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."

Comments

More dollars than sense?

[traskjd]

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?

Re:More dollars than sense?

[Moridineas]

You hit it on the head. 99% of the people who are doing overclocking like this aren't doing it on professional systems or work systems. And yeah, the price / speed ratio for doing something this complex is terrible. It's just the same as people who like to deck out their cars and tweak them to within an inch of their lives, etc. It's TOTALLY a status symbol within some nerd cliques.

OTOH, some overclocking is very easy, and can add a lot of value. The first K7 chip I had, a 600MHz Duron was capable of being overclocked to ~860 MHz with the default cooler. That was good.

Re:More dollars than sense?

[GigsVT]

The worst part is they only got this thing up to 3.3Ghz, that's 500 extra Mhz.

Quite a lot of work, money, and mess for 17% more CPU performance. In a month or two they can probably just buy an official 3.3Ghz chip.

Re:More dollars than sense?

[Latent IT]

Quite a lot of work, money, and mess for 17% more CPU performance. In a month or two they can probably just buy an official 3.3Ghz chip.

Not only that, but if they actually want to spend money, they can just go out and build multiprocessor systems. Yes, yes, not everything is multithreaded, but I think it gets you a heck of a lot more than a 17% performance gain on average. And it won't catch fire if you spring a hose! Overclocking was origionally for the cheap buggers who figured out they could buy a slower chip for $$$ - $50, instead of a faster chip for $$$, but you could make them run the same. Now it's all about the $$$ - $50 for the chip, + $$$ for the cooling system.

On the other hand, it's a hobby. And probably a fun one. Like tricking out cars, or BASE jumping from higher hights... It's not about the sense, it's about the numbers, beating your personal bests, and quite possibly the cool noise this system would make when running. Just to say you did something a lot of other people haven't.

Re:More dollars than sense?

[Latent IT]

Well heck, stamp collecting is a hobby, and there you just... buy things, I guess. IMO, it's a hobby if you enjoy it, and it passes some time. And I guess hobbies don't make a profit - then it's called a job.

Besides, overclocking isn't the simplest thing in the world. You have to track down and compare which chip batches overclock well, find a motherboard that allows you the control you need, and twiddle with some airflow in your case. I'm sure you could just pop in a chip and change some BIOS settings, but that's asking for trouble if you just do it willy-nilly.

Is it worth it?

[et289807]

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%.

Re:Is it worth it?

[Citizen of Earth]

Thats a 33% increase. 2.8 - 3.3 is only about 2%.

I thought they fixed that floating-point roundoff problem a long time ago.

Ugh

[GigsVT]

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.

lets see...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Sheesh

[espresso_now]

All that money and trouble for a measly 500MHz. Sometimes I question people's sanity.

adding processors?

[FaRuvius]

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.

Just in time for halloween!

[EvilStein]

"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.

Re:Just in time for halloween!

[weird mehgny]

Fog machine? Just take a regular Athlon and remove the fan :)

Re:Just in time for halloween!

[NeoSkandranon]

fog != smoke ;)

Refridgerators are for sissies

[Subcarrier]

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.

Diminishing returns?

[darkov]

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.

stupid overclocking and case modding frenzy

[chamenos]

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?

heatpipe

[goombah99]

How come no one seems to be using heatpipe technology to cool things? THis would seem to me the natural way to extend the cooling range of passive systems. It probably wont ever have the massive effects like these acively chilled systesm but it would cheaper than thus more worth while.

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!!!

Taco! make an OC category

[AxelTorvalds]

So I can add it to the blocked list, like Katz.

Seriously, I really don't give a shit about overclocking. I don't want to block out all hardware news though.

Everyone knows how to make your CPU faster...

[El Camino SS]

Just put a tiny "Type-R" sticker on it, and be done with it.

Sheeesh.

Electric Bill?

[Frank of Earth]

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?

Waste, waste, waste

[floydigus]

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.

Old and outdated

[Analysis Paralysis]

Asetek's Vapochill system has been available since 2000, has been extensively reviewed on dozens of hardware lists (get a list here) and Asetek themselves have redone their website so that it will only work with browsers claiming to be Internet Explorer (lamers).

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.

Using a Factory Overclocked Chip

[Stigmata669]

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

With an Athlon XP 1800+...

[phorm]

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