An anonymous guest asks, "If water cooling is so good, wouldn't an ice water cooling system be even better? Is there even such a thing as an ice water cooling system?"

At first it seems like a good idea: using ice water to help cool your system to below ambient temperatures; but, once you think about it, using ice water is actually pretty inefficient, and presents some interesting problems faced by sub-ambient cooling systems.

In an air cooling or water cooling system the best temperature you can hope to get your components down to is the ambient room temperature. Since these systems are only transferring heat from one point to another they cannot cool a system below the ambient air temperature. We use water cooling simply because it's much more efficient at cooling computer components than simply pushing air around.

(Incidentally, 100 degrees Fahrenheit = 37.8 degrees Celsius. With components that are designed to run in the 60-90 degree Celsius range, that's a lot of cooling that could potentially be achieved by simply moving the heat into the open air!)

Well, if water cooling is so efficient, why not add ice into the system and turn the performance up a notch? It turns out that there are several problems that must be dealt with if we're going to force the temperature of our components below the ambient air temperature:

• Making the ice. You'll need a compressor (freezer) in order to freeze the water. This component is loud, bulky, and uses a lot of electricity. In fact, it uses so much electricity that, when used to generate ice for an ice-cooling system, the efficiency of your cooling system drops to nearly 0%!
• Making enough ice. The water in your system is going to get hot. It wont boil, but it will be warm enough to scold you - at 70 degrees Celsius your water will be at 158 degrees Fahrenheit. That means you'll need a lot of ice to put into that system!

"If making ice is the problem," I hear you ponder, "why not simply make the compressor part of the cooling system?" Well, this has already been done in several systems. By removing the water cooling system and actively cooling system components by directly applying some kind of compressor to each heat-generating component, you can achieve temperatures well below 0 degrees Celsius. You are then faced with two problems:

• The compressor is, once again, a large, bulky, heat-generating, inefficient piece of equipment.
• Cooling systems cause condensation to form around the parts that are cooler than the ambient air temperature. That means pure water will form around your sensitive electrical components and, if the temperature is cold enough, ice crystals will form. This means that your computer components need to be well insulated from the outside air, otherwise you're going to end up with serious electrical problems.

In conclusion, adding ice to a water cooling system sounds like a great idea, but in practice it's inefficient, and can cause a lot of headaches. Unless you've got some serious experience with system cooling, sticking with liquid cooling is probably your best bet.

Do you have a question you need answered? E-mail me! lordkat@gmail.com

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Be safe,

Jason