Tom's Guide to Water Cooling

Aaron Cherrington writes "Tom's Hardware Guide has a pretty impressive rundown on how to setup a fairly sophisticated water-cooling system for your ever-growing heat problem in your proc/foundry. The guide even includes a movie! Funny how computers are beginning to develop like the early automobile industry."

Comments

good lord this an economical disaster!

[lingqi]

for the time and effort spent on this -- get some flourinert and just full-submerge your PC. a gallon is ~500 bux, cheaper if you buy more. Or hook up with somebody with access to some and buy used liquid for cheap ;-) -- it's used in all sorts of high precision equipment(s)

To think that IBM spent millions to get rid of it

[SysKoll]

It's rather ironic that IBM and other large systems makers have spent millions of $$ to get rid of water cooling in their systems. The good old water-cooled TCM (Thermal Conduction Module) of IBM's 1990 mainframes was a very impressive piece of mechanical and thermal engineering. If you worry about the heat generated by a single CPU, imaging what it was like to cool one of these babies.

TCMs included spring-loaded copper pistons to maintain good thermal contacts on the chips. The thing was a plumber's nightmare. I remember an IBM field engineer who had to improvise a pipe soldering the night before a computer show because 1) there was no water cooling at the stands (geez, what an oversight), 2) IBM had to require a fire permit to let the plumber light a soldering torch, 3) by the time the fire permit came in, the unionized plumber was home while the on-salary, no-family-life engineer was getting ready for a looong night. Those were the days, when computers were freakin' huge and had to be watered like thirsty dinosaurs.

As a side note, the need for TCM was considered a nuisance. Customers released a collective sigh of relief when IBM dropped their fast but power-hungry bipolar technology in favor of cheaper, easier to cool CMOS chips. It's a shame that Intel's sloppy designs force an entire industry to go back to watering the dinos.

-- SysKoll

Re:To think that IBM spent millions to get rid of

[NovaX]

Its not Intel's "sloppy designs" which have caused water cooling to come back into style. Actually a big reason most people do it, such as myself, is because we get sick of the noise, which is not entirely the processor's fault. Its beautiful to have a PC that's like any other applience, you don't notice it unless you need to use it.

On the engineering front, every modern good performing processor needs cooling. The number of transisters per cubic cm is enormous and increasing, so we're getting bigger chips using more energy and thus producing more heat. This is where a new technology must come and replace it, just like CMOS did with bipolar. Circuit engineers only pay attention to heat during the design phase if its a criteria (which isn't so much on processors) and is mostly left to those in the fabrication stage to optimize and fix. Only in the last few years has any decent energy saving technology started to become popular and important to designers, but in essence until heat is a limitting factor designs will focus on higher performance through novel techniques and providing developers with better tools (instruction sets).