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Using Radiators to Cool CPUs
dan writes "Overclockers Australia have a review up of the CPU Radiator Zen, a new approach to cooling your toasty CPU's. Rather than taking the traditional approach of a heatsink with lots of fins and a noisy 7,000rpm fan it uses radiator/heat pipe technology. The implementation of the unit is a bit flawed, but it is interesting to see where the technology is heading.. and if it can be done right I personally think this is where it will end up."
How silent is this? It's cool for overclocking, but if it's silent, it could also be very cool for music makers.
{{.sig}}
take a large copper cloth flat grounding wire, and attach to cpu. take the other end and attach to case. noisless cooling.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I'm really surprised we dont see this method more often, and from OEMs. Given that water has the highest heat capacity of just about anything, this only makes sense. Look for more water cooled systems in the future.
don't laptop's already have this?
Althought I don't have a link, I know they've done this as far back as the first pentiums. If I recall correctly, this was the ONLY way they could get the very first [then] brand-spankin-new Pentium's to work.
akad0nric0
This sentence no verb.
a noisy 7,000rpm fan
Maybe I'm just an old-school style computer guy, but is fan noise really that big of a deal? My computer is in an infants room and it doesn't wake up the baby (counterstrike pumped through 4 speakers does, but that's beside the point). Honestly, who has a huge issue with fan noise?
And why always complain about CPU fan noise? Doesn't the fans in the power supply make more noise, anyway?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
They use refridgeration units to cool the cpu.
already been done? I do believe that one of the Cray models had a 'liquid cooled CPU', or something to that effect. I never saw the specifics on how it was done, if it was just the CPU, or if it was the whole machine being cooled that way.
I also remember someone else (Penguincomputing?) having the '1st commercial liquid cooled PC', which was a 1.6 Ghz(2x800Mhz) Dual Athlon.
Either way, its really cool to see this same technology replicated for private use.
Can all fish swim?
I remember seeing years ago on public television somebody demonstrating this amazing liquid which, I believe, was called "chlorinert". It looked and behaved more or less like water, but it was completely nonconductive. The guy demostrated by plugging in a lamp, submerging it in the liquid, and screwing in a bulb while it was submerged. It was pretty amazing.
They mentioned its possible application to CPU cooling in supercomputers -- the idea was that you would actually submerge whole circuit boards in the liquid, while pumping it through a conventional refrigeration unit. Heat sinks be damned!
Apparently it never caught on, though -- I can't find anything about it online. Even mighty google just says, "Did you mean 'chlorine'?" I think it was incredibly expensive; perhaps that's the reason.
Me: "My computer has been making a strange sound."
Computer Mechanic crawls under my computer, then slides out a few minutes later and wipes oil off his hands with an old shop towel. "Looks like your radiator fan has lost a bearing. I can replace it, but I also have to put on a new belt. The old one is almost wore down. Also, you need an oil change. These new Septium-6 processors can really eat up an oil filter quick, and the color of this stuff is pretty dark now.
Me: "Boy, I remember when computers were so simple, I could just pop off the case and swap out components on my own."
Computer technician: "Ok gramps, whatever you say. You just sit yourself down out in the lobby and I'll have Betsy ring you up once I'm done. Shouldn't take more then a couple hours. Oh, and the tread on your network connector looks a little thin, can I suggest a new pair?"
This is not a new idea. This has been done before.
In most cases, using a radiator means pumping water into your computer. And THAT is one big source of trouble. Just imagine what happens if one of the pipes cracks, or if a joint falls off!
And, my Athlon 1,5Ghz will instantly boil any water because it's ONE HOT MAMA!
I know where it'll end up: just like Reason in Snow Crash. Boxes will be nuclear powered and you'll have to have the heat exchanger immersed in water the whole time or it'll melt down.
In all seriousness, I do think this is the way things'll go. Remember all those air-cooled Volkswagen buses? Remember how people bolted radiators onto the side of them so they wouldn't explode in hot climates? Air-cooling will only carry you so far, especially with dinky little fans. For serious cooling you need serious metal-to-metal heat exchange.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Great, at this rate, we'll have tricked out computers a la The Fast and the Furious
it was cool when you could jack a celeron300a up to 450mhz and have it run faster than a pentium 450 at less than half the price, but with most processors today you're looking at maybe a 5 or 10 percent gain and maybe a 20 or 30 dollars in savings. the savings is nil when you have to buy a fancy cooling solution to keep running
As someone who has never overclocked my CPU, I have nothing but admiration for those brave souls who risk destroying their hardware, and being prosecuted under the DMCA all for the sake of a few extra MHz. It is this pioneering spirit which shows why time and again hackers (not crackers) are at the cutting edge of computer technology.
I pity the poor tech support person at CompUSA when someone brings one of these suckers in for repair though. Looks like it will need a plumber as well as an electronics wizard, and we all know how expensive that can be :-)
Twinhead advertising claims that their heat pipe technology is patented. I've no further details and couldn't find anything relevant on their web site.
Buy Windows XP. Give Bill Gates even more of your money.
Not that they are all practical but man they look so cool.
http://www.overclockers.com/tips672/
http://www.overclockers.com/tips699/
This is causing me to have "far-side-comic" images of people with their sleeves rolled up in their offices, peeking under the "hood" of their desktop machines, with steam bellowing out of them.
"Just let it cool down for a few minutes, and start her up again."
Ever driven through the desert.
-- yawn. --
No this is hopefully NOT where it (CPU cooling technology) will end up. Ideally, it will end up with CPUs that consume less power and give off less heat, can withstand higher core temperatures, and can more efficiently transfer heat outside the core. Slapping a vapor refrigerator onto the CPU is the opposite of elegance.
I agree that this is cool, but come on now, why are we posting stories about something that doesnt yet work? Can't we wait until it 1) works well (the page states that other high performance heat sinks with large fans outperform it), and 2)doesnt damage the chips (We first tested the Zen Radiator, then the PAL 6035, and finally the MC462. After the first run we thought it a good idea to run the test again with the Zen Radiator in order to verify our results. This turned out to be a bad idea. The installation was again rather painful. Again a lot of pressure and time was necessary until we finally managed to connect the Zen Radiator with the socket. After powering up, the OS did not boot. To make it short: when mounting the unit on the socket, we had damaged the CPU. Chunks from all 4 corners of the die were broken off.)...
...
It's cool and all, but if this were software, it would surely be beta. Do we really need beta announcements? (*cough* mozilla *cough*)
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
Hasn't this been done before, or is it just a different means of water cooling?
No matter how well-sealed they say it is, I don't trust water flowing around my machine. Call me old-fashioned, but...
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout
A similar change was seen in the auto industry - moving from air-cooled engines like the VW Beetle to the water-cooled VW Rabbit/Golf. I don't know of one air-cooled car left in production, though we still have air-cooled motorcycles (Harley) *sigh* But those Bugs were so easy to work on, and now I have to bring my GTI in to get hooked up to a diagnostic computer ... anyone have a Linux hack for this? Heh heh, talk about voiding warranties ..
I forget...are we at war with Eurasia or East Asia?
Well guys if you sat down and read the article all the way through and saw what was going on you could basically understand that this isn't that much of an innovation, just tweaking an already proven practice. People have been using water cooling for years, and basically this just takes water coolings model and just makes it self-contained (at least how I understood it) the only flaw that they are going to run into is keeping the coolant cool at all times which will be hard since in water cooling setups there is a return pipe to the cooler/recycled water..
Over all I give em two thumbs up for at least tweaking a proven practice, but then again they need some more work to really get the idea going.
-bubu
Can't help remembering the original (128K & 512K) Macs. No fan. I worked at a third party shop in high school and we did a land office business replacing blown flyback transformers in the Summer - dang things had a manufacturing flaw and dropped like flies. Inveitably, I was able to sell the customer a fan, either a pizeoelectric, completlely internal "butterfly" one or the traditional "hole in the case" one.
The irony, of course, was that the new flybacks didn't have the flaw and, although its always good to have a frosty CPU, the fan's value was questionable.
END(Old Codger)
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
The reviews are all favorable, but it's not clear whether this is simply because the reviewers are blinded by the "hey, it's neat!" factor, or whether the Radiator Zen SCR325-2F actually has a legitimate technical advantage. But hey, it is neat, so I can't blame them.
ouch. the article mentions breaking both the mother board and the cpu while installing this unit. that, plus the expense of the cooler itself makes it a very expensive overclocking job.
i'll stick to my alpha's
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
A Friend of mine just bought a complete set from Aqua-Computer for his Athlon 1.4 Ghz. It's now running 1.6 at 30C constantly.
The radiator doesn't make any silence, but the other fans in the tower still do. Okay you can also cool CPU, Notrhbridge and GraphicsCard with one radiator, using Cupley and Twinpley, but the Towerfans still is noisy.
You can build a realy quiet PC with it, but it's very expensive (my friend paid around 400$)
Boycot? Blackout? Subscriptions?
I don't care!
We ask why isn't this currently in use? The simple answer is that the pace of innovation in the chips themselves far outpaces the demand for newer cooling methods. Sure the newer chips generate more heat, but we're talking millions more transistors, but now each of these transistors in generating far less heat.
and it physically broke their CPU and their mobo..if it were me, I wouldn't have anything positive to say about it.
------ Work is so much easier when you don't
True-dat on the rules.
When I was in college, guys would come in and have a frickin conversation with you! Jesus christ! I'd always say "I'm concentrating on something here, would you shut up, or should I concentrate on rubbing it in your nose?"
I'd have to take dumps in the middle of the afternoon when everyone was in class.
The bathroom stall (or the "Thrown" as I like to call it) was the only place I could understand Physics.
-DFW : Banned, damnit.
The Zen review is on page four.
I hear you, man.
It's really annoying when some co-worker takes the next stall and strikes up a conversation with you. Hell, what the hell is wrong with these people? Taking a dump should be an anonymous act, not something you advertise -- especially if you can't keep it quiet (grunting, lots of gas or splashing).
And don't forget to water your computer every now and then. Also, they say talking to your computer will make it go faster.
If anyone went through the trouble of reading this article, let me know what it says.
But I can imagine that this would be the logical conclusion of this development trend.
With the engineering and all, it might be just easier to dump everything into a vat of freon in a deep freeze some place.
or just make a refrigerated rack system.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
But they screwed up nearly every design decision they had!
- Poor clearances on the baseplate;
- incorrect dimensions on the mounting clips;
- Plastic mounting clips! (AMD meltdown badness, anyone?)
- Shoddy construction (the evaporation unit "floats" in the CPU assembly, for example, instead of securely attached)
no thanks.Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
I had used this same basic idea in a project about 2 years ago in a computer project. I've still got the 3d models for it too. My partner for the project and myself were told to design a computer for a specific market and come up with design, info, and a marketing pitch. Let's see if i can find the model.... ha! found it! http://lenin.nu/~jwhite/graphics/gallery/comp. basically we had coolant being pumped through a specialized heatsync, through a set up copper coils with fans next to each coil drawing the heat away and pumped back through the heatsync. I always wanted to see it actually implemented.
~~~ They call me Little John, but don't let the name fool you...in real life I'm very big.
You need it to be quiet so you can listen for people who might interupt your monkey-spanking session.
You mean "throne" ?
I don't know if I'm just fucked up but listening to these girls next door grunting while taking a dump (and all those "plop!" sounds don't make it any easier) really screws up my sex drive. Every time I see a gorgeous girl I can't help thinking about her grunting...
Obviously I've never been in a steady relationship. I guess you guys who have managed to move in with a female have gotten over this.
There is a documented link between low level noise and hearing and stress levels in those spending long times exposed to them.
The hum of a fan, whatever it is cooling, is often at a level that you might strain to hear clearly. It is these levels that can cause hearing strain. This is similar to eye strain when you need glasses and can give you monster headaches.
Many articles in New Scientist, among others, have covered this - normally relating to office environments.
Symptoms can be migranes, and a persistant ringing / humming sound when you are in a silent room / trying to sleep. Its worth checking out if you feel any of these because the long term stress levels can be harmful.
I don't know if its a problem for babies - but I know the effects are magnified many fold if you are exposed for long periods, i.e. all night. So I wouldn't leave the machine on 24/7 even if the baby doesn't seem bothered by it 'just in case'.
amen to that. People are ignorant of the rules all the time here. Lucky for me there are a lot more women than men in my section of the building. There is a nice safe haven bathroom - it has an open window to the outside so it is very serene. But there is one guy who I swear forces himself to take 2 craps a day - grunting, stanky odor, the whole production. I usually try to do a fly by - if it is clear, I go take care of business. One time I went in while he was there - he was in the middle of a pause and I did not know it was him - then right as I sit down he starts grunting and groaning again. A tip for you kids - forcing one out is bad for your colon. You don't need to wait until it is poking its head out but you should not have to force it - you need to eat more fiber.
...if it hadn't DESTROYED their CPU and their motherboard.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
yeah, cray has their "waterfall" system. Basically just letting liquid flow over the processor. And they look insanely cool.
~~~ They call me Little John, but don't let the name fool you...in real life I'm very big.
Now for sale: The Mr Coffeee motherboard. (Patent Pending.) Yes it works well, but only on processors over 400 MHz. Makes up to 6 cups per hour.
Retailer and investor inquires welcome.
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
They're using heat pipe technology to move the stuff about- that doesn't mean water. Furthermore, radiators do NOT mean water is involved- alcohol or ethylene glycol work rather well in radiator applications (which is why I keep wondering what these people are thinking when they run liquid cooling systems with water.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
You know, not to be an annoying b*tch or anything. But, stick a heatsink and fan (if required) on your cpu. Keep it cool.
Otherwise it's like, I spend 16 hours and over $300 dollars creating the custom case rig with liquid oxegen flowing past every heatsink in my case. Now instead of 45 deg. C I get it down to 42! Shut up already.
I've never had a cooling problem, worried about my heatsink falling off and anything like that. My 1.4 AMD is at 53 c under full load, after being clocked to 1.533 it's now at 55c. That is well within acceptable limits. I don't have a moded case, or many fans, I have a powersupply, and a fan on the heatsink.
Some people need to get a life and stop worrying about cooling their cpu down one little degree more. sheesh!
The idea of using radiant cooling isn't really a new concept in computing... people have been using radiators with liquid cooling implimentations for quite a while.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
i.e. a refrigerator- that's extreme and a commercial company does the same thing (Kryotech). That is not the same thing as a phase change heat pipe and radiator (The device referred to in the article)- it's moving the heat, but it can't get the chip below ambient.
The vapor phase system CAN.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Project Eunuch from the Temple ov thee Lemur.
It is a joke.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Why not just shrink-wrap your entire CPU and toss it in the freezer? With a small hole in the freezer's side you can run extra long cables and an external CD-ROM to any room in the house. Need to reboot? Then it's time to cook a frozen pizza.
Cheers,
LTR
Your babe tolerates certain levels and sleeps through others.
For her (him?) it's Counterstrike. For others it's the fan on the CPU. For other's it's the whirring of the CDRW drive.
Me, I use a PowerBook because I *love* silence. I listen to my music *quiet*, so when the CPU or PS fan is louder than my music, I have issues.
My *new* PC is an 800MHz Celeron with a low speed fan and a 140W PS in order to supress noise. Tradeoffs of power and heat for noise and performance.
GPL Deconstructed
They have been using these things in big servers for awhile now. Not because they perform better, but because you don't want the reliability problem of "What if my fan dies".
"Son, it's so cold in the house"
"But Mom, I don't want to play quake8 again!"
If you would put a thermal generator on a CPU, would you be able to produce enough juice to run a fan? I mean, modern CPU's produce an enormous amount of heat calories...
--- sig moved for great justice.
I have heard of an infant that is calmed by a vacuum cleaner. The child used to cry when it's mother left it to shower. The child stopped crying when it heard the blow drier and knew mom was not far. The mom noticed and put a vacuum cleaner in the room with the child and it worked. The child often falls to sleep with the vacuum cleaner on. No the child is not deaf now.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I mean, you have a radiator which exposes the same surface area as a typical heat sync, but makes less effective contact with the heat source.
The fluid is probably not doing anything significant at all, the two fans gushing past the aluminum tubes is probably doing all the work.
I don't even think this thing is actively cooling. There doesn't seem to be any pump... they're relying on the thermal gradient to cause the vapourizing fluid to move to the cool side of the radiator and condense. It doesn't work that way. You need to have some way of forcing the fluid to move in one direction, you need to cause the liquid to vapourize by forcing it through a small opening, pulling heat from the CPU.
If you can somehow get around that technical wizardry, then you have to find fluids which vapourize at the temperature of the CPU, but condense at the temperature on the other side of the radiator... whatever wimpy thermal gradient that might be... the pressure of the system also remains constant because the whole system is operating passively of course.
In other words... if you have a CPU at 50 degrees C, and your cooling fluid vapourizes at 40 celcius, then the other side of your heat sync MUST remain lower than 40 celcius, otherwise you just have a bunch of tubes full of pressurized vapour. There is no reason for the cooling side to actually cool especially if the same area is exposed to the CPU as is exposed to the fans.
On the other hand, if your fluid vapourizes at 60C, it doesn't actually DO anything until the CPU reaches that temperature.
This is not to say that passive refrigerators do not exist, I just don't think they've built one. They've built a chunk of aluminum full of fluid with two fans blowing through it.
They should have run another benchmark: Drain the radiator.
Kryotech has this done right.
Or at least similar...
KryoTech Inc had/has a product that is basically a refridgerator for your PC. Been around for at least 2 years( the first 1gig athlon i saw.. months before the 900's were out was an overclocked 850 with their cooling system)
Looks like Kryo's a little more expensive, but a much more 'professional' looking system...
Just took apart a HP 9000 K class server yesterday, its got cooling pipes over to the PA-RISC CPU with a big (approx. 4 cm x 10cm) radiator on each processor board.
The Xeons used in Compaq's 8 processor Proliants use a small plate bolted to the processor with two copper pipes. They go up into a radiator assembly, and the server pulls air through them with a very efficient and nice design. I've always liked the design by Compaq on some of their Proliant servers, and how they stay away from putting fans directly on a heatsync. I'll take a hot swappable fan any day.
Heat is a terrible thing to waste. Mine will make coffee.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Check out a NASA tech brief, Thermacore a company that makes them and MIC another company that makes them for more information.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Heat pipes are a simple yet usefull tech. They are currently being used by a mining company in the Canadian artic to make a dam to hold back water. They needed a way to hold back water in a lake without the expense and problems of a large concrete damn, they opted to create an earth damn that used the permafrost to keep it in place. In order to keep the permafrost as permafrost they used heat pipes. The idea is to draw out any heat from the surrounding ground and lose it in the air. Its very effective due to the rather cold climate and the fact that it requires no upkeep other than simple monitoring. I did a fast search on google but I couldnt find a reference to this specific use.
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
You never owned an air-cooled VW, did you?
Those radiators are oil coolers. Air cools the cylinders, which are finned like motorcycle cylinders. Oil does the rest of the job, besides lubricating, it soaks up much of the heat. Running the oil through a small radiator makes a large difference in some climates, but is usually unnecessary. Shoot, in Israel (commonly accepted as a pretty hot climate) they run without 'em just fine.
The reasons to add the radiator for oil-cooling are:
exposing the oil to a finned, air cooled radiator cools the oil off faster, leading to a cooler engine, and
having greater oil capacity means that the oil is more resistant to heating up, and adding the oil cooler adds more oil capacity.
And remember, the air-cooling on the VW is the same as it is on air-cooled porsches, a fan on the back of the generator (alternator) driven by a belt off the crankshaft. Pretty darn efficient.
Better ?flourinate? it.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
peltier cooling? No moving parts and easily controlled.
to err is human, to forgive is divine, to forget is... umm...
Just my $.02
Heh, Turd Report, don't question the moderators. They are fickle -- who know's what motivates them to moderate one way or the other.
I wish I could post at a lower score. I face a dilemma: I wish to ask Turd Report a question and common courtesy requires that I be logged-in when doing so; but at the same time I can only post at Score:1, making my post stick out like dogs' balls to those good folks who read at Threshold:1.
No matter. Turd Report, I don't understand why Tuesday's turd (the chicken) only scored a 2. Here is a fascinating turd, I thought as I was reading the report, but was disapointed to see it score so low. I know it must have been an unpleasant experience, but often artists must suffer for their work.
Solid-state Peltier-effect coolers are much more promising. They actually refrigerate, they have no moving parts, and they don't make noise.
I needed to read the title twice. I thought it said "Using RADIATION to Cool CPUs."
I was thinking, what are these guys crazy. All in the name of CPU cycles I guess eh?
why? I really don't follow...
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
I think in the not to distant future, some open source geek is going to write an autononymous robot program for linux. Maybe it will grab you a beer or get the newspaper, possibly even mow your lawn. I can see heat transfer become really useful outdoors on a hot summer day.
Also what about steel factories? Those places get red hot. How about volcano monitoring on Mt. Kilauea in Hawaii?
Potential customers:
Military
Aerospace
Petroleum
Geological Research
Development of these systems shouldn't just be marketed to the overclockers. People that are overclocking can't afford (or are too cheap to) buy a faster processor. I'm not knocking them, I think they are really cool beans. Yet I think these companies don't have a clue to who their target market should be. Instead of targeting the poor money less overclockers they should be going after customers where a cool CPU is a life or death situation, an absolute necessity.
There's always a better way to clue-by-four people- what you just did isn't it...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Minor nit pick
The conductivity of water is based purely on the impurites in it. If you had truely pure distilled water, it would not conduct.
I used to work on a transmitter that had water cooled voltage regulator tubes. They regulated many tens of thousands of volts with big wattage. You measured the purity of the water by the measuring the electric conductivity in fractions of micro-mhos
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Simple before you mold the CPU you add INSIDE the chip casing itself a small array of liquid carrying tubes .With two small adapters
for hoses.Yup directly in the cpu casing.
just plug the chip in it's socket..connect a few hoses and there you go.
people will ask how to fill the cpu
how to keep a filled cpu from dripping all over the place when removed etc..
One way valves and connectors anyone ?
richard
The Sega Dreamcast has liquid cooling.
It was seen as a major design flaw when first announced, but I've had no problems with mine.
we have fans to blow the heat away. the motor for the fan adds to the heat
but has a vacuum ever been tried to suck the heat away? the motor for this could be further away from the real heat problem.
someone attach a shopvac to their cpu and tell me the results. i've seen crazier things on here.
Instead of using a conventional radiator to cool the fluid, why not use a large reservoir of fluid that will cool via natural convection? Besides, a radiator would require a fan just to keep the fins cool.
My proposal:
Use a water block on your processor(s)
and recirculate water from a large fish tank.
I think large aquariums use a water pump for the filter system anyway.
Even a dual AMD box would have a hard time boiling off the water from a 30 gallon aquarium.
Indeed, DI H2O is a non-conductive liquid. The difficulty with water is its incredible abilities as a solvent. DI water would rapidly obtain ions fron the components submerged in it (metals such as lead, tin, silver come to mind). Eventually one of two things would happen. 1: The water obtains enough ions and becomes conductive, shorting the machine. Or 2: The water eats away some connection or component damaging the machine.
AUGAUUUGCGCACAUAUCUCAGCGAAUGAAAGGGAUUAA
Water cooling means you're carrying around water, which is a fairly heavy substance, and unlike fuel, water does no work for you. Granted there are advantages to water cooling, but it does have costs.
For ground pounding autos, the extra weight is not that big a deal, but getting rid of water in an piston-driven airplane means you can carry more cargo. A pound less of engine is a pound of something else you can carry. Also, you can devote more volume to processing fuel, which means for the same space, you can crank out more horsepower.
You'll find the majority of aircraft piston engines are air cooled.
If you read the article (broken ad software - phpAdsNew by the way :) - they said it wasn't the best, but it was probably getting there...
;) :)
How about utilizing the Peltier Effect - a.k.a. thermo electric cooling? =) Here is a little info here!
Granted, they use a lot of power - I've seen from around 50W to 200W...
Water cooling! I remember reading somewhere about Leufken - Gotta find a link... Just a sec...
Here it is! - Leufken Technologies - They got both watercooling and thermoelectric cooling, regular fans and heatsinks
I myself is using a twin cooler (CoolTium) for my Athlon 900 - but it is SOOOOOOOOOO noisy!
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
All that transmission gear (belts, clutches, driveshafts, "splitters" and so on) would make more noise than a group of individual motors. Plus, moving parts = wear & tear = maintenance.
Not to mention the headache when your single point of mechanical failure goes out.
I'm planning a new home and I will have access to a ground loop heat transfer system as the house will be on some acerage as opposed to say an apartment or something of that nature.
I want to use three vertically stacked car radiators circulating water outside the house in a small loop that dischrges heat into the ground at about six feet.
The boards will still have fans on the CPUs. They'll be stacked in a rack that is accessible inside the house as opposed to being in a separate room.
The idea of using automotive radiators will just be supplemental cooling. The question is, is it better for the overal HVAC equation to blow fan from behind the automotive radiators onto the board and out into the room, or is it better to blow the heat from the boards into the radiator and have the radiator extract the heat as a heat pump? I thought the latter made more sense, but folks I've mentioned it to say blowing from behind the radiator will provide better cooling.
We allready use air-cooling for our CPUs. A radiator is the next logical step in cooling. It's a simple matter of efficiently moving heat arround. Something that car manufacturers have been doing for ages with good success.
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Anyone else notice that the graphic on page 2 that shows the processor under load is messed up? The coloration for the MC462+delta and zen radiator are swapped. This graph shows the Zen as the worst of the coolers.
There was work done by Hamurgen and Fitch at DEC where they experimented with using heat pipe technology to cool chips way back in 1992.
s tracts/92.1.html
s tracts/90.9.html
They needed a liquid with a high heat of vaporization, and a boiling point in the 30-50C range. They tried mixtures of water and alcohol, but settled on just water, pumped down to 1/3 ATM.
They went looking through the "steam tables" and found that nobody had ever looked at the sub-atmospheric range of pressures, and had to derive all of the thermodynamic properties themselves.
It was pretty quiet, but made a funny little 'tick' noise right when it started boiling.
More details at http://www.research.compaq.com/wrl/techreports/ab
and http://www.research.compaq.com/wrl/techreports/ab
-Jeff Bell
You can't hack your car's ecu with linux, but you can hack your car's ecu with your palm :)
"Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
It's got *2* fans instead of one. How is that more quiet?
What the HELL does the DMCA have to do with overclocking?
.. has liquid cooling using an extremely similar method and was a mass manufactured games console in thousands of peoples homes. Suprised that no one else noticed :-)
Matt Bland
no login... no surrender
I've been said that sleeping under such kind of noise (similar to white noise) makes you deaf slowly, because of the permanent ear stimulation in a wide range of frecuencies. Has anyone any information about this?
My mind is open, so unleash the ideas
"Solid-state Peltier-effect coolers are much more promising. They actually refrigerate, they have no moving parts, and they don't make noise"
Peltier coolers are generally a bad idea, _unless_ the chip has to operate below the temperature of the cooling stream. The problem is that they are inefficient, i.e., you need 70 or 80 Watts of electric power to remove 10 watts of thermal power. All of the electric power supplied ends up as thermal power, so you now have to get rid of 8 times the heat that you originally had.
A great book for understanding thermal cooling issues is "Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks" by Tony Kordyban (www.asme.org). He explains peltiers shouldn't normally be used, and explains electronics cooling is an easily understood and humourous fashion.
Ive been in a server room and its freezing cold! Someone should invent a chip that *stays* cool!
Just what I've been waiting for: A CPU cooling device that physically breaks my CPU. Sounds like instead of a review of the product, they should have just had a 1 paragraph summary in large bold letters warning people from buying this defective product. Giving it a review almost gives it legitimacy.
HP uses water cooling sometimes. Fans are cheaper, and actually less expensive, but water systems are less likely to break, and easier to rapidly fix without opening the whole system.
This is a wannabe site, and their reports are
re-hashes of other crap. Useless as the Anarchist's
Cookbook. Juvenile and assinine. Warez puppies and douche-bag wannabe's. Waste of thread. Get a mufkin life or give up the code.
Yes, the dreamcast had a liquid based cooling system for it's graphics processor. Rather then have a HUGE heatsink, they had liquid filled pipe that circulated over the processor and then a fan. Unlike the Largest heatsink in the world that the PS2 has. The X-Box probably has a huge HS as well. ( not as big as the one they would be using if the had gone with athlon ).
While it is very fun to engage in Tim Allen-esque computer hot-rodding projects like liquid cooling and all, maybe we should instead focus on making CPU's that don't run so stinkin hot and use so much electricity.
Why does it need to be a closed system. Just pipe in your household cold water supply and dump to a drain or a resivoir or you hot water heater.
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.
Uhm... my Dell Inspiron has a water tube cooled CPU, it links to a radiator/heatsink near the back of the machine... and I got it almost a year ago... this isn't really anything new and spectacular. Intel developed it to work with the M series of Pentium III's... it's even listed on their site under technology.
... and all I wanted for xmas was a magic 8 ball, but i got this lousy
Or at least heatsinks made from the same ceramic stuff that they coat the outside of the shuttle with. I've seen one of those suckers cool down from red hot to hand hot in about 2 seconds.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
The average Intel CPU dissipate a waste heat much greater than the few watts absorbed by your average fan. So the idea seems reasonable.
Alas! The laws of thermodynamics often fly in the face of reasonable ideas. See, if you want to passively cool off the CPU, all you have to do is let it radiate its heat. But what you seem to wish for here is some kind of device that actively cools off that CPU, by taking some of that waste heat as its energy source. That's called a thermic engine. And here, thermodynamics get you: You can generate power from a heat source only if you have a cold "sink". All thermic engines work by getting heat from a heat source and moving it to a heat sink. E.g., for a car, the heat sink is the radiator.
Here, your contraption would use the CPU as a heat source and would require some sink, such as, oh, a radiator. Maybe with a fan. Which is exactly what we are trying to avoid.
So it's a nice catch-22. But think about it: if it worked, we would have big ships moving smoothly on all oceans, powered by the extracted heat of sea water and leaving a trail of ice cubes in their wake...
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
www.koolance.com has a new version of there water cooled case. this thing can water cool your cpu video card and hard drives. no fans in the case ( you may want one for air circulation) there a few temperture controlled fans on the top of the case, but im willing to bet this case is quieter then most cases. not to mention its great for overclocking.
Water out of the tap, or water that has had some contact with conductive materials is conductive. Pure distilled water is not conductive at all. Im not sure if this is offtopic, but it was in a thread talking about inert fluids good for heat transfer.
It is actually kind of funny. When he turns his computer on, it sounds like an aquarium.
He basically took a car radiator as I understand it.
Basically whenever we go to the computer store, he goes next door to the hardware store to pick up some tubing.
Pretty awesome.
I have 3656.9 Bogomips. How many Bogomips do you have?
so why should my puter? Yes my car is considered a little bit odd these days. Its a '63 Volkswagen Beetle. But still... I think I'll stick with the good old fashion simple puters.
Vapochill did this over 2 years ago. Check out cpu bongs or Kryotech for real cpu cooling! This chills it down to -40 degrees C.
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
a tube which is attached to cpu heatsink...
you get a fishtank + fish + computer + fish screensaver...
Well, Kryotech has been doing this for quite a long time. They worked with AMD to create the first 1GHz PC. I first heard about them when the 300MHz comps were new, but they were probably doing this before then.
As Jet power has been used as a beer cooler, why not go against the recommendation therein and apply the technology to CPU cooling. Certainly would give the neighbours something to complain about.
The idea is awesome, but the zen cooler is just too goofy. kendon This one looks sweet to me. It doesn't try to look like a sneaker. -- duffahtolla
...and being prosecuted under the DMCA all for the sake of a few extra MHz.
Um, please DO tell me you're kidding.
What I, or anyone else, chooses to do with my processor after I buy it is MY business. We're not talking about art, or artistic license here, but a consumer electronics product.
The only time it becomes illegal is if, through the process of overclocking, I damage the CPU, and then try to claim warranty - that's fraud. Otherwise, if I want to run my 1GHz Athlon @ 1.5GHz, there's no-one who has the right to stop me.
This has been common among overclockers for a couple of years at least, and I'm using it on a 1.3GHz Athlon running at normal speed. I found it would not run under heavy load (like big graphic renders) without going past the BIOS temp limit, whereupon it would slow the clock down. (This is on a home-assembled system with the Asus A7A266 mobo. A coworker tells me his son has no such problem with the same chip in his Compaq, but I have to wonder if the OEM systems aren't simply implementing software overtemp protection without announcing it.) I was able to get the temp to stay in limits by installing a high-quality copper heatsink and a very potent fan, but the noise level was a show stopper: loud and VERY offensive, so I went to a water cooling setup. It's a bit of a hassle, but works very well. The only purpose-built component is a copper heat exchanger block that bolts onto the CPU; the rest consists of an aquarium pump, a plastic water tank and a transmission cooler. Overclockers don't consider this an unusual setup at all. They start with water, and then typically add a Peltier-effect thermoelectric cooler which is essentially a heat pump between the CPU and the water block. Others are experimenting with various types of true phase-change refrigeration. rj
in audio amplifiers from the 60's and 70's?
Sorry, no pictures online yet, other people have plenty however. I got my kit from cool-computers.com, but there's lots of other ones out there. You don't use alcohol in a liquid cooled system because not only is it flammable, the vapours are extremely explosive. If you had a minor vapour leak, the slightest spark inside your computer - like, oh, say, a motor, a bad capacitor, your power supply, whatever - would cause an explosion. Alcohol at near purity running at ~40C is also extremely flammable. That's INSANE.
Please, nobody attempt to use alcohol to liquid cool a PC. It's dangerous. If you want to experiment with other liquids with higher specific heats, try an oil instead, but understand the risks. No, I'm not responsible if you blow up your machine. Distilled water is a wonderful insulator, too. No worries there. $1 buck for 4 liters at the local Walmart. Hardly exotic.
I'm running a athlon 1.2G mildly overclocked (1.3g) with the entire apparatus inside a mid tower case. I got sick of my work machine locking up because of overheating (the lab I work in has poor ventilation and gets extremely hot). Liquid cooling works extremely well, but it's far from plug and play and definately not something for beginners. :)
..don't panic
Reminded me of the following I read up in FUD DEF :
"AMSTRAD, a UK consumer electronics manufacturer, had a reputation of selling reasonably OK electronics goods at rock-bottom prices. Much of their success was due to rationalized design, giving customers what they most desired whilst keeping the construction simple. One day they decided to launch a range of PC's aimed at the home consumer. Due to the optimization of the design, AMSTRAD decided that a 35W PSU would be sufficient, even if a hard disk and tape-streamer were added (at that time many low end PC's just had twin floppy drives). As the computer was supplied complete with a monitor (and monitors have complicated PSU requirements), they also decided that instead of putting the standard PSU in the corner of the box (as most manufacturers still do today), they would supply the computer from the monitors PSU, which was accordingly upgraded.
This actually spawned another advantage. Monitors dissipate a lot of heat, and so the large case is peppered with holes to allow effective convention cooling. Computers by contrast tend to be closed boxes, and so it was (and still is) normal to have a fan incorporated in the PSU. As the AMSTRAD had no PSU in the case, and the contents dissipated typically 20W, they ran quite happily with no fan (they had incorporated convection cooling in the case), and so were also quieter.
The AMSTRAD computers were a great success. Too great. Not only did they sell in AMSTRAD's traditional consumer market, but they were finding a place in office environments, where equivalent 'traditional' models cost typically 50-100% more, and of course the AMSTRAD'S were quiet. FUD campaign gets rolling. "The AMSTRAD has no cooling fan", shock horror. "Stick a hard disk in an AMSTRAD and it melts", aghhh.., "If your program crashes it is because your AMSTRAD has no cooling fan".
The FUD was easily refuted. AMSTRADS actually worked quite well, and you could use them all day, then feel the box and find it to be cool. Nonetheless, many new customers where being scared away from the AMSTRAD because it had no fan when everybody else did. So in the end AMSTRAD fitted fans, right in the back corner where the PSU normally goes. Of course the AMSTRAD had no PSU there, and because the case was designed for natural air-flow, a simple test with a cigarette would soon reveal that the air was just going round in circles"