Slashdot Mirror
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.
The laws of thermodynamics do not prevent the useful collection of waste heat. What they prevent is achieving 100% efficiency by doing so because your collection and transformation system will loose some heat, not create necessarily create heat
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
The G4 rivals the Pentium in power consumption? Not really. According to Motorola's fact sheets on the PowerPC 7400, it uses an average of 5 watts of power at 400mhz, 11.5 watts max. The PowerPC 7450 (the new version of the G4 used in the 533, 667 and 733mhz models with embedded L2 cache and slightly lower core voltage) uses 14-17 watts of power at 533mhz. The Pentium III, on the other hand, uses anywhere from 30 watts of power to 50 watts for the super-overclocked 1.13ghz recall units. I wasn't able to find any stats on Intel's website or in their datasheets (too much marketing), so that number might not be completely accurate, but I am sure it's much higher than the PowerPC 75xx processor line.
:)
:) The processor is one component that stays really cool. The heat sink for the processor happens to be the entire metal shield between the logic board and the Analog/Video/Power board. This shield has lots of holes in it that air goes through. It's quite an interesting and practical design. The monitor makes most of the heat, but since the tube is several inches away from the bottom of the iMac, there's plenty of room for heat to move up away from the components, sucking lots of cool air over the expensive stuff (logic board, hard drive, etc...) on the bottom of the computer. I admit it's not the coolest design, but considering what it is, it works really well.
4 526407.pdf
S SORS/32_BIT/POWERPC/MPC7XX/MPC7400FACT.pdf
p df
Apple encased the whole G4 processor card in plastic to dampen fan noise? Not really. There IS no processor fan on the new G4 models. There's a huge honkin' heat sink on it (which sits next to the power supply and an external vent when the door's closed), but there is no direct cooling on the processor. So, no, I don't think you've seen a picture of the latest G4. If you had, you wouldn't've claimed they encased the processor in plastic. Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of cooling? Heat can't escape through plastic as easily as it can through air.
The hard drive in the latest iMacs don't make that much heat, actually. Apple uses three kinds of hard drives in their latest lines: Maxtor, Seagate, and Quantum. They all run rather cool, with the Quantum being the hottest of them all (this is all subjective, and I haven't scientifically measured this stuff). The Seagate drives are definitely the quietest, though.
The micro fans might be nice on paper, but how long do readers think it'll take for MAJOR chip vendors to implement them? The heatsink/fan combo has been with us for as long as I can remember, and considering how cheap and easy it is, I don't see it changing that much very soon. We need cooler processors, not better fans/heatsinks.
Path of least resistance, I guess.
Here's a Pentium III Datasheet. If anyone can find the wattage for the P3 in this marketing mess, I'd appreciate knowing it: http://www.intel.com/design/pentiumiii/datashts/2
Here's a PowerPC 7400 Datasheet: http://e-www.motorola.com/brdata/PDFDB/MICROPROCE
And here's a PowerPC 7450 datasheet: http://e-www.motorola.com/collateral/MPC7450FSR0.