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Radiator?

Watercooled Pi
Aug 12, 2015
2 min read

When I began planning this water cooling project, I had a tough decision:

Do I need a radiator?

Now, the water cooling and overclocking gurus among you would have answered with a resounding "YES!", however I'm sure the very same water cooling and overclocking gurus would have told me that my little pump is not nearly powerful enough to push water through a radiator. And I agree.

Nevertheless, I’ve done my research, and I know that my pump has a maximum head of 1.9m and a flow rate of 1.06GPM (or 4 litres per minute). This isn’t actually too far off the low to mid-range water cooling pumps that you can buy today. I decided that my current pump should easily be able to push water through 20cm of tubing and a single radiator.

With that in mind, I started looking for the smallest radiator on the internet, to reduce both price and the pressure required to force the water through it. I spent the best part of an hour navigating through radiator-related websites that looked like they hadn’t been updated since the early 2000s, when it was still cool to have a lime green website background. Eventually, I found this on eBay*. It even comes with a fan, and it’s cheaper than I could have hoped for, so it won’t become an expensive lump of metal if I find out that the pump can’t actually produce enough pressure to use it.

A last though - Will a radiator add to the cooling efficiency? Probably not much, the Raspberry Pi has a very low heat output. At least, it will until I overclock it to the extreme.

*If the eBay page isn't available, don't worry! I've archived it on the WayBackMachine. Click here to see the archived version, or simply search "80mm radiator" on eBay.