Dreamcast Liquid Cooling System

[alec006]

Ive been reading on the net that the Dreamcast ha a liquid cooling system. Receiving my dreamcast i opened it up and saw nothing but a fan. Im just wondering if this will prolong the life of my system and if theres any difference between the liqid cooled one and the one with just a fan.

[Vectorman0]

There are no liquid cooled dreamcasts. I even highly doubt someone would even bother modding a dreamcast with such a device either. There isn't much space, and to my knowledge, it wouldn't help with anything.

[SuperShark]

Maybe you heard this myth somehow from someone that... hell Ill make this faster..., trace everything down and maybe whoever was the first one on this list that started this myth saw this video.

http://loadingreadyrun.com/showmovie.php?x=480&y=360&url=launch.mp4

If anybody saw the leet (or 1337) rap by these guys, someone linked to it recently in the video gaming forumn, these are the same guys.

This is a very funny video, so watch it anyway, even if you know that this one myth about the DC is complete bogus! Very funny vid!

[Lost Monkey]

Maybe you heard this myth somehow from someone that... hell Ill make this faster..., trace everything down and maybe whoever was the first one on this list that started this myth saw this video.


The myth was started long before the DC even launched... Since no-one has bothered to say so, the original DC's used a heat pipe cooling system, and it has been mistaken for a liquid cooling system for many years - there were even rumours of liquid leaking out of the pipes and into systems and shorting them out... :roll:

[Avatard]

Yea, I doublt it even gets hot enough to warrant liquid cooling. That would increase the space it takes up by about 5 times for all the fittings, resivoir, and radiator.

[InsaneDavid]

Here's a picture of the additional air cooling on a kiosk Dreamcast I reburbished for a friend...

http://www.startoursinfo.com/junk/kioskDCinside04.jpg

As you can see there is a radiator built around the fan prop that has piping running from it that leads to large heatsinks over the CPU and GPU.

[PDP-13]

Yep, Liquid cooling. :)

By that I mean a closed loop phase change system, with a liquid in those aluminium pipes going to the other heatsink.

Very unusual for a video game system, these are usually only seen on high end PC's northbridges or HTPCs.

[burnt toast]

its not liquid cooling, they are called heat pipes because they have extraordinary conductance.

http://www.cheresources.com/htpipes.shtml

there is a liquid in them but it is a very small amount, the only reason it would leak was if the heat pipe as broken. if you have a look on a fancy graphics card or something you might find one joining up a couple of a peltiers.

we're building a heater for an atomic force microscope in my final year physics project and were looking at using a peltier and a heat pipe to get the heat out as we only have a 6 mm cylinder with a 1.2mm diameter to dissapate about 90 degrees.