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Vapochilled Pentium 4 System At 3.3GHz
SpinnerBait writes "Overclocking the Personal Computer has gotten considerably more elegant over
the past few years and there is now an entire industry dedicated to it.
One of the latest innovations is super cooling processors down to sub zero
temperatures with standard vapor phase refrigeration, in an effort to allow clock speeds to crank far beyond
manufacturer specifications.
This article takes a look at the Asetek Vapochill, a Vapor Phase Refrigerated PC
Case, that chilled a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 down to -7C and allows it to run
stable in a workstation environment at 3.3GHz and beyond."
At such high speeds do you really want to spend heaps in order to go faster? I thought the general feeling was that people aren't finding much need for much faster processors. Like most /. readers I haven't read the article yet however I have seen these cases advertised and they cost a bomb. Without doing a price check it might almost be cheaper to buy several lower spec pcs if you want the overall power (say for the seti programme or cancer curing stuff).
Just my 0.02c What do you think?
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Is the gain really worth it anymore? I still have an old 1ghz laptop. I use an ancient 333mhz desktop. My server is an extinct 133mhz. I'm all for the "I'll do it because I CAN" attitude, but wasn't overclocking originally for serious benifit? Like 100 - 133mhz? Thats a 33% increase. 2.8 - 3.3 is only about 2%.
You also are instructed to fill all the pin holes in the motherboard socket with thermal grease as well.
What a mess. Just don't try this with arctic silver.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
1. expensive motherboard...
2. expensive CPU
3. moisture on both
No thanks... Interesting, but I don't have enough free spending money to attempt this with such a risk.
Less than $500 for the kit so long as you don't need to beef up your PSU, and I believe most OC'ers will have a fairly decent one to begin with.
I remember a couple of years ago someone in the comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips newsgroup paid $5000 to get a Kryotech system that allowed an Athlon 7-800MHz to be overclocked to run at 1GHz. Madness!
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
All that money and trouble for a measly 500MHz. Sometimes I question people's sanity.
Of course, and I highly suspect it, I may be talking out of my ass. -oqti
at this price point, shouldn't people be thinking about adding additional processors, instead of overclocking 1 processor?
That seems like the better path to follow from a price, performance, and stability standpoint.
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"Titanium" case with cool LED blinky-ness... now if they could get the thing to have a built-in fog machine, I'd be happy.
Anyone know where I could buy a cheap a gas turbine engine?
I've always wanted to know how just far you can get with basic air cooling.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
As lovely as it would be to have a compressor running in the room while you're using your PC, isn't this only going to give you only limted benefit - besides the wank factor of runing at 3GHz or whatever? Unless you're overclocking your memory as well, your P4's going to run out of gas no matter how fast it's turning over. And I don't see an fridge adaptor for your memory.
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gone are the days when overclocking was actually an economically viable option to get more performance out of your system for what you pay. these days, overclocking is almost no different from case modding, in that its just for posers to make themselves feel better and have something to show-off.
and is it a good sign that slashdot is continually posting articles pertaining to both case modding and overclocking "breakthroughs"? yes, they overclocked the system to 3.3ghz, but most likely in a few months intel is going to release processors that are just as fast, if not faster. see the pointlessness?
its like posting on article on slashdot about a breakthrough in man-powered vehicles, about how 200 people got together to push a car to more than 200km/h (i refuse to use miles/hour). yea sure, that was fast but is it a breakthrough? currently, the approach to overclocking processors is to up the voltage so the processor can function at a higher clock speed reliably, and then find some way to cool it down sufficiently so it doens't overheat. so they got it colder this time, and faster, via the exact same approach thousands of overclockers have been using all the while.
is this really news-worthy on slashdot?
The general feeling is indeed that there isnt much need for faster processors. ;))
This article, however, has nothing to do with the general computer user. Its about having the fastest available chip on the market and running it faster than everyone else. While there isnt really a practical use for this, some people enjoy it (myself included. I tend to stick more to the "budget" end of things though
I could use a car analogy here, but thats been so overdone I'll spare you.
Phase - Change cooling systems such as the one used here typically only cost around $700. Thats less than twice the cost of a high end graphics card and it can be used to supercool any processors released using the same socket system. In short, its not such a huge/useless investment as you make out.
This is my first post on slashdot, so apologies for any mistakes.
~Laurence Wood
the idea is simple. on top of the chip one places a vertical tube with the same crossection as the chip. The tub is filled with alcohol or propane or freon or other low boiling point liquid. The sides to the tall(!) tube are lines with air-cooled heatsinks.
when the liquid boils then the (VERY LARGE) heat of varorization is extracted from the liquid. the expelled gas molecule rapidly transferes its energy to other gas molecules and then distibutes that over then entire face of the heatpipe which condences the gas back to liquid.
the processor can never warmer than the boilingpoint of the liquid. the average cooling capacity is determeined by the requirment that the cooling rate of the heatsinks equal the heat input rate on average. One of the nice things about this as opposed to a fan or refregeration system is that although the average heat load is the same, the peak heat load can be as high as you want. the liquid has almost infinite reserve cooling capacity up until it boils dry. Thus the temperature of the processor fluctuates less than any fan cooled or refrigerated system.
So what is the heat load capacity. It should be the significantly larger than any refrigerated system with the same area of heat sink!!!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Read the article. They have a heater to warm up the CPU pins and surrounding MB area to prevent condensation.
Seriously, I really don't give a shit about overclocking. I don't want to block out all hardware news though.
I often wonder how many slashdotters overclock cpu's of 500+, because I wouldn't want to blow my money buying a new processor. Therefore, I usually skip these articles. Could we have a poll on the lines of:
4 99mhz /harmonica/large HORN/ over my processor. ...or whatever is realistic.
My CPU is overclocked:
0-49mhz
50-99mhz
100-199mhz
200-299mhz
300-
500-999mhz
1GHZ+
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"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
Just put a tiny "Type-R" sticker on it, and be done with it.
Sheeesh.
Overclocking isnt supposed to be a "useful" thing to do anymore. Chip speeds are increasing fast enough and are frankly fast enough already, that there is no actual NEED to do it. Is there any NEED for people to supercharge their cars? Do they do it anyway?
It's basically the same thing. These are just people trying to push what they've got as far as they can. The point isnt the cost, or even really the gain. They're just trying to see what they CAN do, and how to do it. You may think this stuff is worthless now, but wait and see how long it is before these radically overclocking cooling techniques become commonplace in home PCs (once scaled down a bit).
Can someone explain to me why it makes more sense to do this with pentiums for piddly improvements in performance.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Cons:
Still somewhat pricey but cheaper than similar competitive solutions
Motherboard tray can be hard to work with
Retail channel for product is still somewhat limited
Shouldn't one of the cons be the electricity needed to keep it cool?
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This kind of balls-to-the-wall turbo-charging is not only un-necessary, it's wasteful too.
Most PC's are pretty power hungry as it is, without introducing a whole new load of cooling equipment. Although it appears to make the processor perform more efficiently, actually it makes the whole box a whole lot less efficient in terms of power consumption.
Much more encouraging is the recent trend to making silent PC's. These tend to be pretty energy efficient as well as nicer to have about the place.
All things in moderation; including moderation
electronics work better when they're cold, to get a superconductor you have to be near absolute zero, but overclocking doesn't have much to do with superconducting, idealy i'd think you would want your cpu at about room temperature, not too much above or too much below, but thats just MHO, i dont really know much about overclocking
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
A better overclocking solution is the Prometia from chip.con (whose server seems to be down at the moment) which cools the processor down to -40C rather than Vapochills comparatively tame -20C. Get a list of reviews comparing them here.
C'mon Cowboy Neal, this is a waste of space.
They could have gotten much better preformance if they had used a 2.6 Ghz P4 witha 400mhz (100x4) FSB, and overclocked it. The problem with the 533mhz bus chips is that they are essencialy overclocked straight from the factory, thus making more gains much more difficult. Look on any serious overclocker website, and you will find watercool kits (not even sub-zero cooling) approaching 3.8or 3.9 ghz using 400mhz bus chips
Yawn.
on the other hand, how loud are these things? i'm eyeing a system to use as a home theater deck (new TVs have RGB hookups. mmm counterstrike on a 65" tv at 1280!) -- but being in the main room, it'd have to be near silent. for that pc i may choose silence over temperature.
hmm. decisions, decisions.
I bet this cooling case puts out quite a bit of heat too. Remember, a refriderator produces more heat that it does cold. Thermodynamics and all that nonsense.
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These phase change coolers have proven themselves to be somewhat destructive to P4's in the long term though. After a couple of months of use, the chips mysteriously die. Now typically when chips die in overclocking its due to electron migration from rediculous overvolting (and this is more true with .13u chips). However several people have had thier P4's die with only nominal (~1.6 volts, most p4's defaualt to 1.5) overvolting while useing these phase change coolers. Turns out, Intel only specifies these chips for operation to temperatures down to 20 F, and what happens is the supercooling causes the chip to become so brittle, that even slight virbrations can cause damage to the chip, thus killing it.
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All my games run.
All my software run. I still have to add a little more RAM but windows boots quickly enough (read line 1 for reason why I'm running windows not linux).
I *could* overclock the chip. In fact my motherboard is made to allow this to be easy. But the question is this... "if it's not slow, why risk making it a coaster?"
All you overclockers, we read a new overclock story every 2 weeks or so. It's not really that cool anymore. In fact, many of us just find you wasteful and silly.
Find a way to build your PC into a car, or a robot or something, then we'll pay attention.
Recognition is about doing something new or at least out-of-the-ordinary
I do a lot of VHDL at work, and let me tell you, it sure as shootin is worth it for me. Large FPGAs take forever to synthesize, even on mighty big hardware. The industry (at least where I work :) is moving away from Solaris to Linux & Win 2k solutions. The reason is largely bang for the buck and speed..
So, I have a watercooler on my PC. I upgrade the CPU every couple months. That watercooler always lets me eek out another couple hundred Mhz of speed where I couldn't before, and it does make a difference. 10 minutes here and there does add up.
It isn't as signifigant as it used to be, but it is still definately worthwhile. My machine is also much quieter without the 60mm turbine on top of most CPUs.
..don't panic