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A Look At The World of Heatsinks
A reader writes: "There's an interview with Glenn Summerfield, Senior Sales Associate for Alpha Novatech (USA) that talks about heat sinks and where some of it is going." Alpha Novatech is one of the big boys in the field of heat sinks - the responses do have a bit of "salestalk" for Alpha Novatech, but seeing industry thoughts on watercooling vs. aircooling and such is interesting, nonetheless.
or at least for right now.
... kinda forgot to return the processor) and guess what? Neither one of us really noticed much of a difference. That's 133 MHz difference, a full 33MHz FSB boost too, and for just about everything that we did, we didn't notice a difference.
... well frankly I don't see the point other than just the coolness factor of having glow-in-the-dark coolant running through your PC =)
So I have a TBird 1.5GHz machine, and it hits 100% processing capacity for 0.02% of the time that it's in use. Save the time that I do mpeg compressing, but that's rare and the difference in speed that a watercooled system would give me over this would be negligable.
Using an expensive watercooler solution (well, expensive compared to a $30 air cooler that will work perfectly fine) to squeeze out a few extra megahertz, is that really worth all of the hassle?
Even at work I had an P3/800 (don't start with the intel bashing) and did a lot of work daily including compiling, and was upgraded to a P3/933 (at the expense of my friend who was away for a week, and I
If you're just so keen that you need to go from 33FPS to 33.8FPS in your Quake3 games, then, well, your choice... But is there really any good practical applications where the cost of a watercooled solution is worth the price? Keep in mind that you're comparing not the marked speed of the chip, but the speed that you could overclock to with air vs the speed that you can overclock to with water. I'd be surprised if you can see more than a 5MHz FSB difference there, even if 10MHz difference at a 15x multiplier (which means that you're already at 1.5GHz) you can gain 150MHz, which will do what for you? Practically nothing. Now add int he factor that you could just add the money of the watercooled solution to the cost of the chip to get the next higher up model, and
And before someone starts on the noise levels, we have a Dell 1.5GHz P4 at work that you have to put your ear right next to the bloody box to hear anything at all, they are VERY quiet. They have 2 fans too (1 case that blows across a heatsink on the proc through a tube, and 1 for the power supply). They are both thermally throttled and the hard drives are mounted on a thin strip of rubber too. Trust me, these babies are SWEET boxes and QUIET too.
So, who can explain to me why this would be worth it? I'm curious to know =)
-- Sean
If God gave us curiosity
Keep in mind the noise comes from the FANs in your system (well, okay, the HDs, too, but mainly the fans). There _are_ fans that are quiet! Oftentimes the HSF fan is the loudest one in the system, too, so check your system carefully.
The neat thing about high-end coolers like the Alpha PAL8045 is that the heatsink itself is so efficient that a 'whisper' fan with low airflow can still effectively cool a CPU. I just won a free Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53gHz) last week, and I'll probably be doing just that - a PAL8045 with a quiet CPU. I don't plan to bother overclocking the CPU, as it's already freaking fast.
I went to some sites that specialize in cooling products, and when you buy an HSF at some of them, they let you choose the fan that comes with it, which is nice.
And if you're 'stuck' with a really loud HSF - just replace the fan itself - they usually cost less than US$10.
There was recently a physics presentation at my University about thermoacoustics and its ability to be used for heatsinks. The basic idea behind it was that a thermoacoustic engine could be made to take the heat from the processor and convert it into sound, dissipating the heat more effectively than conventional heatsinks. The group working on the project already has a number of prototypes and showed some of them at the presentation and they were quite impressive! These 'engines' are already being made smaller than a penny in order to fit a number of them on a processor to increase cooling ability. And if you're worried about the sound coming out of them (the heat is converted to sound), the engines are converting it to high enough frequencies that it's undetectable to the human ear. They also told us that they're working on converting the sound back into electricity, perhaps to be used to cool the processor even further. I can't wait until these are commercially available...
Way back in the dark dawn of the desktop PC age, I was a programmer and service tech for the local importer of Intertec Superbrain computers.
These were a CP/M based machine with two Z80 processors (the second one was dedicated to disk I/O but configured so that the main CPU was placed in a busy-wait loop while the IO occured. Obviously this was a crappy hardware solution to a problem caused by an inability to write decent firmware on Intertec's part.
Anyway -- these machines were originally designed for the US market, so the PSUs were all 110V. Around these parts the mains voltage is 230V so they included a 230V-110V transformer with machines shipped here -- and it was mounted inside the all-encompassing case that also incorporated the screen and keyboard.
Cooling on the machines was by way of a weak fan that exhausted down onto the table beneathe the machine. It was barely adequate for the 110V machine so when the extra heat from the transformer was added to the thermal input -- the machines began to overheat.
The manufacturer was useless -- offering no suggestions and losing all interest in supporting the product.
The solution was pretty simple -- use a bigger fan.
However -- there was a rather unfortunate side-effect. When you turned on the computer, the fan-blast would blow every single piece of paper off your desk. Funny as hell -- the first time.
Although attempts were made with the fan reversed so that it blew up into the machine, a couple of machines expired after a sheet of paper found its way under the case and got sucked up against the fan grill -- effectively stopping all cooling.