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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}}
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!
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.
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/
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.
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
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.
Several reasons why water is not commonly found in computers. One, water an electricity do no mix well. Two, it is very expensive to make the many parts required to keep water in the cooling system, keep it flowing, and still allow it to exchange the heat with air. By very expensive, I don't mean hundreds of dollars per CPU, but considering that a heatsink and fan combo are very inexpensive to manufacture...
I know that there is a company called Thermacore does it for Dell laptops. I have been able to play around with their heat pipes and they are amazing. I believe Thermacore does product for any laptop product higher than a C600. So to answer the question.. YES! Are there anymore company's like this besides these 2?
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
The Zen review is on page four.
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"
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.
sPh
IIRC, *pure* water doesn't conduct electricity. It's all the crap found in freshwater that make it conduct.
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'.
...if it hadn't DESTROYED their CPU and their motherboard.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
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
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
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
Actually mainframes went away from water cooling, starting with Amdahl in 1979. Nowadays even IBM's highend mainframes are air cooled.
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.
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.
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
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).
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
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.
True. However pure water picks up impuritieds. Take some 18 megaohm water (the purest we can achive) pour it into a clean glass, and just from the air it will have picked up a lot of impurities. (I've been told how much, but can't recall. puts the water way out of spec though)
Solid-state Peltier-effect coolers are much more promising. They actually refrigerate, they have no moving parts, and they don't make noise.
why? I really don't follow...
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
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"
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.
Good idea. Why not hook up a whole bunch of Athlon/P4 PC's to the same tank...
This will provide a good source of goldfish snacks for a Q3 fragfest.. Feed the critters with some cheddar flakes for a few days prior.
--- sig moved for great justice.
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.
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
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.
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
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/
...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.
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