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With the old system, hooked up to the K6, the waterblock consisted of a PVC endcap superglued and silicon sealed onto the chip itself. The K6 chip had a heatplate, if anyone is wondering, so the die was almost directly cooled by the water passing thru the waterblock. This sort of cooling wouldn't be possible on the Celery, at least not as easily. So we had to superglue and seal the endcap onto a bit of aluminium. Or rather, what we thought was aluminium.

This is Froodogs, cutting the metal. We cut it with our "l337 |-|4ck54W" (we're sorry, we had to slap that in somewhere), using the well known Shout and Swear at the Stupid Bloody Thing Until It Breaks Off method.

Next, we drilled some holes in the endcap for intake and output. We used 13 mil poly joiners, which are VERY useful things. Basically bits of plastic pipe with barbs on each end, which holds the hoses on nice and tight. Then we jammed the poly joiners into the endcap.

Then we superglued and siliconed the whole shebang together.

This is me being a spanker.

This is Froodogs being a deviant.

We left that to dry and cure and whatever. Next was the bong cooler. I mean, the evaporative water cooler. Yes...

Here's a picture of the bit of PVC we had, and the other bit of PVC which i shall call a PVC Thingy.

We cut the PVC into 2 sections and PVC cemented the 3 bits together. So, after all of this, we ended up with this stupid looking piece of.. plastic.

The idea of bong coolers is to have a shower head or something similar spraying the water into a fine mist or spray, allowing the heat to dissipate, via evaporate, into the surrounding atmosphere. We decided that shower heads were too expensive, and seeing that we don't know what kind of metal that they are made of, we didn't know if the battery effect (electrolytic badness which occurs when you use dramatically different types of metal in a water system, and feed them a current) would come into play. So we connected a hose spray head nozzle thingy that we found for like $3 at Bunnings. Hell, it's mad of plastic, and it's cheap. So we drilled some mounting holes in the PVC and the hose head and we were off. Look at the spray head.

And now look at the spray head with holes in it.

Joy. Now, we hooked it all together with my wicked 400 L per hour pump (it's not that wicked, I was kidding, it's a technique I'm working on) and got it happening. Look at it go! Well you can't see the water that well in this picture but you get the idea.

Hurrah. Now, lets connect it all up, and test the integrity of it all.

Yay, it works without leaking. We filled it with water and added blue dye, so that if it leaked then we could tell easily. So, I eagerly took all of the components back to my house and the waiting Celeron 333.

So... the results...

Conclusion 1 : The cooler, when connected to the CPU, works OK. However, when you heat it up, ie turning the computer on, it just gets hotter and hotter and hotter and then crash. Damn.

Cause : We found out that the metal that we used to conduct heat to the water inside the endcap was not aluminium. Duh, it was galvanised steel. Which is around 4 times worse at conducting heat than aluminium.

Bugger. Ok, well we went out and stole some copper from Froodogs' dad's work, and the second system is on the cards. But before then, I decided to have a play with air cooling.

With a trusty 80 mil fan from Dick Smith in hand, I set to my retail heatsink/fan unit and jimmied the fan off. I zip tied the fan on, using... zip ties... and turned it on. Its fine, at default voltage, at 500. So, whether or not the next watercooling setup goes on this CPU is in question. But I'm getting very sick the whine of fan blades spinning. So, stay tuned, and we'll keep you posted on the Kool Frenzy Water cooling system of Death. The galvanised steel may have stood in our way, but not for long! Kool Frenzy II : Down 'n' Dirty 'n' Drum 'n' Bass is on the drawing boards tight now!

Vindaloo and Froodogs, sometime in 2001.