Building my grow light almost there.....
- Thread starter cajunjay
- Start date
Mellodrama
Well-Known Member
Although it's a hassle, and you'll use more power, and you'll have more wires dangling all over the place, you can get by with CPU heatsinks. If you can get them for free, and you don't mind more fans and some way to power the fans, it's a way to get started. I'd love to go passive, but damn it's expensive to buy a big enough chunk of aluminum so I'm slummin' it with PC parts for now.
Microsoft is ending all support for XP in a few weeks. That should result in a surge of old XP PC's going to the recyclers. Somebody in the right place could find himself with wheelbarrows of CPU heatsinks.
We were discussing heatsink sizing in Supra's "DIY - How to Power" stickie just yesterday so you might want to check there.
There was a fair amount of discussion about heatsinks in Gaius' Battlerstar thread too.
EDIT: I kind of agree with tip top (below). I'm using CPU sinks because I had some laying around. If I was starting from scratch I probably woulda spent the extra money for real heatsinks like Supra did.
I'm cooling some 3070's, which are the exact same size as the 3050's. 27.35mm on a side. They're roughly the same size as your bigger Pentium chips, so as long as you've got good thermal conductivity and they're beefy heatsinks (not some scrawny sinks out of a Pentium II), they'll work.
Microsoft is ending all support for XP in a few weeks. That should result in a surge of old XP PC's going to the recyclers. Somebody in the right place could find himself with wheelbarrows of CPU heatsinks.
We were discussing heatsink sizing in Supra's "DIY - How to Power" stickie just yesterday so you might want to check there.
There was a fair amount of discussion about heatsinks in Gaius' Battlerstar thread too.
EDIT: I kind of agree with tip top (below). I'm using CPU sinks because I had some laying around. If I was starting from scratch I probably woulda spent the extra money for real heatsinks like Supra did.
I'm cooling some 3070's, which are the exact same size as the 3050's. 27.35mm on a side. They're roughly the same size as your bigger Pentium chips, so as long as you've got good thermal conductivity and they're beefy heatsinks (not some scrawny sinks out of a Pentium II), they'll work.
tip top toker
Well-Known Member
They can be had for peanuts because they're useless at actually coping with any form of serious heat. It's only due to the recent efficiency of cpu's that these coolers don't just go straight in the bin.
Work out what kind of thermal requirements you have an then search for heatsinks. PC heatsinks might also not be the best option as they are designed around cooling a very small footprint, although granted, i don't know the dimensions of the surface you want to be extracting heat from.
watercool that puppy
would be pretty straight forward to do with the right tool set 
Maybe just a little impractical concerning cost