CPU Liquid Cooling Systems as DSLR coolers

[glend (Glen)]

I have been looking into options for cooling my DSLR cold finger setup - other than cooler boxes/TECs, fans units and heat sinks attached to the camera. One option that looks feasible is to relocate all the heat exhange activity by using a PC CPU liquid cooler to cool the cold finger via an off camera heat sink/fan/TEC unit. All you would have on the camera would be the CPU puck unit attached to the end of the cold finger, and its two tubes that carry the coolant to the heat exchanger unit (which could be a ground box, pier mount, or hang in the middle of the tripod). Traditionally these CPU coolers use water and are restricted to ambient temps but there are a number of people now replacing the water coolant with glycol (coolant) and incorporating a TEC to drive CPU temps down to 0C. Most of these CPU cooling units seem to operate on 12V.

Here is an example of one of the many CPU cooler units available on the market that could be used:

http://www.corsair.com/en-au/hydro-s...uid-cpu-cooler

Here is a good link that explains how it goes together (keep in mind this guy was building a system for a rack based computer so small footprint was not a consideration but the concepts are the same).

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/28...-water-cooling

[ZeroID (Brent)]

I have heard of a water\glycol system being made and used by an amateur but can't remember where I saw it. If I remember rightly though it was to cool the output from a TEC unit. No fan vibration was one reason for the design. Leakage from poor plumbing was the biggest bugbear and having a bucket of liquid sloshing around with piping hanging about was not good practice.

[killswitch (Edison)]

On some gaming rigs ive seen they sandwich the TEC between the CPU and the watercooler block. You wouldnt need to worry about the coolant freezing.

[glend (Glen)]

These are contained closed systems there is no bucket or containers to spill, it's like your car cooling system. It allows a no vibration solution as the fan is off the camera. The gamers lead the way on chip cooling, foolish not to notice how they do it.

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

A good quality fan won't be a problem on the camera.

[multiweb (Marc)]

I've had one of the corsair units on my i7 for quite a few years now. It gets the CPU temp to around 40c under load. Used to go over 70c with a stress test. So it made a big difference. That said, It's quite bulky and I have the radiator part sandwiched in between two fans (pull/push). Coolant is just the standard stuff that came with the unit. I don't know how it could be cooling your camera. It will dissipate heat better but won't really cool below ambient. PS: regarding vibrations, the hoses are semi-solid (articulated skin like a desk lamp) so they will transmit vibration from the fans.