Sunday, May 6, 2012

Mayhem's X1 Water-Cooling Coolants


Mayhem’s X1 Cooling Fluids. The science behind it.
By Device Unknown On 26 Mar, 2012 At 11:09 PM | Categorized As NewsReviews | With 0 Comments
If you are the type of enthusiast that needs to know EVERYTHING about their systems. This is the article for you. We are going to take a look behind the famous X1 fluid created by our friends at Mayhems.
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Mayhem’s like to say that they are “rapidly becoming the worlds leader in water cooling” but I beg to differ. They are already there. And I am here to show you why.
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We started off with a rather unassuming 250 ml bottle of Mayhems X1 UV Blue Concentrate and added it to a brand new loop of other components in which we are testing at the same time.
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What we have here is a I7-920,  motherboard, 12 Gigs of ram, and a video card. All water cooled including the mosfet and south bridge.
We’re using DangerDen’s new M6- Brass CPU Cooler and the ever loving DD-RAD res and DD South bridge block. For the Mosfet we are using EKWB blocks. The video card is a custom block by .. well, me. Also using EKWB pump and Phobya’s 200mm Radiator and Fans (love this radiator btw)
So before we get into performance temps etc. Lets get to the science behind the coolant. And believe me, it IS a science.
When selecting a coolant, not any old coolant will do. You MUST consider the compatibility of the fluid with the components in your system. Something else to think about is viscosity, freezing point, Thermal Conductivity.
Lee Garbutt over at overclockers.com wrote a very well detailed Chemistry analysis of Fluids and materials, so for the sake of my sanity I won’t reiterate. If you are serious about water cooling, be sure to read up on that.
Suffice to say when considering fluids, you must select based on the components in your loops. Most will tell you to just throw a good amount of Biocides, scale inhibitors and corrosion inhibitors into the loop. That’s a bad idea, here’s why;
As you know warm water is a perfect incubator for bacteria such as Legionella but, biocides by nature are very corrosive to metal surfaces. The heat generated also provide nucleation sites for salts to become Scale.
So we have to have the perfect balance of biocides, corrosion and scale inhibitors. But they are competitors in reactions. Plus the more you add the less effective the coolant becomes.
Now, there are ways to provide coolant without additives, such technologies as Electromagnets, Ozone and Ultrasound treatments, but it still wont be perfect due to the inherent design of water cooling systems. We will still have a mixture of metals and we will still have contaminated procedures of installation.
Manufacturers such as Mayhems have spent countless hours finding the perfect balance. If you haven’t figured out by now, it’s no easy task.
We have been able to determine the effectiveness of coolants only through trial and error and up to years of testing. Mayhems has been transparent in their testing procedures since they started. Which as an end user, makes me comfortable as I am able to verify the processes as they go. And there is a lot to say about a company that is as transparent and engaged with us normal folks as they are.
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We snapped a few shots while filling it, nothing special here lets move on…
We decided to do a few tests to push this to the limit. First off I drained just a little bit from the loop and boiled it.
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Besides setting off every smoke alarm in my house it did what I had hoped it would do. that is NOT dry back into a powder. It’s not really some sort of fancy scientific test. It was just a small representation of what the liquid would do once it got hot and natural dissipation occurred over time and start to break down. With performance blocks as we discussed earlier with XSPC’s Raystorm block the best performing blocks have very small fin tolerances and if dyes in liquids such as this were to dry up over time and turn back into their original powder form they would likely cause blockage. Luckily, this is not something we needed to worry about with Mayhem’s X1.
We did run a series of temperature tests and compared them to distilled water, the differences were within a margin of error. About 5C plus or minus. However, the benefits of this solution is the simplicity of the products and how much effort it saved the end user in selecting a coolant for their loop. It’s easy to get confused. When you have so much to consider when working with fluids such as balance, scale, biocides, dyes etc. Mayhems products take the guesswork out. It’s very nice to know that we can simply pick a color and throw it in our loop and sleep well at night knowing it will last longer while keeping it’s cooling properties without long term damage to our loops. Personally, that’s the cats meow. I hate worrying about if I have the right chemicals in my loop to ensure it runs correctly for me for at least a year.
I have not personally tested every coolant on the market, but I have many. It’s my opinion that Mayhems X1 line is simply the easiest, worry free coolant that performs exceptionally.
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Monday, April 30, 2012

First Fully Mac & PC Supported Bootable PCIe SSD!


Has anyone ever heard of OWC, or better yet has anyone every used a OWC SSD?


Well this may change your mind....Other World Computing (aka OWC) has been around for 

almost 25yrs and are a US based company in Woodstock, Illinois

They are mainly known within the Mac circles as one of the leading online Mac retailers.


BUT......




Mac retailer or not....if they have a great product that will work in a PC, then I am excited. Last 

year they came out with the OCW Mercury Extreme 6G which rivaled OCZ Vertex 3 and Patriots

Wildfire SSD's. But had a lower price tag and a better warranty.


OWC's SSD's normally come with a industry leading 5year warranty! (7yrs on the Enterprise 

series) and to top that, they offer a no hassle, no question 30 day money back guarantee.....

We will have to wait to see what the warranty will be on this baby.


Read the short article below

Tuesday, April 17, 2012


OCTAGLOW

This is a scratch build that I am presently working on. I am new to Sketchup, so I am learning as I go...LOL
There is much more to do, but this is a start. Many more rendering to come.

This will be built completely from 6061 Aluminum with some blue acrylic. and blue LEDs.
It measures 30"X24"X11"....It's going to be a monster.

The plan is to have 2X 360 rads on the top, laying side by side and 2X 420 rads at the bottom. Everything will be watercooled.... along with 8X 200mm fans (yes 8X 200mm fans) and 12X 140 mm fans...of course they will all be on fan controllers to control the noise.

Stay tuned for more updates