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For The Overclocking Junkie
wilderf writes: "Check out this site. A group of crazy overclockers decided to fully submerge a motherboard in a liquid nitrogen cooled fluorinert? bath (Fluorinert? is an electronic testing fluid manufactured by 3M? -- $500/gallon), to see how much they could overclock the CPU. Crazy." The site is pretty impressive too, if you're the sort of sadist who loves torturing hardware.
"Dude, this is seriously f*bleep*ed up right here...."
Why is it that alcohol is always involved in such insane experiments??? I mean, Mary Shelly never said that Dr. Frankenstein was blitzed when we was working on the monster... Got to be a techie thing.
I remember some Japanese (or was it Korean) guy doing this, except he didn't immerse the whole board - he ended up building a "wall" around the CPU, then filling that with liquid N2 - he got some impressive figures, IIRC - for the CPU he was using (PPro? Can't remember) - however, the N2 boiled off rather rapidly... Maybe someone has a link...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The Flourinert is returning directly onto the CPU, so the CPU should be the coldest part. At 115 fsb, you'll have a lot of components getting toasty that need cooling off too.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
Why didn't he just try to pour the liquid N2 over the motherboard? It would have been alot cheaper, and more efficient. N2 can be purchased for around $2 a gallon at some welding/gas supply stores. They'll even rent you a special container for transporting it.
The only reason I can see for using flourinert is if he was cooling it with a vapor phase system (classic compressor/refridgerant setup), or with something like a peltier. Since the Liquid Nitrogen is already liquid, why not just submerse the components in that? The lower limit on vapor phase is around -45C with R-22 or R-12, but by using other refridgerants, you can get even colder (-85C or below). You can also whack a peltier cooler on the surface of the cpu to get another -20C or so below what the vapor phase will cool it to. If designed right, you'll be able to get below -100C. The performace limit of CMOS chips doubles at -100C. So if you're getting 550Mhz outta that 366 celeron at room temp, theoretically, you should be able to get over 1Ghz at -100C, given that the rest of your components will work when you have some crazy bus speed.
One of these days, I'll get off my ass and have my http://www.peltiercoolers.com site up, and we'll have a ton of information available, plus peltiers, refridgerants, heatsinks, compounds, coldplates, and other fun stuff to fry your CPU with.
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Actually, yes they are in direct contact with the liquid. And no they won't explode either. While doing some low temperature physics experiments, I've poured liquid nitrogen into a glass dewar without it exploding. For that matter I've poured liquid helium into a glass dewar without it exploding. Both of them were at about room temperature. The people working in labs do this on a regular basis so what I did wasn't unusual at all. On this point, you're just flat wrong. If you want I can show you lab manuals that tell people to do this. If the offer for guiness is legit, tell me and I'll give you an address that you can send the twelve pack to.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
This is very interesting, and a really cool project, but man, for what they spent on parts/coolant you could get a pretty sweet new mobo and chip. That's not the point, of course; this was more for entertainment and geek-one-upping :-)
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The brittleness would depend on how quickly you heated it up, and if you threw it on the floor right after you removed it.
/Over_simplification)
Today, people have found out that if you submerge an object in liquid nitrogen or liquid O2 then let it heat up to room temperature over the span of ~week that it actually increases the strength of the material, at least it works for metals. (Over_simplification)This occures due to the material aligning itself into a stronger crystal lattice, which will remain if the heating process is not so sudden as cause enough immediate energy to break the bonds. When the material finishes reaching room temp, if it was heated slowly enough, the stronger crystal lattice will remain, ergo making the object stronger.(
From what I have heard, disposable razors that have had this done to them will keep their edge for months.
I doubt that they waited a long enough time for that to happen. And of course, if they heated it up too quickly then the material would expand too quickly and it would shatter.
Hope that was helpful.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
There is an intriguing method of obtaining the same results, relatively speaking. The human operator is submerged in a clear liquid (say, water) while the PC remains above the surface. Due to the human movements being slowed down from viscosity, everything the PC does appears hundreds of times faster, thereby introduing a "relative constant of overclocking".
There are other subtle effects. The light slows down since it has to travel through liquid before hitting the retina. Finger movements slow down, as do mouse movements.
Water is also cheaper than liquid nitrogen, and easily available in swimming pools and oceans. Why not try this intriguing method today and see if it works for you? Oh, and you won't believe what it feels like when you're swimming underwater in Quake III. Very realistic.
w/m.
Fluorinert is really neat. It's used with computers because it doesn't conduct electricity, doesn't damage the components and (these days) isn't particularly toxic. There are rumors of bored operators drinking shots of it on dares.
;)
I think that Cray had 3m develop this stuff from scratch back in the day when they sold 9 out of 10 machines to the government.
They use basically the same stuff in medical situations (to keep your blood pressure up if no blood's on hand) and it can be oxygenated and breathed - as in The Abyss. What they didn't mention in the movie though was that it's so dense, you're not really going to be doing a hell of a lot while you breath it. Breathing it is hard work, it's so thick.
Unfortunately it runs about $500 a gallon. These guys blew a grand just on their Fluorinert. Stirring fans might help a little, but it does gel up a lot between IIRC -50 to -100 C. Perhaps they'll just immerse the whole board into liquid Helium next time
(Of course, I remember hearing about one guy once who cooled his system with some kind of motor oil)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
-p.
I bet they're just trying to get their Amigas running in the three-digit megahertz range...
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
This is cool, but wouldn't it short out the motherboard? Could somebody explain why this works?
Obligatory comment: I torture my hardware whenever I see the words 'Booting Windows NT' on the screen...
I wouldn't overclock my system, personally, because I wouldn't sacrifice the stability. I just went with a dual mobo instead of overclocking a single proc.
I realize this is a troll, but it brings up a topic I've heard a bit about.
It's likely illegal for the store to void the warranty on the computer if you open it, even if you agreed to it when purchasing it. Consumer protection laws usually prevent the warranty from being voided by self repairs on hardware that contains user-servicable parts. That's why a lot of hardware (air conditioners, VCRs, etc) are labelled as not containing any user-servicable parts.
So if they try to void the warranty because you opened the case, tell them you'll take it to a competitor to be fixed and bill them, and back the bill up with small claims court if they get fussy. It'll stick and you'll have made a stand against the assholes of the world.
(This has nothing to do with overclocking. Running a CPU past its rated speed, regardless of if it will do it, will void the warranty on the CPU and mobo, unless it's a mobo from an OC-friendly company like ASUS or ABit who serve the hardware hacker community.)
For the record, my new 600E is a happy 800EB with an Alpha PEP66T cooler. A $35 cooler, but one I can keep for years. A good investment versus spending $250 more for the faster CPU. And my ASUS P3V4X is an overclocker's dream.
Since they said that the Flourinert stuff ran about $1000NZ, I found that it would be about $469.018US ($1NZ = $469.018US ).
so, $1000NZ = $469.018US. okay. but $1NZ = $469.018US???? hence, $1NZ = $1000NZ??? i think i should avoid new zealand. they break the law of arithmetic. we only break the rules of grammar/splleing and such here in the us.
Yep. Or atleast something similiar. This Slashdot Article talks about the guy who used mineral oil. So the only way this article differs is they spent more money on their project.
It was only limited because they froze their coolant. With better equipment than what a few hackers can slap together in a few hours, direct liquid cooling might achieve the same result for long-term use.
That's really surprising since dewars are made of glass. It's also pretty common practice to use dewars to hold liquid helium(~4.2 kelvin = -294 C). Singal 11, you should go around and warn all the low temp physicists, NMR people, and a lot of other physical scientists since they all use glass dewars to hold low temperature liquids. At the very least, they'll get a good laugh out of it.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Running electronics immersed in Fluorinert is an old idea. The Cray 2 was cooled that way. This was more trouble than it was worth, and no later supercomputer used that approach. But Cray built one of the coolest looking computers of all time. The cabinet had windows and the liquid coolant was illuminated. Even the Cray 2 heat exchanger was beautiful.
What? I have been running overclocked machines for years now, and I never spend ANY additional money. I simply bought a GOOD fan the first time out (a good idea even if you DON'T overclock) and I use a good motherboard.
I ran a P-II 333 at 416 for over a year. Now I run a Celeron 366 at 450. The Celeron cost me LESS than the P-II. I use an Asus P2B motherboard and a SIIG fan.
The whole POINT to overclocking is to NOT spend extra money. Buy a chip in your price range, and oc it. If it doesn't run at a higher speed, fine, run it the rated speed.
Oh, and as for your comments about instability, if you are experiencing instability, you should reduce your clock speed. Not all chips overclock well. (Which is why I run my 366 at 450, and not 500)
(was I just trolled?)-CZ
At K5 you don't see noise like this. The signal/noise ratio is almost perfect...
From a code standpoint, it is much more stable than slashcode IMHO, and it has been open from the beginning. People are activly developing it.
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
The Cray-2 fully immersed all components in the nert, which flowed cold into the bottom of the tank and was taken hot out of the top. You could watch the bubbles flow upwards and it was extremely cool. It was fun to watch operators top off the nert reservoir occasionally by glugging a gallon into the inlet.
Later machines (Y-MP, C-90, T3D, T3E) ran the nert through channels in the modules, and some had air-cooled versions for smaller configurations. The "LC" or "AC" in a T3E machine designation refers to "liquid cooled" or "air cooled".
On the Cray-3, we ran the nert through a fuel-injector-like nozzle to spray it as a vapor on to the chips. A bunch of other schemes were tried.
Disclaimer: I'm a software guy, not a mechanical engineer.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
$1000 US (that would be about $1000 US)
Impurities in the fluorinert tend to collect at the point where the fluid boils. That tends to insulate the hot spot from the coolant, making it even hotter.
Thermal runaway.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The Cray 1 was freon cooled, Cray 2 was fluorinert, C90 was air (I think), XMP/YMP were air...
Then the T90s, introduced in ~1994, used a big ol' fluorinert tank. Highend, high density Cray boxen (T90) use this cooling, smaller machines (J90, SV1) are air cooled in temperature controlled environments, and some, like the T3E can be water cooled or air cooled, depending on the configuration.
Where do you come up with this crap? When you karam whore, you might as well try to get your facts right instead of fooling moderators into (+1 Informative) with garbage.
It is not enough for the Fluorinert to catch on fire or be next to a fire. What one does have to worry about is thermal decomposition; this will require extreme heat (according to the Material Safety Data Sheets, on the order of 1400 degrees). For comparison, a paper/wood fire burns at most about 700 degrees even with a significant fuel source and a CPU (the "Cray" that you allude to in your garbage anecdote) will not even be able to function with junction temperatures even close to a thousand degrees. You will not achieve thermal decomposition short of heating the Fluorinert on a laboratory burner or sticking molten metal into a beaker of the stuff. You must really misuse and torture the stuff to get anywhere near that point.
Moreover, what you really have to worry about is perfluoroisobutylene instead of hydrogen fluoride vapor. HF's thresehold long term tolerability is about 3ppm and it's LD50 is a lot higher than this. It will take more than 1 breath at any conceivably acheivable concentration to kill you. In any case, even a lethal dose will take more than 30 second to take effect upon intial contact or exposure (I've seen toxicity figures of about 10 minutes for exposure to hydrocyanic acid vapor, significantly more lethal than HF). Perfluoroisobutylene, on the other hand, will inhibit oxygen uptake by selectively binding with the -heme analogues in red blood cells much more efficiently.
Basic summary: Signal 11 is talking out of his ass again. You can mostly ignore his dramatics (but please consult your materials handling and safety staff if you plan to use Fluorinert) if you exercise reasonable prudence and care in using Fluorinert. "EXTREME CAUTION" is not neccesary, in the sense if one were handling certain organic mercury compounds or some other fluorine/chlorine compounds. Oh, and the oxygen masks: they're there so that any person unfortunate to be stuck in the machine room and who cannot reach the hold-off switch will not sufficate from oxygen displacement, not for poisoning (which would require a directed positive pressure system, instead of a mere supplementary oxygen mask).
What did they do for afters, build a potato powered webserver or overclock a 486 to 247mhz using a fridge full of alcohol (a la totl.net)? Am I the only one who doesn't quite believe this?
Seriously though, if these guy really pulled this off I'm impressed. They put in an huge amount of work and money for what, by todays standards, is a pretty slow processor, but the sheer lunacy of it all has to be enough to impress anyone...It really was quite an achievment.
Why develop switches and 1GHz Ethernet?
Why even bother having computers in the first place?
Okay, so maybe liquid nitro overclocking isn't very revolutionary, but it falls under the same umbrella that the above topics do. Curiousity + [moderate] intelligence + interesting subject. "What would happen if..." You know?
As far as "why overclocking" in general... well, I just bought a Celeron-II 566 for $80, put it on an Abit SlotKET !!! and a Golden Orb, flipped a switch and BINGO an (albiet crippled) 850MHz Coppermine for about $100, $110. That's more than 8MHz on the dollar. Compared to a Pentium III 700 (which has about the same performance) for $250 or $260 (again, including slotket and cooling fan). With the money I saved I bought a GeForce.
Morals... I'm a happy owner of an 8088, an 80486SX, and a Pentium MMX, so I have plenty to get Intel back for.
As an aside: The BX chipset overclocked to 133MHz FSB (it officially only supports 66 and 100) is still the top-performing platform out of the Apollo Pro 133A, the Intel i815, and the Intel i840 w/ Rambus. Overclocking helps here, too.
Nerds buy the newest components so they have a fast machine. If they can have a fast machine on the cheap, so much the better. If they have some extra cash to spend and they want the fastest machine in the world, they buy flourinert and LN2. What can I say? It's cool.
Alakaboo
Had they followed the link on their own site they would have found a handy little list of all of the boiling / gelling points of Flourinert. It's 3 links from thier own site. It turns out they make one flavor (FC-87) that goes down to -101 deg C. That should be more than cold enough . . . stick with dry ice and your temp shouldn't go below -90 dec C, if I recall. And why not use a CPU that could go even higher, if you're going to thow a grand $ into heat transfer fluid. We all know you can O/C to ~500 mhz, I wanna see 1000+!
--
Cherish. Live. Dream.
I've addressed your issue about thermal decomposition toxicity in another comment. Fluorinert has a rather low viscosity, but this does not affect its volitility, vapor pressure, or molecular weight (which are what determine the tendency of the vapor to diffuse out of confined spaces). For your information, since you seem to be so concerned, here are the relavent figures (looked up in a MSDS three rooms down):
Boiling point: 215 C
VP: 42 mmHg @ 20 C
Vapor density: 14x air Evaporation rate: 1.7 (Butyl acetate=1)
Viscosity: 14 centistroke @ 20 C
CAN THIS BE ACHIEVED???
Of course it can be achieved, it says in the title that you made the bloody thing!!
Sensationalists. I'm surprised their site is faring as well as it is, I guess not too many /.ers are checking it out.
Wah!
BTW I think mineral spirits will do a very similiar job, and alot cheaper then flourinet.
Correction: insert a decimal point in 42 mmHg (it should be 4.2 mmHg).
The liquid nitrogen was clearly a bad idea, being colder than the gel point of Florinert, but the basic idea is sound. A small refrigeration unit cooling a small amount of Florinert to the temperature that worked best for them might be practical for normal use.
You don't need to cool the whole motherboard. If you can just get the main chip, the memory, and the video accelerator chips (and the other chips you need to make them talk to each other) into a tiny sealed case of the stuff, this could be in every high-performance home-computer.
Hell, they doubled the rated clock-speed with a decent liquid cooling system for about a thousand bucks. A mass-produced, much smaller, equivalent system could probably be as reliable as a CPU fan for under a hundred dollars, and make 900 MHz systems run at 1.5 GHz.
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Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
Nothing like a $500/gal price tag to prevent something from trickling down into the consumer market.
;)
Hell, for $1000, overclock the crap out of a chip, and burn it out, then just buy another
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
These guys really are insane:
* For doing this in the first place
* For getting such an image-intensive, long site linked to Slashdot
Mirrors, anyone?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's not the point in this case. Obviously, spending USD1k on your coolant isn't more cost effective than spending another USD150-200 on a CPU with a higher speed rating.
It's a geek thing, you wouldn't understand.
Wow, those are some crazy twits with too much time and money!
Spending $1000 on an non-conductive liquid cooling agent that you didn't even bother to check the freezing point on is just STUPID. I'm a regular old dumb guy and even I would have thought of that. End rant #1
But other than that little rant, it was a crazy cool idea! Great idea and a very kewl setup. Worth the 10 minutes I spent scanning the site. Too bad some of the pictures with really interesting captions didn't exist.
Oh, I am gonna say one more thing, if you have $1000 to spend on a cooling liquid that you didn't really even research, shouldn't you have a little money to put into a decent monitor? IMHO it's the most essential part of the PC because it's what you have to look at the most. End rant #2
Not a bad idea guys, just think some more before tossing around money like that!
3M's Flourinert
my colourless liquid gold
this shit's expensive
Wah!
You know, that's really a surprise, not using thermos to transport LN since the glass will shatter. I wonder what Dewer bottles are? Oh, that's right, glorified thermos with a reflective coating to prevent heat via radiation transport. Glass will not shatter when cooled to very low temperatures IF you don't do anything stupid with the thermos bottle, such as dropping it on the ground. Not even a liquid-hazmat-transport container will save you from your self (such as leaving one on the trunk of a car, putting said car in reverse, and running over said container). So what do you suggest, in your infinite wisdom, to transport LN? You've eliminated glass and plastic. Presumably, you would suggest transport containers made of metal. [sarcasm]That should solve everything!!![/sarcasm]
The Cray 2 was cooled by immersing it into a big vat 'o flourinert which was circulated through a heat exchanger with water to keep it at around 55 (or 65?) degrees.
Y-MP has a flourinert pocket between cicuit boards so it is cooled that way. That (apparently) solved the cooling problems they had with the Cray 1/Cray X-MP.
C90, T3D and T3E were cooled much like the Y-MP. No Cray uses water cooling since water is a conductor. They have heat exchangers to cool circulating flourinert with water.
There was a deskside version of the Y-MP and that along with J90, low end T3E's, and SV1 are all air cooled.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
This has been in moderation at Kuro5hin all morning...funny how things tend to repeat themselves...
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
BTW I think mineral spirits will do a very similiar job :)
Err mineral oil I mean
Actually, mineral spirits sound much more interesting...
User: ls
Computer: I knew a girl named Ellis once. She was a reeeeeaaaaal looker, boy, and had the biggest damn...
User: ls
Computer: I heard you the first time, big shot! What, you think I'm stupid, can't understand you the first time? Huh?
User: kill -9
Computer: Oh, so you think your better than me, huh? Let's you and me throw down. Come on ya big pansy!
BTW, there are a lot of fun things you can do with liquid nitrogen... If you put it in a pop bottle and screw on the lid, then put the pop bottle under a cardboard box and stand on the other side of the room, it makes a big bang :) If you pour cola into a dewar of liquid nitrogen, it freezes in mid-fizz, leaving a popcorn-like substance which is fun to eat (don't eat too much at once, or your teeth and tongue won't be happy!). Also fun is pouring nitrogen on the floor and watching it roll along in beads held up by the Leidenfrost effect. (boiling at the bottom creates enough pressure to keep a layer of gas between the liquid and the solid, so thermal conductivity is low. This is the same effect that makes water drops dance on a hot stove top.) Pouring nitrogen on the floor is especially fun if you are a lab TA and there are still a bunch of first year students finishing their lab reports. They scare easily :) (of course, they were sitting on stools, so I didn't give anyone frostbite.)
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
Actually, the NSA (not NASA), does exactly this. However, they submerge entire rooms with this stuff and cool it with lots of water. The Discovery Channel had a special on this a few years back.
They need as much power as they can get for Echelon. Of course, it doesn't prove if this is cost-effective. They are a government organization, you know.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
... fluorinert? bath (Fluorinert? is an electronic testing fluid manufactured by 3M?) ...</i>
Everyone seems? to be complaining? about the question marks? in this story?. But I don't? see it?. Sheesh?! What's? everyone mad about??
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Since they said that the Flourinert stuff ran about $1000NZ, I found that it would be about $469.018US ($1NZ = $469.018US ).
I can understand that people want faster, better and if possible, at a cheaper price that they can afford. Hey, I want that too!!! And apparently, o/c-ing achieves those goals. But it's only apparent. Granted, by submerging the mb in liquid nitrogen, the CPUs could be o/c-ed very far. It's also probably very impressive.
:)
BUT I DON'T THINK SO!
In my own case, I'm running a Dual Celery 400 o/c-ed at 500... I know it's no big deal, or anything, but in order to achieve that speed, I had to spend a _lot_ of money for new CPU and case fans, thermal grease, etc. I also have to make sure my room doesn't get too hot. And all sorts of other problems.
Soon after I did this, I wanted to push the CPU's even higher. But I realized that I'm spending so much money it wasn't even worth it. All the stuff I bought for o/c-ing cost me much more than the difference in price between my 400s and the 500s.
That's when I realized that I'm doing something silly. I'm spending a lot of money so that I can have an unstable, warranty-voided, pretty fast computer, when I could have a stable, still-under-warranty, just as fast computer, for the same price. So that's when I decided that o/c-ing is not worth the trouble.
But hey, for those who can afford it, it's certainly cool!