Wako: Cooling a gaming computer with a petrol pump: a bad idea?

In water-cooled computers, Laing D5 or DDC type pumps are usually installed, which can be powered internally via the PC. If extreme pressures and powerful pumps are necessary, there are models like Eheim’s 1262, which actually require 230V with its main plug and are intended for aquarium use. But even those pumps were too weak or too normal for Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips on his latest water-cooling project.

typical petrol pump

Source: Gude

In a current video on his channel, he and his colleague Alex Clark install a gasoline-powered pump with a maximum power of 2.5 hp, which is approximately 1.84 kW. Compared to the Eheim 1262 pump mentioned above, it’s 80 watts, while a typical D5 pump is around 12-25 watts. A gasoline powered pump is of course not designed for PC water cooling, so several adapters must be used before hoses are ever connected to it.

First they test the pump on a faulty computer and learn about high performance issues that cause many leaks in the computer. In order to test the real performance of the cooling solution, a computer was finally used with the Ryzen 9 5950X and Geforce RTX 3090. Thanks to a switching mod, this is capable of sucking 800 watts and was tested in 3D Mark Time Spy Extreme. With a maximum power consumption of 760W, the card achieved a respectable graphics score of 11,600 points at a maximum temperature of 44 degrees Celsius. Fortunately, although there was a leak in the coolant circuit and the existing D5 pump was likely destroyed by experience, the PC appears to have survived without further damage at the end of the video.

source: Linus Techtypes