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Extreme Cooling
hakkikt writes "Icrontic brings us a review about a CPU-cooling device every self-respecting overclocker and cpu-speed freak must get. The device is called MX-EVA3. With a price of US$500, it's not for the faint of wallet, but the performance is awesome."
Besides the points already brought up, the product can be re-used over and over again, making it quite the investment that could pay for itself in 2-3 upgrades.
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. . .
At work, people I know are more interested in the water cooling scene, hoping one day for quieter machines. . .
But now, with an external *piped* cooling device on the market, we're just waiting for the advent of building facility CPU cooling ducts, just like the air - con.
Yup, rent new office, bring in desk, plug CPU into cooling duct (obviously with your case and machine coming standard with a nice clean bit of plumbing), connect cat5 (or fiber, come on this is an _ideal_ office :) and go . . .
Final thought, is there any reliability gain to be had from using such a cooler and _not_ overclocking? Okay, I could probably answer that one if I tried, but it's breakfast time and I'm hungry . . .
Short answer No with a but... : Long answer Yes with an if...
Running the chip at a reduced temperature will prolong the life of the chip. The silicon will be less prone to surges in power supply rails and will degrade more slowly as the atoms will move around less. For optimum lifetime you should also store your CPU at low low temperatures. There's absolutely no doubt that reducing the chip temperature will extend it's life.
Our real issue here is with the reliability of the cooling systems.
A shaped lump of aliminum or copper without a fan just isn't going to go wrong. Ever. (OK.. maybe it'll fall off the chip). But those cheap fans they insist on bolting on... 12 months normally.. 4 years tops.
Let's go for 5 years as the figure to beat.
Keeping that compressor running will probably not be much of a reliability issue. Compressors are old-tech well-known, well constructed and easily have a lifetime of 10-20 years in most refrigerators. In spite of the fact that there's moving parts, the design of the coolant gasses and lubricants means that the compressor is not exposed to corrosion or built up of any residues inside. It remains clean and smooth running until the motor burns out, or the metal breaks. The compressor itself is very reliable.. that's not our problem.
Our problem is almost certainly going to be with the hoses that connect the compressor to the cold plate. These hoses are under very high pressure. They have to carry compressed gas to the cold plate so it can be pushed through a pinhole (at which point it expands and cools) and then circle it back to the compressor. In a refrigerator, these hoses are all solid metal, and soldered together. 90% of the airconditioning system in my car also uses real copper tubes. Our problem if any is going to be with those tubes...
With good maintenance and care, they could last 10 years. In reality, I'd give 'em around 3 years before a razor sharp bit of case pierces one of 'em whilst you're bolting your chiller onto you AMD Pentathlon4 @4.5Ghz
There's lots of parts inside the compressor, flexible rubber tubing and lots of gas moving around under rather high pressures. In terms of reliability, I'd figure that the chiller unit could match a standard refrigerator (10 years? more?).