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.

Comments

Large cooler.

[Shanep]

I'm amused that the radiator is almost as large as the computer itself.

I used to be a network admin for a stock exchange disaster recovery site in the mid 90's.

We had BIG VAXen, as in *large*-double-door-fridge size.

A big chunk of the size of these boxes, was actually the cooling system itself. : )

Does this actually increase reliability?

[panurge]

I'm actually curious to know whether having those humungous cooling plates on the top of CPUs and bridge devices might not actually increase unreliability due to increased pressures on the IC carrier, socket and mobo.

With all of these water coolers, the surface temp. can never go below ambient air, so getting a fast but quiet flow of air to well designed fins on the hotspots would seem a better option. Water cooling for vehicles works mainly because of the problems (with air cooling) of cooling places difficult of access, like around the valve guides on an IC engine, plus the desirability of maintaining a controlled temperature WELL ABOVE any sensible ambient. The objective here is to get the temp. down close to around 10-30C.

Using a Peltier device can get the die temp to below ambient but requires heat to operate which also has to be removed from the case- I have come across a case where people didn't understand this, cooled one device, an IR sensor,with the Peltier and then had the system fail because of overall thermal overload caused by the additional 120W needed to drive the Peltier stack. The answer would seem to me to be the one favored by Apple - well designed air cooling. As Intel and AMD cpus are the SUVs of the processor world, add heat pipes or fluorinert bags to transfer heat efficiently within the case to where the airstream can run most effectively.

Re:all this cooling

[CTho9305]

I do not believe you are correct. In a modern processor, almost NO power is consumed when computations are not happening. CMOS logic is set up so that as long as its state does not change, there is no current flowing (well, transistors "leak", but that is relatively little current). However, when the clock ticks, all the gates start changing states. During the state change, power is consumed. This page has some excellent applets which show how and when the current flows.

During computation is the only time power is being used. Because of how CMOS works, power usage grows approximatekly linearly with clock speed - which makes sense - if power is consumed when stuff changes state, doubling the clock doubles the number of state changes per time, increasing power consumption.