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

all this cooling

[jacquesm]

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 !

Re:all this cooling

[jacquesm]

no, I did not mean the power consumption of the
cooling, I meant the ratio of waste heat vs
the actual computation. Theoretically computation
uses almost no power (just the difference in
having the bits moved from one state to the other
in the FINAL result), most of the energy that goes
into a computing device is disposed of as heat...

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.

Re:all this cooling

[Dun Malg]

I meant the ratio of waste heat vs the actual computation.

This is the problem with your premise. It is the computation itself that produces the heat. Whether that computation is something usefull or is just housekeeping/clockwatching is totally irrelevant. Heat is the inevitable byproduct of the CPU doing anything. "Theoretical computation" is irrelevant. In the real world of CMOS, we have to deal with resistance, capacitance, saturation, etc. and all these thing inevitably result in electrical energy lost to heat.

filtration

[buzban]

i've never done anything this exotic, but whenever i add a larger fan to a PC, it sucks in a ton more dirt. anyone done anything like this with filtration? and if so, how much air flow did that block for you?

just curious...

Re:filtration

[wd123]

One of the easiest ways to filter a fan on a computer is to stretch a nylon stocking tightly over it. The air flows in, but dirt does not. Nylons can be picked up for cheap, though you might want to have your wife/girlfriend/mom(heh) do that for you so you don't look like a weirdo. ;)

Re:filtration

[GigsVT]

You've got to get that black open cell foam stuff that is used for air filtration. The only place I have found to buy this in bulk is the Grainger catalog, it's about $25 for a lifetime supply. It's a pretty big roll, I think it is 25 feet by 5 feet when you unroll it. Anyway, get quarter inch.

The airflow loss is minimal, but you have to clean them every couple months, or you will start to lose a lot of airflow. The stuff is washable. If you smoke around your computers, figure on cleaning them a lot more often. Running a normal room air filter in the same room helps with the dust and smoke.

Carpet is a big dust trap, carpeted rooms seem to be a lot more dusty on average, especially if your computer is on the floor.

Anyway, here is an example of that black stuff mounted in front of fans.

http://www.bedford.smythco.com/storage/5.jpg

Evercase from newegg comes with a processor overhead fan that has the stuff. I've also found some hobby shops selling small pieces of the stuff for high prices, but as I said, grainger is the best place to buy it in bulk.

Re:filtration

[GigsVT]

Crap man, you know how big the Grainger catalog is? :)

OK, here

Grainger Item#:
5W913

In stock, at least until I post this message :)

Re:filtration

[QuietRiot]

You are correct. Fabric softener sheets (better if used!) make great PC fan filters.

shuttle questions

[eurostar]

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

Watercoolig -- yesterday and today

[(H)elix1]

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.

Going the wrong direction

[shagoth]

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.

Re:Going the wrong direction

[SmallFurryCreature]

About using laptop's harddrives in normal PC's unless size is the reason they are not really an option. They are slower, and less reliable with a far higher price. If you don't mind the slowness just use a low rpm regular disk. It will be silent as well but perform a lot better and cost less.

How do I know? I salvaged the new HD from my old laptop when it gave up the ghost,(note to self do not keep laptop running 24/7 in a closed desk). While the 20gig was nothing to be sneezed at it was dreadfully slow. On a laptop you accept this. On a desktop. No way. I now use it to transport my music between machines.

As for using powerpc, most people who have a file server or something like that use their old machines for home setups. So until iMac's start showing up on the rubbish heap I don't think we will see them being used as the router for the average home user geek. of course if like you you already use them for the main machine it is the logical solution.

Eyecandy

[Shinsei]

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. :)

Why overclock?

[PerryMason]

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 ;)

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. : )

Great

[oPless]

Now I know where all my bandwidth has gone.

Re:Great

[Yarn]

Gah. Use that flashy switch of yours to make sure my box has enough bandwidth!

(oPless colo's hexus and also my sexy Netfinity 4000R)

Re:Great

[oPless]

if things wibble, I'll just use the firewall to block it :P

What about condensation?

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:What about condensation?

[(H)elix1]

What about condensation?

You had to be careful with peltiers, but room temperature water cooling rigs are at no more risk then their air-cooled cousins. You have a leak however... not pretty.

Re:What about condensation?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Condensation happens when the temperatures differ. So when warm air moist air touches a cold surface. The water in this setup is WARMER then the air around it. Why? Cause airflow itself, or at least the relativly low airflow created by small fans like this can not cool below ambient temperature. And since the water itself will be warmed up by the cpu it will typically be a few degrees higher then the air, so no condensation.

There are setups where they cool the water and then of course condensation is a real problem. Same if you use peltiers.

The only way you could with watercooling create temps lower then ambient is if you use evaperation. This is not the case here and I am not sure that anyone has ever tried it. Try it by wetting you hand and holding it in front of a fan, this will be a lot cooler then youre dry hand.

If you don't believe me on the condensation put something like a mirror in front of a fan and put it at max. No way condensation should form. (presuming reasonable normal conditions there are always exceptions).

Please note that you can achieve lower then ambient with just airflow without evaporation, I believe it is called vortex cooling or something. But this requires the kinda flow you get out of an airpump.

Re:What about condensation?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

The only way you could with watercooling create temps lower then ambient is if you use evaperation. This is not the case here and I am not sure that anyone has ever tried it. Try it by wetting you hand and holding it in front of a fan, this will be a lot cooler then youre dry hand.

A year or two back, some guys went the refrigeration route, only they went really overboard - they suspended a PC motherboard in Flourinert and ran the stuff through a fridge pump. As it turns out, Flourinert gets really thick when you cool it too much.

hdd cooling?

[fw3]

Watercooling the cpu and eliminating the fan results in very little cooling for all the other parts of this cute little box. The HDD espeically will suffer reduced life expectancy.

Seems to me a false economy.

Re:hdd cooling?

[(H)elix1]

Watercooling the cpu and eliminating the fan results in very little cooling for all the other parts of this cute little box. The HDD espeically will suffer reduced life expectancy.

All the other parts could be water cooled too...

If you water system can handle the extra heat load, there is no reason why you cannot make a water block for your hard drive too. If you don't want to build, koolance and a few other companies will sell you one that you can drop in.

Rounded cables are a tremendous boost to airflow, but I doubt the radiator on the box could handle the heat exchange required however... You can even water cool the power supply. Not sure if anyone sells a commercial version, however. Not hard, but make sure you don't have condensation issue or leaks first!

thank god the server didn't get /.'ed

[Anonymous Coward]

else all that water cooling it would have started to boil!

Only if need to be on the "Edge"

[Gerry Gleason]

The fastest processors of any generation will generate heat, becuase the faster you want to switch, the more power it will take. Theoretically, there is no minimum amount of energy to transmit or transform a bit or bits of information, so as your technology gets smaller and faster (from smaller geometry supported by each new generation of technology), the power required for a given speed goes down. So you can have the same speed at a lower power, or faster at the same or maybe even more power.

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.

Re:Only if need to be on the "Edge"

[Gerry Gleason]

The only way to make faster chips run at the same heat level is to make the buckets smaller, and I beleive that's hard to do.

No, it's not really hard, that's what happens when you scale. The buckets are the charges on the MOSFET gates in current technology, and the smaller the transister, the smaller the bucket, and the less current it takes. At some point, the wires can't take the current densities unless you scale back voltage, which makes the buckets smaller again. There is no limit to this on the bottom end, so no lower limit.

OTOH, the limits can be treated as hard within the current technology, and you have to use current technology, or wait to build it later. You can reduce the voltage, or slow the clock to reduce power, but it that means lower power == slower.

Re:Don't support Redhat!

[eurostar]

Hmm.
being an englishman, you are telling me I have a legitimate claim to the U.S ?
I shall stake my claim immediatly.

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.

I'm starting to think - why are we doing this?

[gelfling]

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.

Mountain climbing rationale- because it's there...

[Svartalf]

There's a few projects I'm working up to doing that are pretty crazy- I want to do them because I can .

smallest? what about hitachi laptop?

[friscolr]

Creating the smallest water cooled system.

is the shuttle+radiator really smaller than Hitachi's water cooled laptop?

It reminds me of Anna Nicole Smith

[fmaxwell]

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...

Re:It reminds me of Anna Nicole Smith

[fmaxwell]

When she posed for Playboy, she was -- especially compared to how she looks now.

Re:It reminds me of Anna Nicole Smith

[fmaxwell]

Anna Nicole Smith is a beautiful person.

She is a fat sow that will marry anything for money. I would not be at all surprised to find out that she's engaged to Strom Thurmond.

Numpty?

[HawkinsD]

Me, being a bit of a numpty

Damn this language barrier!

And Babelfish doesn't help.

Re:smallest? what about hitachi laptop?

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

Hey I have a great idea!

[twoslice]

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...

toaster

[squarefish]

What effect will water cooling have on the Pop Tarts?

Re:Agreed

[zeno_2]

My computer case (The same case that alienware is using for their new pcs) has 4 fans in it, with an AMD 1800 w/ big fan..

I never realized how loud my computer was until one day when I had to shut it down to put some new hardware in, and my room was utterly silent. Ever since that day, my computer seems to be a bit louder because im noticing it now..

And I really wish we had a fry's here where I live, I miss that place..

Re:Entropy!

[Gerry Gleason]

Right, it can't be zero, but there is no minimum (theoretically, at least). I makes sense because the smaller your device, the less energy it takes. That probably terminates in quantum mechanics, but there is a long way to go before we are at that scale. Then it's a matter of reducing the 'size' of the quantum which would probably mean slowing things down (lower frequency, longer wavelength).

As a practical matter there probably is a minimum, but it is very small and we are a long way from it.