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Tiny Water Cooled System
Xev writes "Most people water cool a full PC, over at Hexus they have water cooled a MINI PC (SFF - small form factor). Creating the smallest water cooled system." Takes all kinds to make the world go round. I'm amused that the radiator is almost as large as the computer itself.
It would be *way* better to have a system that does
not use such enormous amounts of power in the
first place, the computations take up almost
no power at all, the rest is heat !
MP3 Search Engine
just curious...
Why watercool?
I started off with water cooling because I wanted to overclock... to get the CPU to run with a front side bus way out of spec you usually end up pumping more voltage to the processor. More voltage, more heat, less stable. Back when it was a buck or more a megahertz, you strapped a peltier plate on to really drop the CPU temp. The peltier plate alone usually kicked out more heat than the latest CPU's, so creative cooling - high speed fans, ducting, and eventually water cooling were required.
Fast forward to today. Mhz really does not matter. I can run 3-4 CPU releases behind and still have a screaming system. Stability is more important than an extra 200mhz, but the current generation of CPU's kick off the same kind of heat I had to deal with in an OC'd 566 (952mhz w/112 FSB water cooled + peltier, 833mhz w/98 FSB aircooled). Less heat still equals stability, however.... It only takes a couple 8K RPM fans in your office before pushing more air and buying louder speakers is not a solution.
A water cooling rig can be silent. I'm not sure what the point of a 8K fan on a tiny radiator, but my heat exchanger I got by with a couple low RPM ducted 120mm fans. Kits are becoming mainstream however - IE, you don't have to buy a couple cases of beer for someone with access to a machine shop to make your CPU heatsink.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
It's about time the movement for hardware hackers shifted toward low-power, quiet computing. Having a giant radiator and a blower does niether.
There is no reason that home servers can't be PowerPC machines running with laptop harddrives other than the hardware hackers haven't yet found clever ways to come up with iMac motherboards. I recently changed out the drive in my home server for an IBM Travelstar 40 GNX and for all intents and purposes removed the last noise maker from my office.
A couple of months ago the server was reborn on a retired Apple Powerbook and the difference in the temperature from the traditional machine was profound. Since I live in the desert, I have to dump all the heat I make whether it comes off heat pipes, heat sinks or radiators so reducing waste heat is a good thing. The surplus hardware is out there for the scrounge (just like with Wintel stuff) and the power consumption and heat production is significantly less.
Similar answers are coming for commercial rack mount machines of which Apple's X-Serve is only the first. Remember that power costs money too, and not just fo r the machine but for the A/C to take the heat away.
It looks very nice, but I don't see the practical uses of it. First of all, if I wanted to watercool my system, I would try a Peltier element to reduce the temperatures to as low as possible. I do of course have a low cpu speed myself, but 34 degrees celcius is my system temperature for an Athlon T-Bird 1.33Ghz system which is only aircooled - and the AMD CPU's are infamous for their heat generation. Also in this machine is a GeForce 4 TI4600 display adapter, which generates a whole lot of heat just by itself as well.
:)
In my eyes, the system is only for eyecandy - as it is surely a beautiful sight for the eye - but it doesn't have much practical use. It is expensive, and I don't believe the system gains any much stability from it, as the Intel CPU's are already made for stability @ factory. If they were able to add a Peltier, perhaps display adapter cooling, and hd cooling - in that small case - then it would be a convenient solution. But as it is now - just eyecandy, imho of course.
God does not play dice - Albert Einstein
Seriously dude, why bother overclocking the first place? I mean overclocking was a useful thing back in the day of the Celeron and P3 where you actually experienced a significant increase in the performance, but these days its such an incremental improvement that its not worth the bother. Just save on the water-cooled rig and get the new whiz-bang vid card when it comes out 6 months after the last one did and 6 months before the next one's due out.
;)
The only real purpose I could see to your rig would be a living-room DVD/OGG player where you want no extraneous sound.
That aside, I'd happily take it off your hands if my knocking it has made you want to get rid of it
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
Seems to me a false economy.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
Appently, the overclocker's must have is:
Near 0C temperatures can be reached like this. The peltier consume a few Watts, and therefore introduce a need for extra cooling, and dealing with condensation due to subambient temperatures. IMHO, this is what makes the solution look like a problem. Anyway, water cooling does not bring the lowes temp. If you want a real low temp, just open your case remove all fans, and put a copper cup of liquid nitrogen on everything that produces heat before switching on.
Watercooling alone (without the peltiers) is a nice solution to get a high performance but silent PC (how reliable it is mainly depends on your pump). Perhaps watercooling sounds over the top to many of you, but having plenty of fans blowing in and out of a case to reach 40C does not sound right either.
After all, water coolers are just switching for a more efficient heat exchanging fluid than air. The pump is an electric engine, and has no theorical reason to be less efficient that fan engines.