The oldest water cooled system I've seen online (too long ago to remember where) was a 486. Can't remember any details, but I think prior to Socket A all loops used custom blocks. None of the professional quality stuff we see these days 😀

debs3759 wrote on 2024-04-19, 20:50:

The oldest water cooled system I've seen online (too long ago to remember where) was a 486. Can't remember any details, but I think prior to Socket A all loops used custom blocks. None of the professional quality stuff we see these days 😀

unless you are planning on doing some record breaking OC, is there any other benefit to watercooling a 486 aside from general temperature control?

I would imagine that some 5x86 might benefit from WC to overclock to 200. Never really thought about it though, I just remember reading some article.

It was an idea that got tossed around when "shooting the shit" in overclocking circles for several years in the 1990s, there wasn't really a necessity for it until we were forcing CPU into the 30W plus regions. The initial more serious experimentation with it came in late 98 or 99ish with attempts to get mendocino celerons to break through the 650-700mhz region, and were replicated by some in the Athlon camp to get to 1Ghz before Intel or AMD officially did.

There is a bit of a memory hole for the two years where amateur watercooling was making it's biggest strides, due to incomplete web archival from archive.org until later noughts, and forums being on server side perl scripts and custom software rather than the now ubiquitous vbulletin and simple machines forum software etc. Also for "web 2.0" a lot of sites basically had all their old stuff wiped offline and started fresh.

There are still some articles on overclockers.com from the end of the amateur era, then there was a bunch of custom parts available commercially from small startups, and it was still pretty much roll your own with combinations of those, then the larger cooling names began introducing products, and then we were into the complete systems and then on to sealed AIWs.

Anyway, if you want a "toy" watercooling setup for 1.5Ghz and lower, put one on you K6-III, there's a surplus place got a bunch of "Silent Stream" kits cheap that weren't well reviewed for high performance use (2Ghz plus) in the day... https://www.a1parts.com/surplus/index.html

I bought a water-cooling kit for an Athlon XP system.

In reality it was a really crappy water block with two push on barbed tails, some tiny diameter silicone hosing, a 'radiator' barely big enough for an 80mm fan to fit on it and a tiny fishtank pump.

It was genuine crap, but at the time I thought it was ace, even though I was constantly topping it up because the water would evaporate... From somewhere!

Finally I then got the bright idea to run the pump from a bucket full of water so that it wouldn't heat soak so quickly.... Yes, it was so crap that it could not cope with the single XP processor.

Pumps were a huge problem in the early days, it was as bad as; reliable/high-flow/affordable ... pick ONE out of three.... though also nobody really really knew what all we needed and were still establishing parameters as it were, then there was a line of pond pumps that proved quite favorable for a while, then there were commercial solutions.

If I had a milling machine, I'd be so tempted to do an utterly ridiculous water cooling setup, like on a 286 or something nonsensical like that.

If you've got printed circuit board etching fluids, you can just cut a block of copper to size and eyedropper etchants and rinse in a bit of a pattern, then use a plate with drilled and tapped holes for fittings on top. ... you can probably do it electrolytically as well, mask off the bits you don't want eaten and give it current until it's deep enough... nothing with too fine a wall though.

However, for all the cooling a 286 or 386 needs, then just hardware store brass fittings with flat sides are probably adequate as the whole "block"

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-04-19, 22:53:

If I had a milling machine, I'd be so tempted to do an utterly ridiculous water cooling setup, like on a 286 or something nonsensical like that.

i hope someone tries to overclock the crap out of a 286 with some insane cooling solution like that someday

One of the reasons that watercooling didn't really get going until we were in the 100s of megahertz is it's not really the CPU cooling holding you up. Pshipkov has some peltier experiments with DX5 5x86 buried in his 3+3 Battlestations thread though if you wanna know what that gets you, assuming chilled water would do about the same.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-04-19, 23:20:

One of the reasons that watercooling didn't really get going until we were in the 100s of megahertz is it's not really the CPU cooling holding you up. Pshipkov has some peltier experiments with DX5 5x86 buried in his 3+3 Battlestations thread though if you wanna know what that gets you, assuming chilled water would do about the same.

i will have to check that out. is it possible to overclock components other than the CPU or GPU such as a network adapter, sound card, chipset ect? ive heard of monitor overclocking for sure and i think i read something awhile back about people water cooling their monitors. id love to see a watercooled ethernet adapter or soundcard for shits and giggles one day. water cooled powersupply even? that might end in disaster...

Well, somewhen in spring 2002 I have been on a big LAN-party (BYOC - bring your own computer) in Locomotive hall, Göttingen, Germany, with over 2000 participants. Göttingen is likely in the center of Germany.
It started Friday late afternoon and should end somewhen on Sunday.
There have been servers from the staff and for some games non-staff gameservers in the service area.
Somehow one of the non-staff servers has had a water cooling system.

https://goest.de/LAN.htm (in German, with pictures)

I once saw a stock Intel 115x cooler that had a copper tube going through it and fittings on the ends.

Also, not liquid cooled but made me laugh:

Lylat1an wrote on 2024-04-20, 03:24:

I once saw a stock Intel 115x cooler that had a copper tube going through it and fittings on the ends.

Yah one of my "shitty waterblocks" from around turn of millennium was a broad finned sink that I hammered down malleable 1/4 inch copper pipe down into, making it conform to bottom and sides. Another one was one of those early screw down into base pentium sinks, with short fins, encapsulated into a slice of PVC pipe. Testing on K6-2 with windshield washer pump and automotive heater cores was a bit inconclusive because temperature measurement was not integrated in boards I was using or CPU, and it was a case again of it not really being cooling limiting the overclock, so they didn't really gain anything.... plus the pump whine was worse than any decent HSF so no noise benefits.

There was a Core2 Duo system on eBay the other day with water cooling, it appeared to have been built like that by some OEM.

Not sure I’d trust it not to leak after 20 odd years.

I've read an article in the early 2000's about someone making a water cooling system with a car radiator. The pump was also something never meant for water cooling a computer. I think it was something intended for garden ponds. I don't know for which platform.

The X800 XT I got a couple of years ago came with an aftermarket water block which I found funny since it has about the same TDP as a GT730 which is often cooled passively. And fair enough given the size of the water block, it could keep the X800 below 50°C temperatures idle for over an hour. Without water.

Slightly OT here but I still have a G5 PowerMac and the liquid cooling systems on those are notoriously bad for destroying a lot of computers. This has given me a healthy fear of liquid cooling to this day 😜

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-04-19, 23:15:

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-04-19, 22:53:

If I had a milling machine, I'd be so tempted to do an utterly ridiculous water cooling setup, like on a 286 or something nonsensical like that.

i hope someone tries to overclock the crap out of a 286 with some insane cooling solution like that someday

The problem with over locking 286 (and 386 for that matter) is the lack of on chip cache.

The speed of the 286 and 386 systems are heavily tied in to the speed of their memory bus too, which means that you also have to over clock the hell out of the supporting chipset. You don't get a significant speed up from a faster CPU itself since you can't feed it instructions any faster than you could at stock speeds.

As soon as you are able to decouple the CPU from directly talking to memory (even with a tiny amount of cache like with the most basic 486 designs) then your speed increase is no longer tied to that of the memory bus. Just look at the spread of clockspeeds from earliest to latest designs with the 286 (6? 8? to 25) and 386 (16 to 40) compared to the 486 (16 to 133 and higher).

Granted some of that came from process improvement allowing the higher frequency, but by decoupling the memory from directly interfacing at clock speed, and integrating on chip cache, the 486 was able to benefit from much higher clock speeds than it would have if it was talking directly to memory directly (not that anyone had the technology to make 133mhz memory or data bus interfaces at that time anyway!!!!).

I'd love an absolute screamer of a 286 as much as anyone else who owned one at the time (somewhere between 25 and 30mhz is the stability limit on the best boards I have found)... But realistically none of the supporting memory controllers (or memory itself) will go much higher than that... so it's really a hard wall you run into.

If someone designed a 286 system from scratch, with an off chip cache (putting aside the fact the 286 design has no cache control built in, so it would probably be best making the memory controller transparently do the caching for you) then you could start to look at much higher speeds.

An FPGA design may be the way to go here.