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."

Comments

Re:Submerging circuit board in an inert liquid

[Raptor CK]

You mean Fluorinert?

I remember seeing an overclocking/cooling experiment with this somewhere. Cool stuff, until it turns to mustard gas.

Also reviewed...

[Daniel Rutter]

...by, ahem, me, as part of my monster cooler comparison.

The Zen review is on page four.

Health Issues

[squaretorus]

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'.

Re:another way to do this

[CausticPuppy]

Good idea in theory but that won't move heat quickly enough for powerful cpu's. Also, your case would get very warm and act like an oven around your hard drives and other components. You'd have to drastically increase airflow through the case in order to keep the rest of the system cool, which would defeat the noiseless aspect of the copper wire cooling method. With cpu heatsinks, the heated air is usually vented right out without circulating to the other components.
Without a real heatsink that has a large air-exposed surface area a relatively short distance from the chip, you'll wind up with an impressive heat gradient across the wire.
An Athlon chip will get up to roughly 600-700 degrees (F) within just a few seconds of power-on if no heatsink is attached. The copper cloth wire might bring it down a bit but you're still talking about having something exposed inside your case that's hot enough to melt wire insulation and probably catch dust on fire (after your system crashes of course).

What you don't know.... WAS : Hell, *I* know...

[firewort]

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.

Liquid cooled mainframes are obsolete

[Animats]

IBM mainframes used to be water-cooled. Cray mainframes used to be Freon-cooled. One Cray machine of the early 1990s actually ran immersed in Fluorinert. All those machines were plumbing nightmares. IBM considered it a big step forward when the water-cooled mainframes were replaced by air-cooled mainframes. Far fewer maintenance headaches. You don't want to go to liquid cooling on the desktop unless there's no alternative.

Solid-state Peltier-effect coolers are much more promising. They actually refrigerate, they have no moving parts, and they don't make noise.

Thermal generator runs against thermodynamics

[SysKoll]

Atilla,

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...

-- SysKoll