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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.
Sorta defeats the purpose of the form factor. Why not just put it in a tower?
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...
So this cools the CPU, but what about the hard disk ?
has anyone seen a decent ventilator and cache that can go in the shuttle's 3.5" front bay to add airflow to the HD ?
I'm thinking on the lines of a temperature gauge and fan.
Also, has anyone run Linux on the SS51G ?
my shuttle is arriving next weekend ! thanks for your comments
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
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. : )
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Now I know where all my bandwidth has gone.
Do all these people who make water cooled systems live deserts or something? Although it seems to be some sort of protection in the design but I would be weary of 24x7 operation of this system especially during those muggy summer days. But I think it would be great in the winter to rest your feet the radiator to warm your feet.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The difference is he mounted a low rev fan which makes way less noise than a small high rev fan.
Seems to me a false economy.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
else all that water cooling it would have started to boil!
That said, there is a difference related to efficiency of the architecture. Some people think the RISC/CISC debate was ended when CISC (read x86 family processors) started using all the same internal architectural features as the top RISC processors, but they did it by pushing the technology, not getting rid of the complexity. It has been costing Intel more to produce the same performance as competing RISCs for a long time, but their market is so huge that they make up the difference in up-front engineering cost by having a bigger market. This also shows up in power consumption.
I find the Transmeta innovation interesting because they solve the instruction set complexity problem a different way. Translate on the fly to an efficient micro-architecture. Can't be quite as good as a simple ISA, but it does much better on the Power/Computation measure.
Bottom line is the architecture matters.
Hmm.
being an englishman, you are telling me I have a legitimate claim to the U.S ?
I shall stake my claim immediatly.
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.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Pretty soon we're going to need reheat units attached to the coolers to break up the ice that collects on them then we'll need moisture collectors to manage the condensors and another power supply to run the whole thing which will generate more heat. and so on.
There has got to be a better way - make CPU's that run colder.
There's a few projects I'm working up to doing that are pretty crazy- I want to do them because I can .
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I bought a new AMD 2000+ XP cpu and a TT Volcano 7+ to cool it. It's really loud. Now my computer room sounds like the server farm at work. I'm currently also looking at watercooling to meet my need for silence and am glad that places like fry's are starting to stock kits. Hopefully as these become more popular they'll also become cheaper.
Instead of Intel and AMD just making processors with higher clock rates that generate more heat, lets see some significant architactural changes that fix the heat problem.
is the shuttle+radiator really smaller than Hitachi's water cooled laptop?
-f
www.blackant.net
Looking at the pictures of the Shuttle water-cooled system, I was reminded of Anna Nicole Smith. Both she and the computer used to be small and cute. Now both are big, unattractive, and on display for the world to see what has become of them. Sad...
Damn this language barrier!
And Babelfish doesn't help.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.
What you expect accuracy on slashdot? A headline like, "Worlds smallest water cooled system except for that laptop that is commercially available and prob some other systems we can't quite remember or wich the maker never posted since he didn't think it was anything special" doesn't quite have the same feel to it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
about the creative software that is being used to aid both sides of the Israeli/Palistenian conflict. =\
"Autonomy is the purpose of conflict" -Me
I put some velcro tape (the hard plastic hooked side) around the intake, then slap a square I cut off a Filtrete filter. Both Homo Depot sort of stuff.
All filters block air flow somewhat, and alot when they get dirty. So, oversize your fan a bit and make sure you change them often.
I tell you, all this whining about "it's almost as big as the computer"...Bah. So what. I've been looking for this kind of idea for years now.
I've put computers in cars but I've been limited to 500mhz max due to cooling problems. Tight confined places with no airflow, like say behind a seat or in the dash, were out of the question. Not anymore.
the micro form factor is perfect and the radiator is a standard in cars. this is a perfect idea that I am embarrased not to have tried it first.
I lost the intrest to mod any further when I found EVERY computer in my home is faster than what I'd have in my car...it was depressing. Now I'm going to look into this more.
Kudos for trying this and thanks for the idea.
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
Talk about putting a ribbon around a turd's neck. The guy probably has flames painted on his metro as well.
Why don't we turn all of our computers into giant moonshine stills! And since alcohol is a better coolant than water it would work better too! Just think about it, free hooch and a cooler CPU to boot...
If the cops ever come around you'll have an iron clad alibi... Uh guys, I'm innocent of all charges, I'm just cooling my CPU really really...
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What effect will water cooling have on the Pop Tarts?
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
PS make sure you throw away the first 50ml as this contains the stuff that makes you blind and retarded
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
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.
Actually, information processing DOES cost a minimum amount of energy. You will always be increasing the entropy of the system, so some minimum amount of heat will always be generated.
Information is energy, so to speak...
For what it's worth - although filtration is pretty important when you have a lot of CFM through your box, I highly recommend getting the computer off the floor as a first step to minimize dirt.
I used to be like most guys - tower case under the desk gives me back the most desktop space. However, room dust tends to settle to the ground, and if your computer is on the ground, it gets first dibs on hoovering up all the dirt in your room.
Even elevating your computer a foot or two is better than having it right against the floor.
MeepMeep
I cannot in good conscience lend any credibility to information from the book "Israel's Secret Wars". The state of Israel did not exist until May 1948, and the Irgun Zvai Leumi, while a terrorist organisation, was no worse than the PLO. The PLO is a veiled front for Hamas and Hezbollah, and the evidence implicating their chain of command with these two groups is too great to be ignored. In addition, the PLO is the sometimes-recognised government of a people. The important thing is to recognise the wrongdoings of both sides...
If the Palestinians dropped their weapons, they would gain true sovereignty and statehood. Should the Israelis drop their weapons, many more civilians would die.
Something also needs to be done about the neighbouring terrorist organisations and religious fanatics, who fuel the "resistance" and send innocent Palestinians to their deaths, furthering this bloody conflict.
Niklaus Wirth has lamented that, whereas Europeans pronounce his name correctly
(Ni-klows Virt), Americans invariably mangle it into (Nick-les Worth). Which
is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value.
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