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Liquid Nitrogen Beats Air Cooling (Again)
joe094287523459087 writes "some guys used liquid nitrogen cooling via a cardboard tube to get a 20,000 3D Mark score. you can see the frost forming on everything - wouldn't the moisture from the condensation kill the board?" The Muropaketti guys had already done this with their microprocessor. Apparently the next step was to speed up their graphics card to match.
Checking out his 3dMark and you notice, fillrate, poly count, shader, spride speeds are missing. Also only 4x AGP, be nice to also see 8x AGP enabled, his motherboard might not support it yet.
His ATI driver is also 6.13.10.6159, he should upgrade to 6193, major performance increase. You can get it over at rage3d.com
Impressive thou, Double my 3DMark on a plain AMD 1800 with a ATI 9700.
The water pulled from the atmosphere would be mostly deionized and non cunductive. Just like those old oil based cooling systems that you actually submerged your components in and ran through a refridgerator.
Nearly pure water, since droplets tend to form around particles of dust, so over time it would gum up whereever it was condensing/settling on.
The moisture forming on the board is distilled water. It is about as clean as possible and has a very low electrical conductivity. It is mildly corrosive, but given that the only exposed metal surfaces are tin or gold, that is not a problem if the exposure is not too long.
I would think that you need to immerse a board in distilled water for some weeks or months to get actual damage. Fans, HDDs and other moving parts are a different story.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
It would suck to have wasted all of that time with ln2 and still not have the top score. http://holicho.lib.net/top/020912/020912.htm http://gamershq.madonion.com/hardware/halloffame/
Yes, they do. They aren't experiments, they are in fact how the space station works. On the last mission they brought up 3 more ammonia radiators.
These work by taking water which runs past the electronics, exchanging that heat to liquid ammonia, which out the truss, and through these huge metal radiators which then radiate the heat to space. They have to use ammonia because the water would just freeze if it went through the external radiators.
More space station info...
Wouldn't what they're doing exceed environmental specifications for the chips?
I looked around ati.com and intel.com, but couldn't find any specifications on what the upper and lower bounds are as far as temerpature is concerned. I recall seeing in most product specifications for electronic devices temperature limits, and I thought the lower was usually around -15 degrees celcius.
Or does the temperature of the chips ever get that low? Do they hit some kind of equilibrium that keeps them from reaching their lower limit?
-kidlinux.
...it's contaminant salts, and basic electrolysis (not often an instant 'zap!' phenomenon, unless you're dealing with 110VAC or better).
If you're adventurous, go dunk a 386 or 486 in a tray of water- just the motherboard and cards, nothing with wall-power going into it. See how many weeks it takes to die. (Took my Socket 7 board with a drippy peltier about 2 years, although corrosion on the CPU socket might've been what made it flaky for a good period prior. Silicone's a good idea.)
And I just got a Pentium II 233MMX IBM ThinkPad and was hella excited about that. But seriously, why doesn't someone try out these experiments on a Linux system? I'd be curious to see the differences in performance. I'd do it myself, but as I noted earlier I just got a PII 233 Thinkpad so we know what my financial situation is.
Also, if I remember rightly, the actual drain currents of the transistors goes UP because the resistance is going down (which is why you can overclock, of course.)Although the lowered temperature means the tracks will not be damaged, there may be other effects of the increased current density in longer term degradation of the die. If there is track necking anywhere, this might be a potential failure point.
You might also expect damage to the epoxy cladding of the graphics chips, as the contraction pulls the epoxy away from the filler. This could result in the epoxy eventually becoming porous and the system failing due to moisture penetrating the cladding, just like 6502s etc. used to fail before anyone realised that glass fibre filler could wick water in to the die.
The answer is to follow Seymour Cray and sink the entire system in cold fluorinert, using the total loss nitrogen system, or much cheaper dry ice, to keep the temperature at a sensible -45C or so. But that wouldn't be nearly so spectacular, would it?
This is all a bit like our local hot rodders who can't safely make it to the next town and back for fear the engine will blow up on them. Even so, it would be nice if Intel would release some of the data they doubtless keep on this sort of thing.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Actually pure water is a very poor conductor of electricity and seeing as how condensation is one of the ways to distill water I hardly see a reason for concern over the melting condensation. The only real concerns I would have over using nitorgen is mechanical failure do to contraction/expantion issues. My real question is why didn't they submerge the entire system board? The changes in temprature between the chips they were cooling and the the ones with just heat sinks had to be substantial and as we all know the temprature of a conductor affects it's resistance. Probably the reason they were having the problems they were.
OBTW Seymour Cray is turning over in his grave if they have just discoverd what LN is real option for cooling computers.
We spent hours playing like this, and of the 20 of us in the class, not one was injured.