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Cooling Hardware With Microfans
Jeriten writes "NewsScientist puplished this story about how your chips could be cooled down without that huge and noisy fan. Answer is multiple fans sized smaller than head of a pin and growed directly to a surface of a chips." Now if they could just make hard drives silent, we finally could hear ourselves think
in a room with 3-4 computers. I tell ya, the noise generated by a few
PCs doesn't seem like much until you turn off the tunes.
Big fans are ok. If they are of high quality they can be almost noiseless, I replaced all of the small fans in my case with some larger ones and the machine is running a lot cooler and quiter now. It's those small fans with high-pitched noises that are the worst!
So now my silent box and I are stuck next to a noisy highway. Now what? Silent cars?
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
replacement? What happens when these fans go bad. I understand that there are probably many of them and a single failure won't hurt, But will I have to throw my chip away after 25% of them die?
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
> Jeriten writes "NewsScientist Ah yes. I remember the News Scientist. Is that the dude who reads the news in a white coat? > puplished this story Puplished? Oh so it's one of those nasty scientists that does tests on dogs. Nasty man. > about how your chips could be cooled down Personally I find the best way to cool chips is to leave them out of the oven for a while after you've fried them. > Answer is multiple fans Is this a definite article? [poor grammatical joke] > sized smaller than head of a pin and growed Like Topsy? She just growed and growed and growed. > directly to a surface of a chips. A chips? [In silly 60s detective film voice]: "Excuse me Mr. Chips we have a situation here."
A related idea would be to make some sort of heat exchanger that'd simultaneously cool the cpu and warm your room. With lots of machines, that could save a lot in heating costs.
I don't know, just an idea. Anyone know if something like this has ever been done before?
- Jonathan
Silent hardware is nice, but there can't be too many people willing to pay a large premium for it (as oppposed to, say, flat screens.) Until the price is comparable to the noisy varieties, this is going to be a non-event.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I have a Fujitsu 20GB and i never hear it. Its getting to the point where its disturbing during a long fsck :)
two on the power supply,
two 80mm fans venting the hard drives,
the CPU fan, the fan on the GeForce 2 GTS,
the 80mm fan on the front, the 3-fan 5.25" bay vent, and
two Antec Cyclone slotfans (one below my sound card, one below my video card).
I also have two 3.7" fans that are just waiting to be put in (one from an old 386, one from an ancient Bernoulli drive). If I did happen to find places for those two, then my fan total would go up to 14.
No, I'm not overclocking this system; I hate overclocking. I just hate heat and dust buildup inside the case.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Why bother with fans at all? There are two fully-functional desktop personal computers out there today that you can go out and plunk down cash, credit card, or check with two forms of ID and take home right away. You can install Linux or *BSD on them, or use the vendor's pre-installed OS. In two months, the vendor is going to release a new, Unix-based BSD 4.4-compatible operating system that will be pre-installed on all of the machines come the summer.
;-) Check it out at Apple's iMac page and Apple's Cube page.
What am I talking about? The iMac and the Cube, both by Apple. Both are completely convection cooled, and the only sound you hear is the clicking of the hard drive (and the sound of the other poor bozos getting fragged in Q3A
OK, so I work for Apple, but c'mon folks, do the design right and you don't need a fan!
--Paul
Solution: Find ways to cool them.
While I understand that electronics will (for the foreseeable future) generate heat, it seems to me that it is just as important to find ways to make them run cooler as it is to find ways to cool them. Apple's latest iMac line (I think) was convection cooled - but the monitor, processor, and hard drive give off enough heat to make the entire machine very warm. It definitely a step towards a quieter computer, but an iMac won't suffice for your average Slashdot reader.
As for microfans - they're not really even microelectronics. They belong in the region of "mesoscale," which means macroscopic but small. I saw pictures of Apple's latest G4 (which rivals the Pentium in terms of energy consumption) in which Apple had encased the entire processor card in plastic to dampen fan noise.
Anyway, just some thoughts.
The link.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
It is amusing to see slashdot editors consistenly take New Scientist seriously. It is a hair above the Weekly World News in the journalistic food chain. I was "interviewed" by one of their "reporters" once. That only confirmed what most scientists/engineers already know about its penchant for enhancing mundane science with the most preposterous speculation.
As for noisy hard-drives this probably won't be a problem as you'd probably not want data to be stored away from devices that you physically interact with and accessible from several of them. Each home could have a server built in in the loft with fast networking around the home. All data is stored on the server, then lower performance systems could be installed next to your tv/hifi etc.
This definitely sounds like a good idea.
...
... only then you realise just how noisy the room was with all the fans.
/me looks around the room and counts.
Okay, i have some 6 computers sorrounding me in this real small room. I live in Australia. The Temperature outside is over 40C. (110F). Its hot.
Luckily, we have the A/C on, so its real cool in here. But the computers make FAR too much noise with all the darn fans.
I'm not even going to begin counting how many fans my main workstation (Dual PIII-500 512mb ram) has. Well. Okay. Cpu fans, 2. Case fans (extra added by me), power supply fans, and even fans on my CD-R.
And thats not my only Dual CPU box
Computers definitely have a problem with heat, and shoving ever more fans into cases is not the solution. New tech such as this, is.
When the power goes out, its almost surprising at the silence around you
D.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I can just imagine it know...
Cries of "I have 12 fans on my computer" from all the OC sites will rapidly be replaced by "I have 300,000 fans on my computer!" However, things like Sub-zero alcohol cooled PC's will never change.
47.5% Slashdot Pure(52.5% Corrupt)
So.. what do you do when the fan fails and needs replacing... get out your microscope and tweezers or what? Nothing lasts forever.
{} ------ When I think of a good sig, I'll put it here
I've lately heard a lot of good things about how quiet MacIntoshes are. Since I've been making this the year of my Microsoft purge, I have become self-sufficient in GNU/Linux with the help of the local users group. But lately I've become aware just how much noise fills a room with a single tower... or even with no tower and only a 3com Superstack 24port hub, running its fan. Such a harmful shar can be maddening when compounded.
There has got to be a more efficient way to "recycle" wasted energy in a system... particularly in notepads. If a modern CPU generates 25watts of energy into raw heat, and a fan is required to cool it, reducing battery life, there's got to be a way to use that more efficiently. If the CPU heat can not only run its own fans, but maybe also backlight a display or something else useful, then the waste of heat and noise are replaced with greater efficiency.
Common, bitchin' about fans in computers is so 1984. Just get too carried away with this whole fanless silence thing and you end up with a computer that looks like a water cooler.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Ugg... why are you script kiddies such jerks. SHUT UP! Don't post unless you have something to say that's at least an amusing contribution to what is laughably referred to as a "discussion thread". Also, "...and growed directly to a surface of a chips." is just... too much. Someone edit! Oh, and these fans are an interesting gadget. The media has picked up this story last night (sorry Slashdot) and showed the fans are made from the same silicon material as the chips themselves, just cut into fan shapes and powered to work (funny, never saw them actually demonstrated). This strikes me as another sign of the growing miniature research and development world (an interesting subject to discuss in ... oh say ... a thread?). IBM being well known for all their press releases about atom sized working parts, etc.
But when will all these miniature miracles be used for the public good? ... HAHAHAHA! I know, it's just so funny to say such things.
Cheers monkeys... ;p
No way. Ever put your hands on the GeForce while it's running? OUCH, that's hot! There's a reason why they put heatsinks on the DDR ram.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
We just discussed about power shortages and you keep your hungry hardware ?
Come on !
i just think we should take a deeper look to the low-consumption alternatives around, like this, or this.
What ? Vapourware. Nope. I own many machines running these processors and my brother just bought a transmeta laptop which he's in love with.
Don't believe the hype and aim your purchases towards a brighter future.
Intel's selling radiators, so is Nvidia.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Can they build these into t-shirts too?
Of course this could lead to propagating smells, while cooling off the person wearing the special micro fan shirt...
E.
www.randomdrivel.com -- All that is NOT fit to link to
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Call me the English police, but since when is "growed" a word? I would have used "grown" in this context.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
These micro-fans currently run at 100RPM. My current CPU fan is about 3000RPM. Shouldn't these things be faster since they have a smaller radius, not slower? Sounds like somebody came up with a great trick for making them, but that the methodology does not scale well.
I've been using a Maxtor 75G 7200RPM Drive for about 6 months now. I swear, you can't hear the drive. I've turned everything else off in the room and still the hum of the fan is the only thing you can hear.
Now, if you'll excuse the terrible pun, surely the industry should be moving towards leaner, more efficient processors.
Has anyone ever measured the AMD Athlon's contribution to global warming through both its excessive voltage requirements and heat dissipation.
I've been waiting for someone to bring out a 5 1/4" Toasted Sandwitch drive module for my overclocked dream machine. I doubt it would even need a heating element...
Man, I've hardly had the heating on this winter.
Anyone have an idea about how much noise would be generated by a ton of these fans all going at 1 million revolutions per minute?? It seems to me that it has the potential to be even noiser than what we have now.
"it could just be the midgets. You've got to be careful with midgets in Spandex." --Jamie Richardson
Come on... are we all five here? This is just ridiculous.
wow, an AC with something useful to say. Would this be what you're talking about? Don't worry, the market for vogue computing technology will open wide up when we try to squeeze those last ten years out of silicon.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Taco brings up an interesting point - computers do get noisy, and it's a dull, droning noise. Standing in our server room one day last week, I got to thinking about the noise level and type of noise being generated. I wonder if long-term exposure to it without protection would lead to partial hearing loss, maybe in particular frequency ranges? Might we see OSHA regs on the amount of noise put out by desktops, and required hearing protection in a room with more than X boxes per square foot?
Now if they could just make hard drives silent, we finally could hear ourselves think in a room with 3-4 computers
:)
Fan noise does have an upside, though. In my home office I find that the noise from my SparcUltra10, 2 Regular PC's, Rackmount PC, and 3 laptops drowns out the noise of my wife
If the room were silent, I would probably have to respond to her calls to come down and take out the trash or something.
-This sig intentionally left blank
...becuase I need to compensate for the load that my Windows 2000 box puts on the CPU.
My finger is caught in the fans!
Micro fans are pretty cool, they definitly show that over time, everything gets smaller in th IT world. But let's face it, we don't need armies of micro fans cooling our hardware. What we need are better built chips that use less watts and produce less heat. Transmeta's Crusoe processor is a pretty good example. This is the direction we really need to move in. However, it's also nice to know that for the things that will never be able to go low heat, that there is a immerging solution on the way.
Trying to be different, just like everyone else.
University of Colorado researchers state they never had the intention of using these micro fans outside of the computer world. Apparently, they underestimated the creative will of some insane scientists.
Protestors outside the research facility held up signs saying, "It's the end of the world! Pigs are flying!"
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Seriously though, I think they are "cool" and can't wait until I can buy a chip with them on it. Hopefully, they will sell sheets of these fans to the consumer market. Plus, these could have great influency on small computer designs in which the heat could be dissapated more quickly and efficiently.
Amigori
------------
Duck! No, that's a pig flying!
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
It has many applications. On one level, it deals with furnishing, landscapes, and building to increase comfort. On another level, more important to the work my wife and I do, it is about removing offensive stimulii, or balancing the qi/chi/whatever-you-call-energy. This does not mean maximizing efficiency in a machine like manner, because having long straight hallways, or doors evenly opposite each other in halls, can "point" offensive "energy"(noise, flow, stress) at a person.
I've known architects to redirect long hallways, or split them up with fire doors, just to slow the flow of a place into more pleasing directions. Ironically, this seems to parallel electronics in a metaphorical way, balancing "resistances" where an inducer could do harm. Stressful positions, like having your back to the door or world all the time, can make a person paranoid ("Big brother is watching" or "I could be stabbed in the back!"), and such offensive stimulii are called shars , which I think means "poison dart." Feng Shui prescribes remedies, such as having a desk mirror to see who's behind you.
In a world where it's easy to go hard-of-hearing amidst computer equipment, Good Feng Shui should be considered in this design, as it is in any other field of design. Microfans could be far more harmonious, or quiet (yin), than conventional cooling methods.
PS: I've also made little microcontroller "pets" whose LEDs simulate breathing rhythms. It has a cool, soothing energy about it.
Fans are out in this environment. Fans gunk up with dust and die. And a trip to fix it costs thousands of dollars. Actually *anything* with moving parts is out. The oil in fan motors and even in hard drive motors can gel up when it gets that cold. So we use solid state flash+static ram drives, and 486/25s that need no fans. Cursoe may finally be the next CPU upgrade because it runs cool without help.
Install a big ol' 4" 12 Vdc fan, and run it off a 6 or 8 Vdc power supply - fan is way too big at full voltage, nice, quiet and adaquate air volumn at half power.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I doubt those microfans really would reduce the noise generated by the fans. First of all, the efficiency of air cooling is determined mainly by the volume velocity of the airflow, and you'll still have to blow the same amount of air with the microfan technology -- with fans with no aerodynamic/acoustic design. Size of the fan does matter, though. Usually bigger is better (quieter). Blade noise is easier to handle with big, slowly rotating blades. Microfans seem to move into opposite direction, suggesting they might be even noisier than conventional fans.
There are ways to get rid of the noise, though. This site is a good starting point for screwing that silencer on your PC. Particularly, there was an interesting link to a Korean company, which is going to introduce a free-flow refridgeration system for computers. With that, you can throw away every (except the power source) fan from your computer. Hopefully it'll work as well as they tell.
New Scientist is a joke. If /. reporting on science wants to approach anything near journalistic integrity when it comes to science, they should be very wary of refrencing the infamous new scientist. The magazine will constantly publish any story they think will be the most sensationalistic, seemingly without even an attempt at fact checking. They still do stories touting so called cold fusion BS as "just around the corner" to providing the worlds energy. Other stories for instance on EMF's and cancer are totally biased and even get into using scare tactics to sell more copies. According to James Randi New Scientist even ran articles in the 70's and early 80's touting the validity of DOWSING! pardon but this magazine is almost total shit.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Try sitting in my server room with the plexi doors on the racks open.
10 compaq proliant 3000 servers (ML530 now) sound like you stuck your head in a jet engine.
I see uses for silent hardware, like a library. But then you don't have to resort to exotic hardware to achive this. Just placing the computer in a closed case that is well ventilated or purchasing a premiuim enclosure in the first place. (Hard drives on rubber isolation mounts, and soft material grids on fan openings with rubber isolation mounts on the fans) make a huge difference. Try it. add rubber o rings around the mounting screws and then dont tighten them down so hard. makes a big difference. a little bit of engineering can achive huge changes.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So what are they going to do? Drill little holes in the casing? That'll do wonders for manufacturing costs, I'm sure.
The best fan design I have ever seen was on my roommate last year's machine made by the wonderful Packard Bell company. I'm not sure what they were thinking when they did it, but they put 2 differently sized fans, one on top of the other, onto his processor to cool it. It was a socket design processor, so the first fan was the normal size of the processor, and then stacked on top of that fan's lower-left two thirds was a second, smaller fan. It was _really_ odd...
Posted from the wireless couch.
I knew some people who growed some microjuana in their window sills. I growed but one microinch in high school. George W. Bush will be a full-growed adult male in four years.
maybe he's still using an 80086 (kaCHUNK kaCHUNK kaCHUNK kaCHUNK kaCHUNK "bad command or file name")
i could live a little longer in this prison
But I can't sleep anymore without the hum of computers in the background. And the best place in the office is in the server room with the hum of several computers as the only sound. I think it is kinda like the same reason you put a clock in the basket with a puppy you just bring home, to simulate the sounds of the womb. So don't take away all the noise or I will be lost..... -TShrew
I could knit a sweater out of the dust I've cleaned out of fans over the past 3 years.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Apple may have a fanless system, but the heat is still there. Not as much as there used to be, there has been progress made. Only real problem is, not everyone wants a Mac. Alot can be learned from Mac as well though, thanks for pointing out that the pc market isn't the only onw ith low power/heat offerings
Trying to be different, just like everyone else.
Personally, I'm not very enthusiastic about having moving parts in the most expensive component in my system, unless they're guaranteed not to reduce the chip life. I just had to get my video card replaced after 6 months due to a faulty fan. And it's tough enough cleaning the crud out of my normal-size fans. How am I going to do it with microfans?
when you talk of converting the excess heat into electrical energy, there are a number of ways. these micro-mechanical fans, once started, may be able to maintain sufficient velocity due to convection to drive equally miniture generators. the more practical option that springs to my mind is thermocouples. thermocouples are great, we use 'em all over the lab here. for those who don't know, a thermocouple is made by joining two dissimilar metals, that, when heated, produce electricity. unfortunately, thermocouples don't produce a lot of electricity. it's generally on the order of micro- to milli-volts, but it's because of this small scale that we use them to monitor process temperatures. we also use them because of their ability to take extremes. we use them to measure the temperature on our liquid nitro tanks, and at penn state we used them to monitor our oxidation furnaces, which ran at upwards of 1200 C. recycling this energy might knock a few bucks off your electriciy bill per year, maybe. it's really not worth it to bother figuring out a way to do it. not yet anyway. for now, i'd suggest warming your feet on your case, and your hands on your monitor.
Even if the small fans could push a good volume of air, I think that most noise comes from the air moving over the heatsink. I have some fans that are silent when running out in the open, but put them to the heatsink and the air moving through the fins causes most of the noise. That's why I switched to watercooling; it is so much quieter.
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
we use turbos on some of our vacuum tools, and on our e-beam. the problem with turbos is that the older ones couldn't handle atmospheric pressure. they'd crash. the prinicple of a turbo spinning at that kind of speed is not to suck and push air like a normal fan, but to actually clobber air molecules and physically knock them down further through the fan. with all those tiny little fans moving at 1M rpm, my prediction is that it's all going to crash, spectacularly. imagine little tiny propellers, all flying off the chip assembly with amazing speed. shrapnel comes to mind. my advice, keep the speeds down to a reasonable level, and get some saftey glasses.
I have to work in a room with 22 Dell machines of varying scale, 4 RS/6000 workgroup servers, a waist high AS/400, a rackmount system containing an IBM M-80 and several drive racks, a dual frame SP system consisting of 10 nodes with accompanying VSS and 3494, and an air conditioning unit with air blowing in through the raised floor. It's a wonder I can hear myself think in here.
Of course, the upside is that I get to actually see the cool stuff I'm working with and it's so loud and cold in here that people generally leave me alone.
+++
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NO CARRIER
I built a silent machine for my stereo, it was simple. Underclock a 600 MHz P3 to 400 MHz, remove the CPU fan, use a notebook hard drive and an Antec power supply with a thermally controlled fan. Voila!
I work at a microelectronics company, in the computer lab, I have an old digital scope, a nice (and loud) switching power supply, and a protocol analyser sitting at my desk. The scope and analyser have some sort of HP-brand SUPER fan in them, they're much louder than PC fans, the room also has the laptop I work at, two pentiums, two sparcstation 10s, a Sun ULTRA 5, an ULTRA 10, a nice big UPS, 4 external SCSI Hard drives and an external tape drive, plus an UltraSCSI box with 4 hard drives in it, now THAT's loud, an engineer who used to work here once told me a story of being in the room during a power failure...
There was a big BANG from the industrial air conditioner, and then the slow sound of dozens of fans whirring down to nothing. And then he got this big-eyed amazed look and told me that you could actually hear footsteps in the room!
I also once brought my "surprisingly quiet" laptop to class once, only to discover it was actually quite loud, and it made noises I hadn't even been able to hear a foot away from it in this room.
-Koryon
lemon@ee.unb.ca
Also note: All the moniters are CAD sized, some of them are also very old (mid 80s Sun cad moniters), imagine all the radiation in the room...
The solution for your dust problem is to get some sort of filter for your room
yeah, like vacuuming it once in a while.
--saint----
For those of us in the digital media field, or for anyone who needs to minimize data errors without huge redundancy, these many internal fans could murder us. Digital audio's place inside a computer is like that little girl from the Pepsi commercials wandering around in Compton. I'm worried that all of these little fans whirring inside the box, although silent to the ears, would cause more pops and clicks than a 78 of Jimmie Rodgers that's spent 6 decades in the back of a Buick. Of course there's the matter of hardware failure, and it WILL happen. All hardware fails, even that big fan on the back of your beige box. But is anyone else worried about data integrity?
D. Morgan Jahnig Old Crow Medicine Show
My roommate's iMac is incredibly quiet. I had never noticed how loud my computers were until he got it. Sometimes you will hear the hard drive, however when it goes to sleep there is virtually no noise whatsoever. It is the only computer to be kept in a bedroom in our place due to this. This is due to the lack of fans which is made possible by the fact that G3 processors are incredibly low power/heat dissapation.
The G4 cube systems have no fan either. I also understand that the new G4 powerbooks are likewise not cooled by a fan. Does anyone know what game systems are or are not fan cooled? If I am not mistaken I think that the PS, PS2, and N64 are not cooled by fans, however since I am mostly uninterested in consoles...
Processor fans seem to be mostly an X86 thing due to the high amounts of heat dissapation for a 32 bit processor. My sister's Compaq laptop is fan cooled. My K6-2 would fry if I removed the fan, my overclocked p-166 (200) was having issues til I added another fan to the case, the fileserver in my apt, a P233MMX was having some issues when the proc fan started dying. I would imagine if Transmeta ever got around to putting some processors into PC desktops, maybe we could get something in as radical a form factor as the cube (and without a fan). The fact you can fry an egg on most x86 procs these days seems kinda sad. If it were an Alpha, or a Power, I could kinda see it.
Fujitsu, IBM, and Maxtor make the quietest set of drives. Seagate's and Quantum's lower-speed offerings are reasonably quiet, too. Just avoid Western Digital's. They scream like a banshee.
These fans are 1mm across in size. assuming that they can be placed side to side, on a 100mm2 chip there would be 100 fans, and on a 200mm^2 chip there would be 200 fans. Any noise they make would probably drive your dog mad after a few hours, bit nothing more.
These fans rotate pretty slowly too. A typical fan can do anything from 3000RPM to 10000RPM, these do from 50 to 200RPM, so they are pretty slow at the moment. I doubt that they shift the same amount of air through them that a normal fan does.
Now they guy talking about 1 million RPM fans... that would probably make your processor explode from the sudden vacuum between in and the fan when it started up. Any bits of dust going through the fan would probably smash through the computers case! I would love the sound of a 1MRPM fan in my house, honest!
What the future should be is cooler running CPUs. Efficiency is the key. The Palomino CPUs from AMD will go a long way to cooling down the high end of the CPU market - they can run without a fan at 1GHz. Transmeta CPUs are great for the notebook market (unlike the 'cooler' PIIIs that generate 10W when running at full speed, but 0.5W when running at under half the speed).
If one day I can have a powerful fanless computer - it doesn't have to be the bees knees in hardware - then I will be happy. The really powerful computer can go in the garage or in the loft and make lots of noise AFAIAC, and it can do all of the Divx and MP3 encoding. Shame I won't be able to play the latest and greatest in games, but then again I never get the time to play them, so no loss there.
Seriously, I can do all the work I need to do on a 200MHz processor, or a 400MHz processor with MP3 player and some other stuff (and this is using Windows and Office 2000 and Outlook etc). If I ever wanted to play a game, then it would be nice for the processor to double its speed and turn on the fan whilst that was required, and then turn it off when it wasn't (same goes for the graphics card), but the only place you can use these processors is in laptops at the moment - hardly the ultimate gaming machines. AMDs PowerNow! technology will be supported in desktop chipsets soon though, which I hope will provide this functionality.
Excessive ? Yeah, i guess i admit it is. But ram is so damn cheap, i couldn't resist. PC133 SDRAM is going at $94AUD now. (about $40USD per stick). I mean, christ, they're giving it away.
:). lol! 802.11 wireless is sweet, though.
A for Dual cpu's. My first box was a Dual P200 w/ 64mb ram. I picked up the m/b real cheap at an auction, got two P200's, dropped 'em in, and sweet. Windows NT never lagged. I mean, you could have big compiles running in MS VC++, or run Quake2 and play mp3s at once, or whatever, and the GUI never lagged! I burn CDs at 4x (all scsi system) while playing multiplayer games on the net, it rocks.
So when upgrading time came, i KNEW i wouldn't settle for single cpu, so i went Dual again. I run Win2000 on it, and FreeBSD (though its not there atm, i need another hdd).
Funnily enough, the machine i use the most is my measely little P166 32mb ram laptop
What has this to do with fans? not much, now.
D.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Jesus Christ, Taco, how stupid are you? "Growed" is not a word! You're supposed to be an editor, so edit, dammit.
--
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Communication throughput is suboptimally parameterized when culturally marginalized nomenclature ("jargon") is specified in negative relation to nomenclature which is itself based on logical contradiction stemming from inconsistent taxonomy.
Putting it another way: the "micro" in "microelectronics" means "small" not "microscopic". So if "macroscopic" means anything in this context it means "big". So you just said "big but small". Hoist by your own jargon.
__________________
I have two Macs. The Ruby iMac 400 has no fan. My Powerbook may as well not have one for as often as it comes into use - and I use this computer all day long.
I recently bought a Molex Silent Drive (http://www.silentpc.nl/prod04.htm), it reduces the hard-drive noise by more than 90%. This is really great!
Advice for North-Americans, don't buy it from Nedcomp (http://www.nedcomp.com/), they charge 25$ for the silent drive and 35$ for shipping, without telling you first.
GFK's
Use a thermocouple to drive a small CPU cooling fan! Oh wait...
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Now if they could just make hard drives silent, we finally could hear ourselves think in a room with 3-4 computers
I use a special device to hear myself think.
Hey taco, it's time you knowed...
the word is grew instead of growed.
Ooh... The Internet is on computers now, Good for it.
-Homer Simpson
"This is not a company that appears to be bothered by ethical boundaries."
Attorney General Mike Hatch on Microsoft
How are we expected to clean these miraculous fans (provided they don't jam and burn themselves out)?
I don't mean to sound cynical, but my fan collects so much dust that it looks like it was hidden between my couch cushions.
Excellent link at this site. The only problem is that it is partially in German. Use the fish if yah need to, however it is mostly obvious.
p ation__mm2___processM Hz____42____.18M Hz____83____.15M Hz____???___.250 MHz___105___.183 MHz___???___.180 0MHz__217___.18H z_____102___.18H z_____225___.25
Some exerpts:
Processor___Mhz_______L1___Transistors__Pwr_Dissa
G3cx________350-550___64k__21'500'000___4.0W_@400
G4_/_Max____350-500___64k__10'500'000___5.0W_@400
Mobile_Cel__266-400___32k__18'900'000___7.7W_@300
Coppermine__533-1133__32k__28'000'000___26.2W_@80
P3/E_Xeon___600-1000__32k__28'000'000___28.7W_@73
Willamette__1300-1500_20k__42'000'000___54.7W_@15
K-7_(100Mhz)700-1000__128k_22'000'000___42W_@700M
Alpha-EV67__667-750___128k_15'200'000___90W_@750M
...but what happens when these things become clogged with dust?
So if this makes it into the next processors from Intel, we can expect something akin to porcupines?! An interesting prospect...
I was wondering how far down I'd have to scroll before someone threw in a Transmeta reference.
Will you see a topic on computer fans turn into a discussion on thermodynamics!
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
Rod logic, combined with Code Morphing and nano-bots, should obviate the need for convective cooling. A well-designed nano-bot should be able to operate below the quantum of heat conductance, and turbo block coding can be used to inhibit entropy leakage. Please, this forum is stuck in the 20th century.
I'm not so sure about silencing -- if you need to put 1000 of them they might became to be quite noisy. Here is what I came up recently looking for a silent computer solution:
Molex Thermal Acoustic Products
Directron: silent components
The Silent PC
Quiet PC (UK)
Shut that damn thing up!
> The Seagate drives are definitely the quietest, though
/dev/null > /dev/brain
I think Quantum would disagree with that. Their AS range are claimed to be the "world's quietest drive". The one I had was louder (spin whine) than their older LM, so I sent it back.
cat
If you wanna see hard drives with ZERO noise, check out nano hard drives at www.nanochip.com, those will be soo sweet when they finally get going...
I do have one use for noisy fans: As a college student, there is always a lot of noise emminating from the houses around me. Thank god (if I believed in him) for "white" noise. The volume of the fans drowns out everything except the loudest noises (like a party next door). It also drowns out people watching TV too loudly in the next room, and, when I had a room mate, his heavy breathing. :)
Granted, whenever I want to record audio through a microphone, then I get this hum in the background. All in all, however, the noise has served me well. I even usually leave on my external CD-ROM burner (mounted in an old case with a really noisy fan), just to generate more white noise.
(Oh, and don't call me crazy just because I find the hum of my computer's fans comforting).
So, who would win in a processing match between Athlons and Pentium IIIs. Of course, Da Bears. Only, however if Ditka is on the Pentium III's side would that skimpy processor have a shot. I say Bears 77-3
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
I haven't tried this yet, but I want to make a silent computer with no hard disk at all -- it would boot from a network card.
With a 100Mbps full-duplex Ethernet connection, a decent network switch, and a server with a fast hard disk tucked away into a clost, I believe that a completely diskless workstation would be nice and fast. 100Mbps is about 10MBps, which is exactly the speed of a fast narrow SCSI bus; not that bad. Just put in 256MB of RAM so the system doesn't need to swap. (Last time I checked, you could get 256MB of RAM for well under $200!)
I'm typing this message on a computer I built, and by far the noisiest part of it is the CPU fan. (Anyone know of a really quiet Socket A cooling fan?) That's why I would love to buy one of those Transmeta Crusoe server-edition CPUs. With a big heat sink I wouldn't need a cooling fan.
I have hopes that IBM or HP will make one of their "legacy-free" managed PCs like this. Then all I would need to do is just buy one.
I have fond memories of typing on the Atari 520ST we used to have. No cooling fans, no hard drive... unless the floppy disk was whirring quietly, that thing was silent. Oh yes it was nice.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Okay, my fluid dynamics is a little rusty. But won't these fans be operating well below the dissipation range for turbulent eddies in air, and consequently won't most of the energy from these fans go right back into heat rather than bulk air motion?
I dont know about you guys, but I've had fans die from dust (OK!! I'll clean out my server closet! jeez...) but..wouldnt one tiny speck of dust kindof..break a bunch of these fans? seems to me that that could lead to, well, problems (CPU BBQ anyone?)
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
So we can have several valid comparisons:
Clock for Clock
$$ for $$
'Performance' for 'Performance
Clock for Clock, it would seem that both dissipate the same amount of power; 14W
That, however, doesn't tell us how much 'performance' the processor generates per Watt, as it were. A Gateway Select 1200 with similar options (but a faster processor) $2341 vs an Apple G4 667MHz tower for $2799.
So there is definitely a $450 delta between the two. The G4 gives off 14W, the Athlon at ~55W. If we want, we can do the math that 2x MHz and 3.7x energy dissapation.
As per performance, everyone thinks/knows that a G4 on Photoshop beats the pants off anything else on the market, supposedly, but we have that on a clock per clock, the G4 supposedly outperforms but has the same wattage, while at max MHz, the G4 *still* supposedly outperforms and uses much less watts.
Now, how about non-Photoshop? I dunno.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
The noise that I heard months ago was the hard drive. It was almost as noisy as a fan.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.