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Notebook Cooling Strategies
An Anonymous Coward writes "As components shrink, heat control becomes critical. Hitachi will sell water-pump cooling for notebooks while Sony has fancy, twin-fan ductwork in its new Vaio laptops. Meanwhile, a ceramics company that's testing a coating that's highly efficient in radiating heat away from processors and race car engines." We mentioned the water-cooled notebooks earlier.
But it keeps an army of fans to keep my desktop cool enough to runs stabely, and it sounds like an aircraft carrier.
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
to see how this technology proceeds. I can see some interesting applications if efficient heat dissipation techniques like these become more commercially prevalent, although it would also be nice to see the progress be made on the proc side instead...
--Kevin
IMO I think that ceramic-based cooling systems are going to be the way that things like this are cooled in the future. The cooling capacity of ceramics is much more economical than mechanical systems. Examine the space shuttle's cooling capacity vs. weight, complexity, and cost of other traditional systems.
Imagine your car being cooled by a ceramic plate that never rusts, never needs refilling, and won't kill your pets. Sure it might break, but the cost to replace a ceramic cooling system will be much less than the cost to build a radiator.
you don't have to outrun the bear, just the slowest person in your group.
Lately I've found if I want to prop it on the corner of my bed to place a few silver dollars under it, which works pretty well as they elevate it, give some ventilation and also wick away heat rather effectively, but perhaps not for everyone. :) Old cruddy silver dollars can be found for ~$7 each at coin shows and about a dozen works well.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
tends to cook my legs very well now. If it were able to conduct heat any more efficiently I believe it would become too painful to use. On the other hand that kind of thing could lead to a lawsuit that would get me out of the daily grind and into the life of luxury I deserve.
Ceramics are cool - I love ceramic knives but they are so easy to break.
Water cooled laptops would make for 'funny' commercials with guys crawling over sand dunes gasping "water!, water!" and then pouring it into their computers. I could be a marketing genius.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I have a sony Vaio, and that thing sounds like a friggin jet engine when it's running. The fans are unbelievably loud. You can even hear them when on a plane. I highly doubt I will buy another Sony laptop.
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Now how long will it take to get Coppertone 1500 (with Cerac alpha-1500 heat dissipation)?
I purchased a HP Xf145 notebook from Sam's Club about 1 month ago, for the price it was a great machine, 1ghz mobile amd, 20 gig hd, 512Megs of ram for $1200. Only problem is that it locked up randomly, and frequently. HP refused to acknowledge that there was a problem and I ended up returning it to Sam's Club for a full return. (15 day full return). I ended up purchasing a Toshiba Sattelite 5005-S507 that I can't be happier with. It cost me a bit more (~$1600, I bought it refurbished) and it features the Geforce4 chipset, 1.1 ghz true p3, 512 megs ram, 40 gig hd, firewire, 8x/4x/cdrw/dvd combo drive and many other features. Even though it has a full desktop processor in it I have yet to have a lockup on it and it's as stable as anything I've ever ran.
20000 / 5 / 365.25 = 10.95 years. Good enough for me.
I find no matter how quiet they make these cooling systems in both laptops and desktops, water or air-cooled, its the hard drive noise that's drives me nuts. I use SilentPC stuff, including their hard drive cover, but I still find that high pitched whir of the HD is the loudest and most irritating thing coming out of my box.
Now sure I can get my hard drive to spin down when not in use, but even when I'm not sitting at the computer there are many a cron job that need to get done, and when they write to disk the hard drive spins up again. Apparently IBM's drives are supposed to be quiet, but I got one and they are anything but.
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5 times per day = 5*365 = ~1800 open/close cycles per year. This is more than 10 years.
sucka!
No probs. Just put it in the freezer and it will be icy cold in the morning when you take it to work.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I have to change the radiator fluid in my computer. Perhaps the colder regions will require anti-freeze (no longer for just software, for hardware as well)
mund freud.
Don't water cooled systems consume more battery power than air cooled? For me, battery life is more important than size, so I'd be more inclined to purchase a larger air cooled system with longer battery life than a smaller water cooled system with a relatively short battery life.
Ban laptops in Antarctica. http://www.boston.com/news/daily/09/iceberg.htm
There's hell to pay.
One could always inspire computer makers to simply develop more heat-efficient chips...
:)
This has the added benefit of increasing battery life, as in most cases heat emission is proportional to power draw (all that energy has to go somewhere, and it usually comes out as heat).
Motorola has done a pretty good job, probably b/c their main market is for embedded systems. This has the result that Apple laptops are remarkably power efficient and give off little heat. My iBook's fan has *never* turned on since I bought it about a year ago. It has gotten warm, but the fan hasn't ever needed to turn on. tiBooks have G4 chips, which are less "cool" while running, so PowerBook G4 fans turn on more often. And I imagine the transmeta Crusoe is similiar, though i've never used a Crusoe laptop
But still, one would imagine it would be cheaper to develop more energy-efficient chips, rather than simply finding ways to vent that energy. Of course, If venting must be done, I am all for fractal-geometry heatsinks at the nano-level (maximizes surface area in which heat venting can occur, for a lot less price than water cooling, not to mention being very nice and quiet), but thats a topic for another post
Anyways, my point is that it might be better to develop a solution at the chip level, rather than have to compensate for power-guzzling chips by having obnoxiously loud and edxpensive cooling solutions.
The fact that the portable device is generating that much heat means you're loosing a lot of your precious battery to resistance, not a very good use of your battery life.
they should be mainly concerning themselves with lessening energy consumption and keeping the same performance if they really want to make something worthwhile. unless of course someone wants to come out with a dual processor notbook, batter life would then infact be a moot point.
I used to have a Vaio, and like others, I have expereinced leg cooking heat when using it as a 'laptop' (that is if the battery ever lasts that long). Plus, the fan was noisy - there is an option in the Sony Power management software to switch the fan off, however, i think performance is comprimised. :-)
I've now got an iBook, and not only do my legs stay cool.. it is also extremely quite (no fans, just uses convection currents if I'm correct), the only sound being the harddrive below the left palm rest.
Personally, I think Apple notebooks are the quietest. Less heat/noise = less energy is wasted thus, longer battery life...
Fight Crime - Shoot Back!
Rather than finding ways to eliminate heat generated, I thought more research should focus on reducing heat generation. For example, with the proliferation of solid-state drives such as CompactFlash cards, do notebooks really need a mechanical spinning hard disk???
I have a Dell C800 (1ghz) laptop. When the fan comes on, people look over...when the second comes on, people dive for cover. (Well, maybe they are not really that loud) It would be nice if they could sync the RPM's a little better so it doesn't have the "whir" "whir" "whir" sound. That's the price I have to pay for a 1st gen gightz laptop.
I've got some copper piping stuff going from my CPU to the fans, which supposedly has some super heat conductive stuff in it.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I guess there are three available options for cooling here. 1 - Active (fans, coolant circulators, Peltiers anything else?)....2 Passive (fin type radiators, coolant circulators) ... and 3 -Mixed solutions (passive + active when using intensive CPU)...
It stands to reason that since battery life is always a concern w/ laptops then passive cooling should always be used, and if not sufficient then some active cooling as well. In arid areas (Southwest USA) evaporative air conditioning works very well so an evaporative strategy might work - however you're screwed once you hit the east coast i.e. Washington DC.... My low tech solution is obvious...use a readly available heat sink that is non-toxic, cheap, easy to obtain....ICE WATER You can get it anywhere you go (airplanes/7-11s, etc) - just add a temp sensor to your laptop to indicate when you need to build up some coolant reserves.. It shouldn't take that much engineering to isolate any condensation problems..
..........FULL STOP.
I prefer using my laptop outside in the middle of winter in Wisconsin. Luckily I will be going to Michigan Tech next year so the same cooling method will still work.
- Pimp
I like computers, women and computers... in that order...
Freon.
Yet another signature that refers to itself. The irony and humor is dead.
There's this article I found... some people have developed ways to cool silicon using nothing but silicon! Here's the article. I remember also a little side article about refrigerating silicon (the silicon acts as a active heat dissipater) in Popular Science a few issues back but I'm too lazy to dig through my room or do a web search.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
What I'm wondering is why no one has attempted to regenerate that heat back into usable energy. Sure, there will be significant losses, but if you end up with a net energy profit, it is probably worth it. Other potential drawbacks include increased weight, cost and complexity. However these are all things that engineers, over time, could overcome.
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
I seem to recall a recent batch of a very lightweight carbon based foam that was VERY effective at conducting heat. Perhaps such a substance could be used as a solid "heat pipe" to a larger area of same such substance on the back of the notebook screen (to avoid that "hotlap" syndrom all of us that use P4's know too well). I know there are probably major challenges to such a system, but I have it working (in principle at least) in my heat storage in my solar greenhouse. Heat conduction does not have to be liquid. I am sure there are a few esoteric solids out there with the correct mix of performance and price. I know liquid cooling is both efficient and cheap, but I have serious doubts about the longevity of such systems in practical use. Laptops and portables of all kinds take more abuse than Bill Gates at a Linux Convention. I shudder at the thought of my pride and joy springing a "leak" on a business trip and ruining my day AND my data. Just my 2 cents.
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
Now that we have a portable water heater free with our laptops maybe we could put it to good use
1) We use it as a coffee maker. Just add a USB (Ultra Strong Beans) port and let the laptop do its stuff
2)Power generation. Use the heat to make steam . use the steam to turn the mini turbines which can replace the fans and use the power generated to recharge your laptop.
3) Fight against terrorism. Add a nozzle for squirting super hot water. Any terrorist trying to take over a plane would face 20 streams of boiling hot water in his face.
Any other suggestions?
**Life is too short to be serious**
I thought it said "Notebook Cooking Strategies" I often fry eggs on my titanium ibook, Apple's non-stick coating is the best!
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
1) We're going to finally start seeing hard-drive free systems. RAM is actually cheap enough that one to two gigs, living off an independent power supply, should be price competitive with a ten gig hard drive. Though XP might need to be shaved down a bit to fit in such a small amount of space, the increased system speed and vastly decreased amount of moving parts should make a significant difference in both power consumption and heat generation(the two are arguably the same thing). On the flip side, repeatedly pulsing that much memory might actually drain more power than I'd guess, and battery life on the RAM might not extend past a few days. In this case, I could still see a microdrive + RAM combo, or even a system that flat out just ran off a 2gb microdrive.
2) CPU heat will eventually be turned into a power source. Heh -- it's there, it's dependable, and if nothing else, it'll supplement primary power sources. I don't know how efficient electrical heat->power systems are -- I doubt Peltiers are going to work too well here, and we ain't sticking a turbine into a laptop (though Microfluidics just got much, much more interesting!). So this is the "five-to-ten years down the road" likelihood.
3) I feel like sounding like an idiot for a second, so I'll put this out there just for someone else to discredit: What about mechanical compression? Imagine a spring on the side of a laptop that needed to be pushed in periodically, but would absorb heat by slowly expanding. It'd be annoying, but each time the spring was compressed, heat should be lost reasonably harmlessly to the user's musculature. I'm sure this doesn't work, but I'd be interested in knowing the history of why not.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
One of the major problems with laptops today is that they are very difficult to actually keep on your lap. Most have either air intakes or exhausts on the bottom, so keeping them on your lap can plug the intake and make the machine overheat. The situation is even worse when sitting the machine on something soft like a blanket -- it completely plugs the air holes. I like using my vaio to watch movies while lying on my bed, but I have to put a book under one edge of it to keep the bottom from being in direct contact with the blanket; if I don't, I can certainly feel it heat up very quickly.
When we hear about some hardware geek using water cooling to ratchett up his l33t box to 3 ghz we think he's crazy. But when Dell does it, it's news.
AMCGLTD.COM. Where cats, science fictio
I had to post this. Apple gets so bashed for the SLOW cpu's it uses. Perhaps rightfully so from the speed addict's point of view.
My iBook may not be the fastest machine on the block, but it is more than adequate for the things I need it for: daily work, e-mail, database programming, scientific computation in Maple, Internet research. It runs OSX quite nicely with 384 MB of memory. Uptime is currently 78 days. Last shutdown was for an OS upgrade requiring re-start.
The only noise I ever hear (I've had it for a year) is the hard drive head clicking away. No fan noise. And,...No forced water cooling system. My lap barely gets warm from the battery when it is recharging.
I'm very satisfied. And my iBook is way cool.
Icebergs
**Life is too short to be serious**
that the only truly efficient cooling system is liquid nitrogen in a styrofoam cup!
Uh, how do you know it's not broken?
Am I the only one wondering about the concept of taking water and electronics and combining them together? I mean, after all, one little leak and - zaaaaap. No more laptop.
IMO, things like ceramics would be much better, if for no other reason then that I've never heard of ceramics killing electronics (well, short of having a clay pot fall on a laptop or something).
-Tim
-------------
"You would not get a high grade for such a design" -- Andy Tanenbaum on Linus' Linux design.
--Chag
or just get a nice, cool-runnin' power pc...
Using tap water is a good idea in theory, but all water (except stuff from a lab) has impurities, and these would clog your system after enough use.
Hitachi will sell water-pump cooling for notebooks
Imagine you're using a notebook with water cooling in a public place and it somehow starts leaking. You suddenly have hot water running all over you and when you stand up you somehow have to explain how that big wet spot got on your pants in the first place...
Unfortunately, you're wrong about it being cheaper. A water pump is orders of magnitudes cheaper to engineer than a completely new chip. Furthermore, the total abject failure of the Crusoe in the marketplace seems to suggest that few people will make the tradeoff of higher price and lower performance for less power and less heat (unless, of course, it comes in fruity colors). Maybe in another couple years when someone sues because of first degree leg burns received from their "laptop" things will change...
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
What you want is a Seagate Barracuda ATA-IV. They have fluid bearings and run so quiet it's startling. I upgraded my TiVo to a 60Gb Seagate and a Vantec Stealth cooling fan, and now I literally cannot hear it (except for occasional seek noise during heavy activity) when I'm sitting on the couch, 12 ft. away. My desktop machine has the 40Gb version and it's just as quiet.
Once you solve the hard drive problem, your next issue is the cooling fans. At this point I have a near-silent CPU cooler (the Vantec Stealth again), and a near-silent Panasonic Panaflo case fan that usually isn't even running. The loudest component is my power supply fan, which I might try to replace soon.
Of course, when you have to go unplug the refrigerator to be able to hear which component is making noise, it's arguable that your PC is already as quiet as it needs to be...
-Graham
It just seems to me that water cooling is so. . .clunky. It takes a lot of energy to circulate water which has to come from somewhere. Water is HEAVY. And there's always the obvious problem of water around sensitive electronics, as anyone who's "water-cooled" a gameboy in the bathtub will tell you.
One of my roomies has a water-cooled case, and the sucker is heavy, expensive, takes a lot of water, and sucks a ton of power. Keeps his athlon cool without a huge roaring fan, but if the thing ever tips over I would think he's out a lot of money. Not to mention the huge stain on the carpet.
Water cooling can't be the answer for laptops; too inefficient, too heavy, and its a dated idea. I would think that chips that ran cooler would be a more long-term solution.
Sides, if your laptop sprung a leak, I think a wet lap on a plane for 8 hours would be damn unpleasant.
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
Yep -- you can read about it here.
(shamelessly plugging my own site...so sue me)
--kurt
Gentoo Linux http://gentoo.org/
There is no reason a system has to be that loud. Generally, removing the case venting will reduce a lot of the turbulence (and thus noise) in your system. Additionally, you can replace your fans with cooler ones like Papst or Panaflos.
The noisiest (or at least most annoying) components in a system tend to be the small fans, such as CPU fans and video card fans. You can replace those with passive heatsinks and then run larger (quieter) 80mm case fans to maintain enough airflow to keep things quiet.
For more information on keeping your system quiet, see the web site in my sig.
--kurt
Gentoo Linux http://gentoo.org/
I know this will probably be read by nobody, but nonetheless...
I sold my iBook a few months back and just recently bought a PC laptop. The iBook got too hot for my taste (but that's not why I sold it, that's a whole other issue). Anyway, my new x86 laptop is a Sager NP5620 model. Mine has been upgraded to a 2.4ghz P4 (Northwood core, 0.13u). Yet, this laptop barely gets warm. It has two very quiet fans on the bottom that have some interesting channeling so that air flows quite well. The fans are placed in just the right position under the laptop that when sitting on your lap, they are between your legs. When your legs are crossed, again the fans are placed correctly. I've sat with this laptop on my lap for two hours once, and not once did I get uncomfortably warm. As a matter of fact, it's on my lap right now. It runs BSD like a champ.
These guys have the problem licked, IMO. Compared to the Dell's and Vaio's we've got at work... holy gawd! Those things are three to four times hotter than the iBook! Yipes!
- AnoniCoward.
What I'm wondering is why no one has attempted to regenerate that heat back into usable energy. Sure, there will be significant losses, but if you end up with a net energy profit, it is probably worth it.
Net energy profit? Young lady, in this house we obey the laws of THERMODYNAMICS!!!
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Wouldn't anti-freeze work better than water? It works better in cars doesn't it?
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
The old Sun optical mouse pads were made of aluminium. I put one under the CPU unit of my ASUS B1 notebook. As long as it keeps in contact with the bottom of the laptop (rubber feet sometimes get in the way) it keeps it running cooler.
:)
Also, running Linux keeps the laptop temperature down compared to WinXP. Linux seems to be more efficient in that category as well!
The leaking issue and conductivity of water has already been solved by 3M with their flourinert product. Conducts heat great, toss a running electrical device into a pool of it and it won't create a single short. My memory is a little fuzzy here, but it's not all that expensive (well much more expensive then water, but a lot less expensive then say printer ink cartridges). The only problem I see with water cooled laptops is the radiator/pump and keeping the system efficient without making it huge. It took me an enormous AT tower to make a self-contained water cooled desktop.
Power consumption on chips will most likely continue to rise into the future. Process technology shinks (025um -> 0.18um, for example) have long been used to lower power, but transistors have now gotten so small that they are essentially conducting even while they are supposed to be turned off. In addition, everyone tries to cram more transistors onto a chip to improve performance which uses more power. Finally, pipelining improves performance by allowing higher frequencies, but faster clocks use more power. The end result is that chips will continue to get hotter into the future. Patrick Gelsinger from Intel gave a keynote at the ISSCC 2001 conference showing graphs in this rise in power and said that power will be one of the biggest challenges faces designers going forward.
In mobile apps, the majority of consumers pay little attention to battery life beyond looking for a minimum theshold (an hour and a half). In addition, since there is no defined way to test for power that is enforced between manufacturers, there is no easy way to compare battery life using the manufacturer's specifications. Performance sells CPUs in the mobile space - not power savings. At least not yet.
As long as performance continues to be the key selling point of CPU's, the power situation isn't likely to get better - and, at best, can only hope to stand constant. Performance and power savings are generally opposed in CPU designs similar to the way fuel economy and high-performance engines generally are opposites. Even if power becomes the key selling point, the future still doesn't look bright for power dissipation on chips. Current leakage in supposedly "off" transistors will continue to rise in future process technologies.
* Not speaking for Intel Corp. *
Notebooks are doing some incredible things in the way of upping power/features/screen size/etc while shrinking drastically in size and weight - and ending up with some problems such as heat dissipation. In my mind the biggest advantage to a notebook apart from its' portability, is the weight issue - not size. Surely giving quite a bit more space inside the box isn't going to add all that much to weight, may bring a laptop an extra half inch higher while increasing air cooling possibilities incredibly.
I can see that laptops have a high 'just plain sexy' component, which isn't likely to go away. A rep in a former workplace of mine insisted on one of the top Compaq notebooks, when his only need was for a PDA. Thin does sell for many people, but for me an iBook or TiBook would be just as nice at twice the depth.
a grrl & her server
People like you are going to be the reason that Anonymouse posts get banned...
What I meant to say was that unless the fan is on, the loudest sound the ibook produces are the clicks of the keyboard. When and if the fan ever comes on, however, it sounds like a dremel...
More effective cooling - install a reservoir in the laptop, and fill it with freezer spray (freely available). This will cool the CPU/heatsink to -50 Celsius, just target the spray at the CPU.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
A big bucket attached to the back of the LCD screen where the heatsink is located. You fill thes bucket with ice which contacts the heatsink directly, then the melted ice water goes into another bucket, perhaps on the floor...
Great idea man! I can't wait to lug that thing around...
One problem with the new faster-than-God chips is that the clock signal has to switch every clock cycle (duh). Most waste heat comes from the switching from 1 to 0 or vice versa, so that shiny new 1.7 GHz P4 laptop is going to be making that clock signal heat 3 times faster than the 600 MHz machine you're using now. If CPU makers went for more aggressive parallelism (AMD for x86, IA-64 long term, etc) the clock wouldn't need to switch nearly as fast, saving us a lot of wasted energy. Of course, Joe Consumer is still only looking at the clock speed when buying a new laptop, so manufacturers are stuck to following the market and driving battery life into the ground
This post is targeted towards people who know the internals of a Dell Inspiron. It's kind of hard to describe, but bear with me. Basically, you have the CPU under a thick metal plate (of what type, I am not sure). Between that is the compound, and then a copper plate with a copper pipe squeezed into it. This pipe then goes about 2-3 inches to the right where it is joined to a sink and fan.
I was having some severe overheating problems with my laptop (Dell Inspiroin 3800) for a while. I opened it up and discovered a less than ideal situation for moving the heat from the CPU's metal casing to the copper pipe that lead to the exhause (another sink with a fan on it).
Betwen the Cu pipe and the CPU's casing was a piece of fabric with what appeared to be Ti-oxide (generic, crappy thermal compound) on it. I had just recently bought a tube of Arctic Silver II at a computer show, and decided to try it out. After removing the wad of junk, I put a nice glob of AS2 on the CPU casing. I wanted to make sure there wa sufficient quantity to ensure full contact between the uneven (kind of bent) and poorly designed copper piece. When putting the assembly back together, I put the frabic wad on top of the copper plate and between a bracket that held the thing together (to apply more pressure between the CPU's metal casing and the Cu).
I managed to lower my CPU's temperature by about 5-15degF on average. I noticed when my fan was on, the air coming from the remotely located heatsink facility was a little warmer than before, indicating success.
Conclusion: your laptop probably has a rather crappy cooling solution. Go to a computer show, get some decent thermal compound, and do a little hacking. Just make sure to test your setup a lot to make sure you actually made an improvement or at least a lateral move.
Why bother.
Look at all the items currently needing cooling:
:) (to boot...damn funny)
CPU,
Graphic cards (gpu)
power supplies
Soon RAM
So when are these high heat items going to be put into a package that will accept "super cooling". Either water with a heat exchanger or a more sophisticated cooler.
Damn, I can buy a college fridge for $89, if that would allow doubling or quadrupling the clock speed I'm all for it! Also a good place to put all that beer as in "free"
I proposed this to John Dvorak 3 or 4 years ago after a plane trip from S.F. to N.Y. with a bunch of IBM Think Heads (which this was a main topic of conversation) and all I got back was that "condensation would be a bitch" (something like that)...geeze if that's a tech problem how did we ever get to 2 ghz cpu's running at ambient with nothing more then cpu fans (which for me by the way, cumulatively cost more than a college beer fridge! I actually heat my home office with my pc's...summers are so sweaty) I think that if producing mobo's was more like producing software this would already be available and GPL'd to boot
Folks are proclaiming that notebooks are taking over the desktop...I say "super cooling" will win back the desktop for mid-sized cased computers. Bring on my 10 ghz CPU
For those that believe $89 more for a 10 ghz cpu is not necessary I simply point out that it would take only 1 hour of productivity improvement over the course of 1 year for break even.
But WTFDIK?
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
My laptop gets super hot when I'm in bed at night, so I needed something to cool them down. I froze some baggies filled with water and duct taped shut. at night, I take them out, triple bag them just to be safe, and put them under my laptop.
The Space Shuttle has very different needs for it's cooling system, one of the most important being working in a vacuum. This means that the of the 3 methods of transferring heat (conduction, convection, and radiation), only radiation is acceptable. To do this black body radiation part, of the shuttle, the radiator, must do something entirely unacceptable for your computer: get really hot. Black body radiators are among the least efficient coolers in the business, and a very bad choice for computers.
The ceramic coolers you are thinking about work just the came as other CPU heat sinks, that is they conduct the heat away from the cpu and the convect it off to a passing fluid (air, water, oil...), they just do it better than metallic heat sinks.
An important thing to consider when looking at water coolers for computers is that they recalculate the water, so... In order to work, they ultimately need to dump the heat that the pick up. which means these things still have fans, they just cool water, instead of metal.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
This is somewhat offtopic, but ceramics are not as breakable as people think (teacup hitting a concrete floor).
There are hammers made out of ceramics and internal combustion engines. These are pretty much the most extreme applications - both involve high resistance to impact and high pressures.
The hammers actually outlast steel hammers, and ceramic engines are almost impossible to wear out. I'm not sure if it's the price or the engineer knowledge that's keeping them from being widely used. After all, the properties of steel and aluminum are well known to all engineers - those of ceramics aren't.
I've had success using an invention of my own devising, called the "God Antenna." It's a 20 foot long chunk of copper (used aluminum first before I could afford the copper) made into a docking station for my Toshiba Satellite. Always keeps my laptop at the ambient temp.
Somewhat dangerous during those spring lightning storms, however.
Looking inside my Apple PowerBook G4, I see things that look very much like pipes traveling away from the CPU to other areas of the laptop (areas which tend to get rather warm), and I assume these are the phase-change heat pipes I heard about a few years back. Whether Apple is the only company doing this, I don't know, but it is sure cool, pardon the pun. The fact that the G4 consumes less power is also a big help.
I'm now going to go off on a tangent, mentioning various aspects of physics that are barely relevant, but pretty damn cool. First of all, a bunch of people have suggested using the heat as a power source. While you can use temperature gradients as a power source (think thermocouples), it's damn unlikely to be practical here (the power harnessed would be trivia).
Second, I'd like to point out that heat dissipation is becoming an increasingly-important problem in CPU design. Although we're not there yet, there are theoretical limits on how efficient non-reversible computations can be, in a thermal sense. In other words, each time you manipulate a bit (to be really picky, each time you reset a bit), it must produce a certain amount of heat. This could be the hard limit that breaks Moore's Law for classical, non-reversible computers. The way around this is to use reversible gates (such as in quantum computing), which have no such minimum heat cost. For instance, the XOR gate can be replaced with the controlled-not (CNOT) gate, which is reversible. This would require a major reworking of how we build computers... But I digress... Suffice it to say, heat is a big problem, and it's only going to get worse.
well, in that case, you are an ass licking cock gobbling jagoff.
...typically, heat-related coatings on engine components are designed to keep heat *in*, so belts, hoses, and other non-metal parts don't get fried.
I guess I could see an application to radiators -- parts that are specifically designed to radiate heat -- for some "heat-phobic" coating, but it seems highly unlikely. 1) Drag racers are concerned about a quarter mile that goes by in somewhere between 4 and 10 seconds; there's not enough time for heat to make it to these fancy coatings. 2) Road racers sustain speeds of 100mph+, and wind alone does a heck of a cooling job at those speeds.
I can't say the racecar angle is bunk, but I can say it's the reverse of my limited experience in that field.
-b
Bill Gates buys Itanium, then can't sit down for a week. He sells Itanium then optimises and removes bloat from Windows.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
...Okay so the overclocking went a little hard and blew off my ice shelf...but i digress.
Really a update of the old IDT Winchip, but given the Cyrix brandname.
Its cool enough to use passive cooling, ie a fanless heatsink.
Or just under clocking works well too.
The AMD Athlon 4 mobil processor is really just a T'bird Athlon of about 1500mhz or something that's been clocked & volted down to 1000mhz.
I'd say virtually any chip that can be clocked up without increasing the voltage should be able to be clocked down giving the potential for a good volt drop & corresponding heat drop.