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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!
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
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
To be blunt, yes. Silencing of cars, trucks, buses would go a long way to increasing general mental health in the cities. I recall reading about a muffler for diesel trucks that used a computer to analyse the noise coming down the exhaust and creating an interference pattern to muffle the sound. Whenever I go to the country it's not the silence that I notice, but the goddamn noise when I finally force myself to return to civilisation. We are doomed.
:wq
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It's a well-known fact, anyone that picks on spelling/grammar is a Big Poo Poo Head.
-This sig intentionally left blank
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!"
-------------
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.
actually I've always been afraid of "the country". A number of times I've gone out to a rural area and almost gone insane during the day. It's just so quiet! I find it hard to maintain a single line of thought in my head without background noise. During the night it's a different story. Trying to sleep in a rural town is totally dependant on the whether anyone has mowed the lawn that day. If they have, you lie in your bed totally incapable of falling asleep. You have no problem falling which is how I feel in complete silence. If the lawn hasn't been mowed that day you have the standard background noise of traffic replaced with crickets and other green what-have-you's. I dont know how people can stand it. Give me the sweet background noise of traffic and an occasional tram. There is only two other background noises that I can stand. A fan in summer or a thunder storm. But even a thunder storm in the country is ruined by the constant croaking of frogs.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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!"
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
Well, if those fans were spinning at a million RPM, as suggested by the article, any noise they did generate would be in the ultrasonic range, don'cha think?
- Mike
If it needs a fan, then that's a sign of a BAD DESIGN.
Are you a designer?
I install radio repeater controllers on mountain tops for various communications companies (radio, TV, cellular relay, business 2-way, etc.)
Nope. Kindly keep your opinions stated as such and not as fact. Fans do NOT indicate bad design.
Now to get on with business: Fans in designs are NOT a bad thing if the design calls for them. Your communications equipment won't be spitting out too much heat since the control likely runs off of 24VDC bussed from a single (redundant) power supply which can probably endure a colder environment. Your actual transmitters will throw out heat in proportion to their strength.
Then you go on to say that the ambient is 80 below (degrees Farenheit) -- of course you won't need much to get rid of the heat! You've got a freaking 200 degree C temperature differential! If I'm not mistaken, you'll have heaters in the enclosures in order to keep the temp within component tolerances!
Now let's come to the Real World (in the sense of consumer equipment) -- People like to be in a 20 degree C ambient, so their equipment will be in there as well. Commercial components are spec'd to operate between 0 and 70 degrees C. So there's 50 degrees to play with there, not counting heat thrown out by the power supply, hard drives, motherboard chipset and expansion cards. Heat sinks can only distribute and radiate so much heat. While I'm not saying that 60W for a processor is an efficient design, it is by no means poor. Poor design is when you don't meet the design spec.
In the world of industrial equipment (I design for this environment) your components are rated -40 (I think, we don't run into the low end much) to 85 degrees C but you usually use commercial-rated components since your rarely in an enclosure that gets below zero. We too have equipment in the middle of nowhere where it's cold enough to freeze spit before it hits the ground and the location is unmanned. Know what though? It's the hot and/or high elevation remote locations which give us the most trouble. We literally have equipment in the amazon rainforest and in the Chillean mountain ranges (Andes?). Even when we have our power electronics bypassed we can't avoid generating 1 Watt / Phase / Amp (three phase equipment). This stuff has to go into NEMA 4 enclosures to keep the crap out. Fans are unacceptable here (watertight) so we need to oversize the enclosure in order to increase the air volume inside the enclosure and help get the heat radiated. In some cases we have to use industrial air conditioners (want to talk expensive? Try a NEMA 3R air conditioner!) in order to keep the heat down and that is in a design where we are already generating minimal heat! (you can't get much less minimal than a slab of copper!)
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.
Yes and you have the money to spend on lower power equipment and cold-temp tech. The industrial world has MUCH higher price margins than even the least competitive commercial sales environment. Please try to keep that in perspective before bashing commercial designers.
Fans are cheap, not perfect. Just because you have the advantage of a 200 degree temperature differential to improve your radiated heat transfer doesn't mean we all do. And just because you can afford to sell expensive technology (flash vs HDD) doesn't mean we all do.
i camped out in the middle of the desert in Utah once. i headed back to the car from the campground to bring back a few jugs of water and while walking through a small valley i experienced complete silence for the very first time. it was an interesting sensation, but i'd have to agree with you that it was somewhat disturbing.
;)
... intersting ... area of the core. i listen to the sounds of traffic, ambulances and police sirens as i dose off, and i like it. ;)
i also noticed a slight ringing in my ears that was later confirmed to be the beginnings of Tinnitis. i now wear earplugs when i DJ.
anyhow i now live in downtown Toronto a few blocks from a hospital, and about half a block from an
- j
Yes.. I absolutely love the sky at night. Stars totally own. I can stare at the sky for hours.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
__________________
Use a thermocouple to drive a small CPU cooling fan! Oh wait...
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Yes, I am aware of that (they speak English in Canada, too 8^D), but I would think that one would be courteous enough to try and make their story submissions semi-readable. Comments are one thing, story submissions are another (my view). Then there's always the lame cop-out: "Well, I wouldn't post on a [spanish/french/polish/korean] board without a good grasp of the language!"...
Maybe people are just too busy trying to submit things quickly to check them over... and maybe I'm just too bothered by simple mistakes 8^)
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
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
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