VGA TUBE for xteme cooling
 

Needed one, the goal was to keep it cheap.


Here is some stuff I got for myself:




This is my basic idee of the base design. The final thingy in the middle was a lot smaller and almost no solder was left.




I got myself a 90° corner and soldered it onto the base, this is how it looks like:




A plastic holdown is used to push Armaflex at the back of the card onto the PCB so that no condens can form there.
I also used a second pipe to make to final tube longer, for example when using lot's of dry ice.




Tube mounted on a modded VGA card:




A shot of the backside:




For compatibility reasons I had to use smaller 'teases', the northbridge and CPU heatsink got in their way.

So... that's it for now, my first VGA tube has been born.
Shure there are lots of improvements, that's something to think of in the future.
For now I hope you like the pictures :)

LN² ready? :D

If we could get an inscurance to cover our losts, I would try it, for now it hold dry ice well for atleast 2 hours. But it didn't really improve overclocking, so sad :(

what vga card? temp probe squeezed anywhere? readouts?

I have a tempmeter in my tube but that is just so watch the aceton temp not raise to much. So, no temp probe, but there is a temp monitoring trick on the NVIDIA 6600 to read core temp. It goes down to +23°C, but that's enough to compare against normal heatsinks, so in some way I can say the contact with the core was pretty good. When I loaded some 3D the core temp went up to the middle 40's and to tube felt warm. Not the base, the tube itself. So basicly, I think everything went very went, except for the overclocking itself.

With the 77.77 driver (very good in 3D Mark 01 with those cards) I couldn't get high scores. OC-tools would let me go over 700MHz on the core, but when I tested it I got results comparible to stock card. So I loaded another partition with 91.47 driver, é voila, I was finally doing something. Though, the final stable clocks or just above the ones I got with cold water, nothing special.

Here is the result link: http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=565214

Good enough to claim the WR, but not what I hoped for :(

Benchmark rig overview:




Another overview:




The number of the beast:

Next time, try to insulate the tube itself, that's one of the main reasons the temps sucked

Temps got lower then -66 though, but you are right on that one PJ. I didn't really care this time, as I thought anything well under -50°C was enough to get good scores.

Did the acetone go down to -66 or the coretemp?

Coretemp, I wish :p
The aceton temp, but I remember getting lot's of better results when benching the FX57 with dry ice. Much aceton aint good, I really had to much this time.

pixors are dead :(

I hope my host will put my website online again soon :)

Pix are back online now

5mm copper baseplate? 10-13mm is best ;)

Looks not tooo bad for teh first build :)

I could slap two pieces on eachother, but I don't think it's going to perform any better. My copper resources aren't that good :(

No sandwich the copper won't perform like 1 piece,
i used to have copper enough but thats history.

Gistel near oostende, willems recuperation company. little to far from you i guess..

=> checked

89km :D

Any idea of the coretemp?

Just one more thing: acetone is used to conduct the cold of the dry ice pellets. Because of the 90° angle, the acetone won't cover the baseplate entirely, so the upper part of the base won't be cooled down. I guess it hurts the performance?

aceton will cover the base completely when boiling, it's just to fill up the gaps and indeed conduct.

If you poor enough aceton in there...

... you get in trouble because you have to count the DICE's volume also :D

I had to remove some aceton in the beginning otherwise it would be boiling over the tube's top when getting sub -70°C.

exact ;-)

Yeah, had the same problem when I used dice a week ago. Too much acetone and it boiled to 5cm of the top, I really needed to remove the acetone :)

wo~~~ dry ice cooling??

indeed, frozen CO2 :)