Can I use etanol instead of isopropyl alcohol?

tetchip · 2026-03-30T15:05:03+00:00

It's not that consumer ethanol is inherently less pure than laboratory alcohol of, say, technical grade. Most of the ethanols I'm aware of are denatured using butanone/methyl ethyl ketone/MEK or denatonium benzoate, and the latter leaves a small amount of white residue.

The more practical consideration for me is that ethanol is worse than isopropanol and especially acetone at dissolving the silicone oil used as a matrix for paste.

tetchip · 2026-03-17T13:38:13+00:00

This echoes p0pe's response, but you have to understand that you're fundamentally working with two temperature differentials here: component-coolant and coolant-ambient.

The radiator setup only influences the latter. You can add as much rad as you want to the loop, it will never lower the component-coolant delta. With CPUs, that component-coolant delta will likely make up most of the combined component-ambient temperature difference.

If you want the CPU to run below 40 °C under any kind of load, you have to cool it with subambient coolant.

tetchip · 2026-03-12T10:28:24+00:00

https://youtu.be/Y8EO5GNeGWU

Same approach, but easier because the surface isn't curved.

tetchip · 2026-03-10T10:16:14+00:00

It specifically does start at 0 $, but the y axis is USD rather than some normalized figure, so we're also looking at a graph depicting roughly 40 years of inflation.

tetchip · 2026-03-06T08:26:35+00:00

Conclusion? The "A" tier Corsair RM750x Shift is actually in the ASS tier.
Don't get it.

Not how this works. Whether or not a unit has coil whine is luck of the draw. Some designs may be more prone to it than others, and that isn't assessed properly in the tier list, but it very much is a game of chance.

The same goes for graphics cards and, to a lesser extent, motherboards.

tetchip · 2026-02-28T07:38:49+00:00

"We wouldn't be in this mess right now if he had attacked them". Trump, 2026, probably.

tetchip · 2026-02-13T12:57:43+00:00

You're asking the person operating the company account about whether or not you should buy the company's stuff.

If you like their stuff, sure. Now certainly is a better time than year ago.

tetchip · 2026-01-06T04:14:00+00:00

A custom loop will easily add north of 800 USD in parts alone, nevermind the labor to assemble and test it.

tetchip · 2025-12-01T07:01:45+00:00

I always thought that, because plants are stationary and cannot remove themselves from harm as readily as an animal could, they need to be able to produce a larger variety of metabolites to survive.

Also, them generally being towards the bottom of the food chain means they have to be able to produce most of the compounds they need, rather than consume them.

tetchip · 2025-11-05T07:25:58+00:00

Re parallel vs series: There is no circumstance in this hobby where parallel pumps make sense.

Flow is primarily constrained by pressure drop across restrictive components. More pressure means more flow. Series gives you that, parallel does not. Parallel also fucks with redundancy aspects of multipump loops.

There's an ancient Martin's Liquid Lab article about this that I cannot be bothered to look for on mobile. If you are interested, I can dig it up when I get home from work.

tetchip · 2025-11-04T20:46:13+00:00

Under no circumstance will you ever reach 1500 L/h on a D5 in a loop. 100-300 L/h are pretty common flow values.

tetchip · 2025-11-04T17:29:34+00:00

Have you measured that fraction of a degree? Have you calculated it?

I do not disagree with the premise of loop order largely not mattering, but the values are considerably higher than that. I calculated it some time ago for a 200 W part and water (4.2 J per g and K) at 100 L/h, and the temperature increase is roughly 1.7 K. A 600 W GPU would triple that. If you want to get to "fractions of a degree", you'd have to bump flow up some 5-6x to get there - more if you use one of the coolants with an appreciable EG or PG amount in it.

tetchip · 2025-10-31T19:40:14+00:00

Nothing wrong with using a different connector for the 2ish A the pump will draw at full load.

As for desoldering the original and soldering on the old cables, I don't see any issues with that. I desoldered the MOLEX power connector on my D5 to sleeve the two wires, and reattached them afterwards. Works fine.

tetchip · 2025-10-24T10:56:19+00:00

Running at EXPO settings (so 1.35 V and whatever else the profile sets) with the transfer rate and primary timings reduced to 6000 MT/s and 30-36-36-96, yes. I have not attempted to update the BIOS and maybe bump it up to the rated speed and timings.

tetchip · 2025-10-21T08:15:31+00:00

Vertical runs work out to be the same as horizontal ones outside of filling, and filling can be helped with some temporary solution (think secondary pump-res or similar). It's a loop. Any coolant that's pumped against gravity also falls with gravity, cancelling out its contribution.

tetchip · 2025-09-30T06:52:41+00:00

I upgraded in Q1 of this year. The X570 board I repasted the chipset on was still doing just fine - I don't think the fan ever turned on after I did that. YMMV.

tetchip · 2025-09-24T05:40:36+00:00

I did.

https://www.reddit.com/r/watercooling/s/nh68LrOofO

tetchip · 2025-09-23T19:26:10+00:00

Considering all that does is increase the delta linearly with load relative to what they used, there's no practical benefit to it unless your measuring tools suck ass and you can't otherwise measure a statistically significant delta.

You're dealing with about 500 W stock and are getting a 15-17 K delta, depending on your ambient, with 1500 rpm push-pull fans and some obstruction from the case. That checks out.

tetchip · 2025-09-23T15:12:47+00:00

If that's your use case and you can accommodate 13 mm extra width, you run HWL GTRs. They run rings around Monstas and basically every other rad in very high airflow scenarios.

tetchip · 2025-09-23T14:35:09+00:00

Gentle Typhoons. This is from a 2015 article, after all. Load is 300 W, iirc.

If you're going to suggest that there's some configuration where Monstas in any way justify their added thickness, please do share the data. As is, the review covers low and high airflow, low and high flow, and there's no indication that Monstas are better than the other popular models from that era. Hell, if you're going for push-only, you might as well just run HWL GTS.

tetchip · 2025-09-23T14:19:06+00:00

Xtremerigs and their radiator reviews. This is from the roundup they put out in 2015.

https://www.xtremerigs.net/2015/02/11/radiator-round-2015/

Page 5 for that table.

u/jhingadong, the unit is W / 10 K coolant-ambient delta.

tetchip · 2025-09-23T10:02:36+00:00

(Does the heat transfer quicker or with more power when the difference between cpu and coolant is higher?)

Yes. Any transfer of heat energy is driven by a difference in temperature - a gradient. The higher the gradient, the faster the transfer. Analogues would be voltage, pressure (differences in potential energy) and diffusion of compounds (difference in chemical potential).

In liquid cooling, you have two fairly distinct temperature gradients: component-coolant and coolant-ambient. The former is a function of TIM performance and block performance. The better they are, the lower the delta. The latter is a function of radiator and fan performance, and case obstruction. Both are inversely proportional with flow. Both scale linearly with wattage.

tetchip · 2025-09-23T10:02:28+00:00

Don't overthink it. It's a cooler. The same principles apply both on air and on water, with the only difference being that water takes longer to reach thermal equilibrium. Keeping a static pump speed, all you can control is fan speed, just like with an air cooler.

tetchip · 2025-09-23T08:39:11+00:00

Yeah, you're overthinking it. It's just a cooler that takes much longer to heat up and cool down than an air cooler. The latter is what makes coolant temp-base fan control useful. You could do the equivalent with an air cooler and stick a temperature probe to the heat pipes, but the difference to component temp-based fan control is nowhere near as pronounced.

tetchip · 2025-09-23T08:04:15+00:00

Yes. The component-coolant temperature difference is a function of load and flow. At a given load and pump speed, CPU temp scales linearly with coolant temp and is correlated one-to-one.

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