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.

Comments

1/2 the 3dmark tests not shown.

[BrookHarty]

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.

Re:1/2 the 3dmark tests not shown.

[Paladin128]

8X AGP won't buy them anything here. What that mostly affects is AGP sideband addressing, which allows the graphics card to grab textures directly from RAM without going to the CPU. Seeing as all of the textures in UT2K3 and all of the 3DMark stuff can fit in the 128MB of RAM on the graphics card, this is mostly irrelevant.

Re:Frost everywhere

[kenthorvath]

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.

Moisture

[gweihir]

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.

Thermal shock

[panurge]

Someone mentioned this. Forget the solder joints for a moment (though the pure tin used on some boards now will actually crumble after a time at liquid nitrogen temperatures) the contraction of the case of the CPU will put stress on the pins, and the temperature differential between top and bottom of the case will put stress on the die joints.
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.