to the radiator, where it gets cooled off.

[Bajawoojie]

So water blocks are just small, hollow metal blocks that act just like a heat sink? Except water flows through them and takes the heat with it to cool back down at the radiator? Then you can buy more water blocks of different sizes/shapes to fit different things such as processors, between PCI slots(?), on RAM, etc etc? It finally all makes sense ^_^

[nil8]

Yep. Exactly.
That's why when you use a waterblock, you still use thermal paste, to transfer the heat to the unit.

[Bajawoojie]

The thermal paste, sticks it directly to say the processor, or ram? Alright, this is all a lot more clear to me before. But how would you go about getting it off of what you paste it on? Or is it pretty easy to get off?

[.Maleficus.]

It screws on normally. Think of the paste as toothpaste. Same feel, thickness, etc. You can actually use toothpaste for thermal paste if you want (for a little while anyways.. and I don't recommend doing it).

[Spawn-Inc]

not quite, think of running around on a hot day, if you spray yourself down with water you get cooler, thats because water conducts heat better than plain air

Or because the water evaporates, lowering your skin tempareture (that's how sweat works too)

well since its a closed system there is no evaporation.

here is what a water block looks likes.
the water flows into one of the barbs(tubes) and flows across all those little metal pins and the water absorbs some of the heat and carrys it through to the other barb.

then it flows to the radiator (below) and does the opposite as above. fans blow cool air over the fins and as the water flows through the radiator its transfers the heat from the water to the brass tubes(painted black). which then pass to the tiny little fins that the fans are blow air across.

all the water is moved around by a pump(below). its like your heart and pumps the water around the system.

you can also add a reservoir(below) to have a small "storage" of cool water. you would generally have water flow from the radiator to the reservoir so there is lots of cool water for the water blocks.

here are the types of water blocks you can get. some are good and some are uesless(unless your RICH!!!!!!!!!!!)

Voltage Regualtors

they cool these little chips

installed

Chipset

which cool these, you can get north bridge and south bridge coolers.

installed

CPU / Processor

which cools the cpu/processor

here is it installed

Hard Drive (HDD)

which cools the hard drive

and looks like this

GPU/Video card
you can get a full block card like this

installed,

or a smaller, cheaper and more future proof (meaning you can put it on a newer card rather than only 1) but you need ramsinks.

installed.

RAM

and looks like this when its attached

you can get motherboard coolers, power supplys with water blocks built in too.

[Commando]

Holy cow, Spawn Inc that was a great lay down of water cooling. I rec we move your post to the tutorial section and sticky it.

Definite +rep