Slashdot Mirror
Watercooling Drifting Mainstream
pacc writes "With Prescott said to dissipate 103 W and the dual Apple G5 playing in the same league, air cooling seems less than sensible.
Nikkei Electronics has an article about watercoolers getting standardized by Hitachi. A technology pioneered by a NEC desktop last May."
Watercools his system using a radiator from a '55 Lincoln. You gotta love it.
Not a bad looking box, either (though I usually end up looking at my monitor more than I do my computer case.)
It seems to me that with all the concern over cyber-pollution these days (discarded monitors and other computer components) maybe it's time to take a greener approach and harvest whatever relics we can from the last great love affair with speed and power: the automobile.
The trend is towards customized boxes we build ourselves anyways, right? So go to the local junkyard and shop American for a change.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
this could be great if people knew how to service them properly, in my own mind, watercooling is more effective than aircooling in many applications (cars, computers etc) but CARE must be exercised. What was once a hardware hacker's toy is now becoming mainstream, this is a VERY good thing.. .
Now we can hopefully get all ATX motherboards with those four lil mounting holes in the same location. No more breaking out the dremel & soldering iron when that water block is just a little bit too tight.
Has there ever been a head to head with air-cooling vs water-cooling?
Water better be damn good to risk my system to the exposure of fluids.
Davak
I think watercooler computers are a bad idea. I have enough trouble getting interrupted in my cubicle without a crowd of people wanting to stand around my computer talking about yesterday's episode of "American Idol 4: The Revenge."
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Seems like forever ago when I first saw a water cooled system. But I never thought I would see the day it went mainstream.
OTOH, the media gave it a push lately, so what you are witnessing is probably a shortlived fad. Not that it isn't cool. (No pun intended.)
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
I overclock. I run a decent cooling fan. I have never seen solid comparison results between water cooling and just high-performance fans. If I (and the public) were to see dramatic improvements published in say THG or some other more mainstream publications perhaps water-cooling will gain even more ground. But as it is I have never really seen anything that has jumped out at me and said "go water". If it is so good and is gaining more ground then why haven't I seen more about it? Slashdot educate me!
Finally, an excuse to hang around the water cooler all day...
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
To have mass public acceptance, it has to be pretty cheap to buy. And by being cheap to buy, it may also be cheap material, or sub-par, so it may have more chances to leak. I've been burned (more exactly my CPU) twice by a cheap CPU fan and an AMD CPU fan. The last thing I need now if being "flooded" by a cheap watercooler. Especially since a burned CPU breaks the CPU and the motherboard most of the time, but water spilled on a running motherboard, that's gonna do a LOT of damage.
The 103W figure for the Prescott 3.6Ghz is actually the Thermal Design Power. This is the amount of power the processor is expected to use during "normal" operation. A P4-C 3.0Ghz with HyperThreading has a TDP of about 80W, with an actual maximum power usage of 104W. Assuming a similar scale, a Prescott 3.6Ghz can be expected to dissipate around 130W. It's this maximum figure that really matters, since I don't think most people want their processor to throttle during gaming or whenever they are driving their CPU hard.
(Yes, I know the answer is that nobody actually needs these new CPUs, but you know Microsoft and Intel won't stand for that...)
Get a portable Freezer or refrigerator put the computer parts in it. Find a way to keep the humidity out. Put a couple of ports for for USB and monitor and your all set.
I feel that heat is becoming a major problem with making faster processors. You guys in college should quit your Computer Science and Engineering and go into thermal physics. That is where the future is in.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Hmmm... what exactly do two hot CPUs talk about by the watercooler, anyway? How much better than DDR guy was than the Rambus man?
1. Will the warranty cover water damage? If I buy a system that depends on a water-based system, then the pre-packing company better be willing to cover the dangers.
2. Will water introduce hotter running, shorter-lived systems? This, of course, would lead to higher computer turnover and higher $$$$s for the computer makers.
The question is not if you are paranoid, but are you paranoid ENOUGH?
Davak
I'm waiting for Krups to put out a computer case that can pump out a killer double espresso with a nice froth.
Instead of using 100-year old technology, why not leap-frog to Peltier effect instead? At least it doesn't run the risk of leaking and frying your electronics.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
The Ultimate Waterblock
Ultimate Pump
Ultimate Radiator
Two of these to cool the radiator at only 30db
Round it out with a Cool Reservoir and some tubing. Maybe toss in a GPU cooler. Plenty of pump to support it.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Less then sensible? Maybe you just need a better air cooling design. Since the G5 was brought up in the post, it seems reasonable to mention that Apple is really pushing the idea that the G5's are quiet*:
http://www.apple.com/powermac/design.htmlIf a system is having trouble dissipating that kind of heat with air flow alone (or sounding like a jet engine), then you just have a poorly designed system. And maybe it's just me, but I have some qualms about putting water in a poorly designed system.
* of course, we haven't had independent reviews yet, so...
Having installed a car radiator on the computer, perhaps the heat could also be used for lunch - although right now I'd be happy with a heater, or an evaporative cooler in summer.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
...is that most watercooling solutions try to keep it all within the case. So you end up putting the radiator where one of the fans normally goes, and then mount a fan on the radiator to blow air over it to cool it down.
But which way does the fan blow? I think most people end up having it blow hot air out, which means you're not cooling the radiator as much as want to.
But if you have it blow the air in, then you're essentially pumping warm/hot air back into the case, which seems counterproductive.
I saw one comparison (and no, sorry, I don't have the link anymore) where there was almost no difference between the air and water, until they moved the radiator out of the box. Then the difference was very dramatic.
So it's like we need a mini-case for the radiator. A little clunky maybe, but I can live with that. Not everything belongs in the case anyways. One of the best improvements in my computing experience was when I got the Soundblaster Audigy External, not necessarily because the Audigy is a great soundcard (which it is) but because all the noise generated by the EM within the case is no longer audible.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Will they offer a discount on 5L of 3M Fluorinert?
$100/L might be fine for Cray, but not for me.
I don't think many people with $600 cpus and $400 video cards want to watch things go up in smoke when a clamp fails.
Are there any tests that show how well a machine holds up if deionized water leaks from this type of system onto the motherboard and processor?
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
People who aren't hardcore about there overclock are starting to get annoyed by all that racket. I know a friend of mine who upgraded his CPU just to get a quieter fan with the upgrade.
Creative Labs is also keen on marketing 'whisper quiet' cases so people can actually hear those ridiculous SNR values they claim.
This is by far the loudest component in my system. Everybody seems to think that the CPU fan is the biggest culprit but that's only because they have crappy CPU fans. It really doesn't cost much these days to get a 'silent' CPU fan which can be undervolted to be truly silent and still cool these nuclear reactor CPUs that modern PCs have.
After the CPU fan the hard drive is the loudest, but since the Seagate Barracuda IV - the best hard drive ever in the world, which is freakily quiet - hard drive makers have been using the fluid bearing system and I guess most new hard drives are now as quiet as the Barracuda IV.
That leaves case fans, which can be silent and graphics card fans, which apparently are getting quieter too (no fan on my Geforce2MX, so I wouldn't know).
So why didn't the article address the only component which can't be quietened cheaply and easily? 'Silent' PSUs cost a fortune (>$50 for something that most people expect to just be built in to their $30 case) and are far and away the biggest obstacle standing between sanity and tinnitus. I know they must be coming because manufacturers aren't dummies, but they have to realise by now that they are more of a priority that CPU fans, don't they?
Build your own website - full service homepage system your m
There is no reason why an air cooling solution would necessarly be noisy. There are plenty of ham radio rigs out there that dissipate a lot more heat than 103W, and do so quietly. What you also need is a large thermal mass on the chip regardless of cooling mechanism to prevent a rise in temperature too rapid to respond to in the event of a cooling system failure.
In the article it mentions:
The water cooling technology can significantly reduce the noise level. Equipped with a microprocessor whose heat dissipation is measured to reach 75W, the NEC desktop PC can suppress noise level to 33dB (A) owing to a water cooling module inside it. As its level was measured to be 43dB (A) with an air cooling system, the noise actually has gone down to one-tenth.
Do they not realize that the decible is measured on a logrithmic scale?
Every friend of mine who has entered into the water cooling realm has burned out at least one CPU before getting the system stable enough to work properly. Have fun, but be safe :)
The more you know, the less you understand.
all you hear about is 3 gigahertz this or 3 gigahertz that. what about the long pipeline that Pentiums have in the first place?
H z_ Myth.html
load up on the RAM and get that fast HD, but you never ever hear anyone complain about the inefficiency of Intels chip design.
but NO! that cant be.
http://eshop.macsales.com/Tech/index.cfm?load=M
2. Will water introduce hotter running, shorter-lived systems? This, of course, would lead to higher computer turnover and higher $$$$s for the computer makers.
No, it will just introduce systems that die even quicker (as in milliseconds instead of tenths of seconds) in the even of critical cooling failure.
Systems are already running about as hot as they can to avoid the transistors breaking down.
This will allow them to introduce systems that use more power, thereby hitting your electricity bill, but all that heat is going to be channeled away from your system and into your room (thereby hitting your electricity bill in the form of a/c), because the CPUs better not be getting any hotter.
So basically, the CPU's won't be getting any hotter, but the amount of heat being ejected into your room will definitely go up.
I run a Pentium 4 2.8C chip at 3.3 GHz (Hyper Threading enabled) cooled by a Volcano 7+ cooler on medium setting which has a tolerable noise output at 1 hour load temp of 60 Degrees. Having worked on _many_ athlons I have seen default 2400 XP athlons run hotter using mainstream coolers. I used to be an athlon enthuiast but later realised that I was kidding my self because not only are they slower and not as smooth running, but having 5 x 7200 rpm fast drives in my machine and a full complement of PCI cards i realised that Intel chips run cooler than their AMD alternatives. This also increases the product life of all the other components in a computer system as the internal case temp is reduced dramatically.
Any Athlon users out there notice drives just "dissapearing" from explorer... thats your cause, plain simple overheating. Swallow your pride and pay the money for an Intel Chip, I assure you you wont regret it.
Also note i _am not_ an intel employee... :)
seriously...
- Sig
Correct my if I am wrong but here are my thoughts on water.
Water has an extremely high specific heat compared to air so it can dissipate many more watts of energy from the processor. Acting much like an energy buffer. But what happens when you are running at high temps for a long time? (SETI, Games, Photoshop filters) At some point that water is going to get hot and then it is going to lose its effectiveness. That heat in the water is going to have to go somewhere and that somewhere is the air. It's a closed water system after all and we all know that dissipating in the air is no better for water than it is for aluminum or copper. So what does air get you? More time running hot before you have a problem? More surface area to dissipate into the air? It sounds to me like water cooling is only good for when you have short bursts of high-usage followed by long idle periods. So the water can suck up the heat fast when it needs to and then bleed it off when it can. Which of course, won't help a bit if your processor is running at 100% 24/7 like mine.
As much as we all like have our big huge CPUs and VPUs I think perhaps it's time to rethink the "speed at all costs" mentality of processor design. A lot of companies don't even try to optimize code anymore using the argument that processors are fast enough to handle it. Then processor companies use the fact that fast processors are needed to run this clunky software (I know this is simplistic and there is also a big numbers war between processor and video card companies). I think instead of basicly brute forcing more cooling we need to design components that are more efficient (produce less heat) and design computers that can dissipate heat well (kudos to apple for thermal zones, 9 low speed and quiet fans that are controlled by a thermometer). Also, more efficient code all around is a good thing for everyone.
Help I'm a rock.
Tom's Hardware Guide - search "water"
please speak up! I can't hear you over all the fans in my computer!
I've thought seriously about using my ex-wife to keep the system cool - that was one frigid bitch.
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I remember touring the studios and transmitter site for WWVA 1170khz in Wheeling WV, back in 1965 or so. Water-cooled tubes were the norm, both in the audio and the RF chains.
/.-ers not familiar with analog electronics, AM (amplitude modulated) signals generate lots of distortion when amplified. So the only efficient way to create a high-power (50kW) AM signal is to modulate the 50kW carrier signal with a 50kW audio signal. Fifty thousands watts is serious power, even today.]
[For those of you
But I don't recall the station engineers being especially concerned. IIRC, the tubes ran "upside down" (pins up, glass bottle down in the cooling water) and so long as the city water supply didn't give out, they were pretty sure their tubes would stay cool.
There are much more computer-friendly heat transfer fluids than H20. Why not use one of those?
Since when is 43 watts @ 1.8ghz, (I don't think they ever released the 2Ghz G5's power dissipation number, did they?) in the same league as 103watts?
While it puts out a bit more heat than the G3s and G4s mac users are used to, the G5 is still nowhere near as bad as prescott.
The prescott puts out more than doubble the heat.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
3 Tips for successful water cooling...
1: Never fill the water cooling system reservoir with boiling water from the kettle.
2: Coffee... as much as we all like it coffee _does not_ serve as an efficient coolant. (Tastes great though)
3: Dont run your water pump when there is no water passing through it. (that one is actually a serious one...)
- Sig
Overclockers.com maintains a nice database of the relative performance of various air and watercooling systems on a variety of platforms: The Heatsink and Watercooling Roundup.
This is utterly rediculous. Think for a moment, water cooling, ok, sure, but what happens *NEXT*. Intel keeps pushing CPU's, AMD follows suit, they get so hot that water cooling doesn't do it anymore... what will they do next, liquid nitrogen?!?
Come on, ya won the speed war, now turn down the oven, PLEASE!
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
"Has there ever been a head to head with air-cooling vs water-cooling?
Water better be damn good to risk my system to the exposure of fluids."
A constant danger in the porn industry.
The early Cray supercomputers (as well as the CDC6600) had Freon cooling systems. I recall pictures of an early prototype of (IIRC) the Cray II. It was one module of the new system immersed in an aquarium filled with Freon.
The high frequency EMF of the system caused some interesting color effects in the Freon, combined with the thermal gradients to make an interesting 'light show'.
Of course, we can't use Freon these days but what about other insulating oils (such as are used in transformers) & refrigerants? I haven't kept up - can modern chips handle being immersed in oil or in (for example) carbon tetrachloride? (yes, also a controlled, environmentally hazardous material)
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Two or three computers in the house, and pretty soon I will not need a hot water heater......
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
103 W? No more cold winter nights! I think I'm gonna sell my furnace and get me one of those 103 W babies. I wonder if they make bed covers with tubing.
cooling. Then I can pipe the hot water into my hot tub where all of my hot bitches are. Yeah, I know some hot bitches, what, are you saying that I'm full of shit because I have good slashdot karma? Hey, I'll bet that lots of guys here who post as often as I do know lots of hot bitches. Really, we do, Damnit! We do!
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
...is at least partially liquid cooled. Apple has been doing this since the G3 Powerbooks. So it only makes sense to use the technology on the G5's...
My Athlon XP 2000+ is running at 49 degf with it's fan going at 3000rpm. (It's not stock, but with the original fan it only ran about 5 deg hotter.) Other than that I have the PS fan, two case fans (one temperature controlled, the other an intake that blows over the hard drives), chipset, and video. It's noisy, but no more so than a Pentium would be.
One hot bitch is enough for me.
Imagine this. A tower divided down the middle, front to back. On the left side is the MB with the CPU(s) mounted on the backside of the MB. A short length of heat pipe runs from the CPU through the barrier to the other side were all the cooling equipment is(1).
The hard drives are mounted parallel with the vertical barrier. On to a chill block, either seperate, or integrated with the divider.
The MB has a pass-through for the video card.
The usual 5-1/4 stuff (CD/DVD-ROM, electronic displays, etc) mounts as it always does.
A couple things are achieved. One is neatness. Two is the seperation of electricity from water. Three with proper insulation on the right side, it can be very quiet.
(1) The right side could be made even thinner, by putting the bulkier items in a stylish base.
Manufacturers, please, please, start putting the processors on the back-sides of the motherboards!
The back side can be one huge heat sink, with large cooling fins, just like nice audio amp gear. If need be, the entire backplane can be one extruded piece of alloy. You can even include water cooling "safely" as no piping needs to enter the case at all. The back-side is the outside of the case!
What is so hard about this idea?
+2
Personally, I like the Navy's method of liquid cooling. The circuit boards are coated with a thin layer of rubber. They're then plugged into their sockets that are located inside of a water filled trough. Not the most elegant of solutions, but it works.
-- Remember, we're not happy until you're not happy. -- Local FAA Inspector --
With one minor change: You don't want the actual outside of the case to be cooling material in direct contact with the case. Never mind frustrated developers smacking the box, what happens to that CPU core when you knock the box over on the wrong side, or your grounded-forever kids whack the side with some hurtling toy?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I just leave my PC in the fridge. It makes it easier to swap out DVDs and get more Mountain Dew.
WHADDYA SAY?
I can't hear you! You're fan is TOO LOUD!
First off, the thing that I find attractive about this is the reduced noise level. What counts for me is the ability to run my computer 24/7 and not get hearing defects from it (or get my computer fried). So if water cooling really is quieter while cooling better, then I'd be willing to pay... say 40 Euros more for it.
That said, why stop at water cooling? Once you have a seperate coolant circuit, it wouldn't be much of a difference to work with pressure change cooling, like a fridge. That would work like this: In the radiator, the coolant is compressed, causing it to emit heat. After it is pumped to the cpu, there is a throttle, which allows the coolant to expand after passing it, thereby drawing in heat like a sponge, which is in turn dumped in the radiator. Of course, this approach requires a compressor and a pipe system that doesn't burst when overpressurized by a few Kilopascal.
Divide et impera!
"But seriously, that guy is taking the "hot rod" metaphor a little too far!"
Actualy, I suggested awhile back, running with that theme. Enclose the entire MB in a stylish metal shell (with sutiable cutouts(1), with metal cooling pipes coming out and running to an aluminiumn radiator. Mount the whole thing (except radiator) inside an acrylic case. Interior lighting optional.
(1) The extension card area can either be enclosed in a metal shell with vents, or a mesh covering with sutiable reinforcement.
Here is a snip from IBM- There are signigficant differences in the design cycle of this series. Here is the link to the full page BUT the snip contains reference to the thread.
p is .html
;-)
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/435/kato
The page is VERY long and this is near the bottom so I stole it outright for reading convience . . . really!
-quoth IBM-
the MCM technology provides us with the most dense configuration of chips in a two-dimensional arrangement, which facilitates refrigerated cooling. In fact, the GEMI MCM is the key contributor to a low-cost refrigeration apparatus that can enhance the performance of the system by more than 10%. In this refrigerated operation we have shown that the GEMI MCM can support 300-MHz synchronous interconnections of significant bandwidth. However, as was pointed out previously in this paper, this frequency limitation is affected by the delay of the electronic circuits associated with the interconnections. As CMOS technology advances, glass-ceramic MCMs with thin film should be able to support even higher interconnect frequencies
-unquoth IBM-
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
Use fluorinert, although it was origionally developed for heart transplant surgery it has a long history of use in electronics cooling. The Cray 2 supercomputer was cooled with it because its large GA chips performance was dependant on their temperature. It's great because you can submerge everything in it because it is non-electrically conductive.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"With one minor change: You don't want the actual outside of the case to be cooling material in direct contact with the case. Never mind frustrated developers smacking the box, what happens to that CPU core when you knock the box over on the wrong side, or your grounded-forever kids whack the side with some hurtling toy?"
Thank you. I'll add that to the rest.
How about using the "cell" concept to ease the pinpoint nature of the heat?
I think the machine was out for a month or so, but maybe that long outage was when they were having trouble getting the thing to be happy with its 4th Megabyte of core memory.....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Zalman TNN 500A fanless computer
Now, is this something most people would need or use? In terms of noise most definitely.Actually I commented to a person that it was a shame that the P2 design wasn't licensed to others. Why? Because the design had a couple advantages. One the hershey-bar design made it easy to handle (no 'core' breaking). Two with future modification. It coud have been made thinner (a bewoulf, PnP style). Metal shell for EMI and heat considerations. A cooling block could have been easily integraded with the connections made at the end of the case, which was usually at the edge of the MB. Instead of the present "reach all the way". And I haven't even gotten into SMP yet.
Hey, there may be benefits to hotter computers. When you get home in the middle of winter and realize how cold your home is, just open up the computer case and render a few videos. Or better yet, hook up your system to your hot water heater. Start it to replay your last Quake III game, and in the morning, coffee and a hot shower!
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The thing to remember that there is a practical upper limit to conventional cooling solutions. Let's assume for a minute that some exotic water cooling rig could dissipate 210W from a system (including video card, power supply, etc). This heat would still need to be transferred out of the room/house. It is easy for datacenters or specially prepared rooms to dissipate excess heat but in your stereotypical house with central air this is going to be a serious problem.
It would be interesting to see if something using a endothermic reaction or maybe a condensor could be made practical as a supplement or replacement to a more conventional cooling system. This would obviate the need to dump the heat.
Invented? The years since end-of-lifed slot-loading iMac G3's had no fan, using convection cooling instead. I have one in my living room hooked up to my stereo system. I had to replace the built-in hard drive with a much quieter Segate drive (much larger too, of course), but now it really is silent except for the occasionaly very, very quiet tick of the hard drive, and makes a fantastic music box. It is so quiet that I also use it as a server and leave it running all the time even though its in the reading room of the house. I dread the day that my trusy slotted iMac goes to pasture as there may be nothing to replace it.
--- What?
I own Athlon MPs, and they don't overheat, granted I don't overclock them, because I figure, 2.0 ghz chips in an SMP configuration is enough power. I would suggest to AMD people, if anything, don't run with the stock CPU coolers, granted, you will void your warranty with AMD, but it works better, and perhaps some arctic silver, that way, you don't have to buy a new CPU! amazing. Intel chips could run cooler because of that heat spreader as well, and new opterons, and hopefully athlon64s will have them, and I doubt that any athlon I have would get as toasty as prescott. And also by your logic, we should all be running computers based on G4s instead of Intel or AMD, because they run a lot cooler than x86 processors. So I say this, buy whatever chip you want, just learn how to cool it properly!
Refrigerators are meant to keep cool things cool, not make hot things cold; the compressor on the fridge would work itself to death within weeks, if it were able to maintain a low temperature at all.
Personally, though, I'd love to see more people go into thermal engineering. A day hasn't gone by this summer when I haven't thought that there must be a better way to cool the subway cars in NYC than pumping hot air onto the platforms!
First of all, I would like to say that I refuse to buy any computer system that uses any more power than current AMD processors. For one thing, the fact that I live in the desert causes serious problem. Electric bills going through the roof, if for no other reason than needing to keep the cooler on 18hours ever day. This will drive people from Intel to AMD, and if AMD keeps driving temps up, then to Apple, or IBM, who's PPC chip seems to be the coolest running modern processor around.
With that said, I'd still like to talk about cooling methods. I hate the current system as much as anybody, but it can work! Really! I swear!
First of all, I'd like to say that the ideal cooling system would be to make the top of the computer a huge heatsink, and conduct the heat from all internal components to it. That would remove the need for fans in residential computers all together.
Secondly, I have seen the light, and I now understand the benefits of convection.
With the above design, I would also sell a top that hooks on to the computer, and makes a covered space of 4" above the large system heat sink. What this would accomplish is to allow ducting (standard 4", dryer-sized) to be attached.
With my XP 2000+, here in the desert, things are so damn hot already that another 20 degrees from a computer pushes the temperature from incredible hot, to inhuman, and that just wasn't working out. What I did, was to duct the power supply fan through a duct leading outside, and venting through a one-way vent. With this system, not only is it 20 degrees cooler, but the system stays much much cooler, so much so that it doesn't need air conditioning anymore. It is now only drawing in cool air, and not it's own recirculated hot air, so things stay much cooler. It's much more tolerable for people as well. As an unanticipated benefit, the noise of the power supply fan is almost completely gone, because the noise is ducted outside as well.
The best thing about ducting hot air out, is that there is really no limit... If computer makers built air-tight, insulated cases, where you could control the air input and output, you could theoretically run millions of computers at incredibly hot temperatures, and not raise room temperature at all, because the heat is all going straight outside.
Additionally, fan noise is not a fact of life, but a byproduct of saving 2 cents on a fan. I replaced my power supply fan with a $10 one, which blows more than 3x as much air, but isn't as loud. On the CPU, I replaced the fan with a $5 unit that blows slightly more air, but is about 5x quieter. Finally, I replaced the junk on the heatsink with thermal grease, and that move ALONE dropped the CPU temperature by more than 10 degrees.
Now, why in the hell aren't computer manufacturers doing anything like this? Spending $1 more on fans would get them loads more customers, and spending a few cents on heatsink grease would get them a better reputation, higher maximum operating temperature, and less need for more powerful fans. Can anyone explain why the resort to expensive, complex, unreliable, crap like this, rather than just doing the current convection methods the right way?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I believe they quoted 35 dB in the keynote.. correct me if I'm wrong... I just remember not being impressed. Ambient room noise for me tends to be around 30 dB or so. Thus, under 30 dB is "silent." However, for many people, with music playing and whatnot, 35 dB is probably going to be fine.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
If it feels good, do it ... I guess....
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
Why are people now getting so hyped about water cooling? I am far more excited at the prospect of cheap Peltier/Freon systems like Vapochill. Cools to a far lower temperature, allowing oft-times double the clock speed to be attained, and means not messing around with water in your case!
A vaporizer, actually. There are guys who use a bit of tinfoil and a lightbulb to vaporize their dope. It'd work just as well on the heatsink on one of these behemoths.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
For just a second you gotta stop thinking like a /.r
Computers for the rest of the world are these boxes that when you push a button they turn on and they produce a steady stream of pron, email and spam that comes from some netherworld called 'the internet'.
And that is about all normal people understand.
These people have enough trouble with EASY preventative maintenence to the OS (I am talking Windows Update), asking them to do preventative maintenence to the hardware is just plain mean.
In that respect fans are good. Occasionaly they clog with dust but aside from that they are really maintenence free.
I don't watercool. I have read some odds and ends here and there talking about maintenence to watercoolers.
So what is the reality? The people that do watercooling, is there any maintenence to them at all?
Even a little maintenence is too much for mainstream people.
God forbid I need to start telling people they need to check the oil inside there PC.
I'm calling troll because my Athlons have always treated me well. Drives have never "dissapeared" from explorer for me, and I've been using AMD processors for quite some time.
Even with the STOCK AMD heatsink and fan, I have to put in a considerable amount of effort to get an Athlon above 60 C.
I've never truly overheated an Athlon, and the 2500 XP (Barton) I just put together has a _shitty heatsink_, and I still can't get it above 60 C if I try.
With a good heatsink and Arctic Silver, people have gotten their Athlons to stay in the 30s. I plan on replacing my current heatsink when I have the time, but even with the POS I have right now I can't even get it above 60 by 3D gaming for hours, let alone running Toast.
I agree that in general, Intel processors are cooler, but I do not see a performance difference in gaming that warrants their extra price. Either way, if your processor is overheating, either you are doing something wrong or something is defective.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I like the idea already..
First the auto mechanics make it big -- with the idiots who cannot remember to check their oil in their cars..
Now when some idiot home use forgets to water their computer -- I get paid!
I like it..
= Grow a brain...
If you don't stop moddin' that Hot-Rod Lincoln!"
Nope, just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
RIAA with a $100,000,000,000 court order for your son.
Feel like having a drink yet? Me neither, but the law is obviously shitfaced. I'd try to rhyme it out and sing it to you, but some RIAA dirt bag thinks they own it already. You will have to come up with something catchy on your own, sorry.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
what will we drink? Maybe its a good thing :^)
after all that those icebergs are melting...
we need the water!
The people that do watercooling, is there any maintenence to them at all?
Ive been watercooling for several years, and the only maintainence ive required is:
1) Very occasional top up of the water (maybe once a year). It s a sealed system, but some vapour must escape through the piping/connectors.
2) Cleaning the radiator every few/6 months. This is no different to fans/heatsinks, it's just that the location and airflow I use means my radiator gets clogged.
I agree - even a little maintainence is too much for many people - a factory watercooling system would need to be developed with this in mind. It's certainly not impossible to expect several years maintainence free.
Does your fridge make ice for you? Behind it is a 1/4 hose with fittings to your house plumbing. It's cheap, flexible, and generally does not leak. Fittings for low pressure water are everywhere, cheap and work just fine. It should not take lots of effort to move them into mass produced PC cases. The thing does not have to be beautiful, it just has to dissipate 100 watts or so.
100 watts is considerable, but by no means does it require loads of equipment. To keep the temperture rise of your cooling water equivalent to 1 degree C, you will need a flow of about 0.5 m/s through that tube. If you can live with 2 or 3 degree temperature rises, you can get away with 1/2 and 1/3 that flow. Not much pumping power would be needed to get the 8 to 25 cc/s needed. Larger diamiter tubing makes pumping easier. Dissipating the heat from there to the air is a different story, but it's not that hard. We are not talking about a 100 kW car engine, we are talking about the equivalent of a 100 watt lightbulb, something you could generate with your own hands for a short time.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Original AT PC.
Generic AT form factors.
Funky vendor-specific layouts from Compaq, Packard-Bell, etc.
ATX layout
mini/micro/??? ATC layouts
Quick -- which is the standard? The only one that even comes close is the ATX, and even that isn't 100% "standard" now that so many boards have hole-through CPU cooler mounts that require additional clearance.
Some of the micro-ATX shoebox systems out there use some of the passive case cooling ideas, with heat-pipes transmitting the excess from CPU contact to the case itself.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Coolant good. Water bad.
Liquid coolant works damned good!
But anyone who is too bloody damned lazy to adequately maintain a liquid cooling system of any sort deserves whatever leaks out and the consequences thereof.
What??? Don't want to do maintenance? then don't get it! Got it?
Water cooling is all about increasing the radiant surface for dissipating the exceess heat. Even the relatively basic Koolance water cooling systems have several times the surface area that even my Zalman coolers have.
More surface means better heat transfer, which means you can either crank your system's thermal load by overclocking harder than usual, or reduce your fan noise by using larger slower fans instead of 5000+ RPM screamers.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Compare the cost of a few extra case fans, a couple power barnacles, a honkin' big air cooler, and toss it in a nice sturdy case and you end up within about $50 of something like a Koolance case with built-in radiator/pump and an appropriate water block.
It's actually the fact that I could get the Koolance mid-tower for so little more than a "normal" performance cooling setup that convinced me to give it a shot. (Not that I recommend the mid-tower case -- it's too cramped. Getting a 425W PS in place was absolutely brutal, and I only had about 1/8" clearance along one edge of the mobo. Go with the full-size case instead.)
The only thing I'm thinking about doing with the system yet is replacing the stock fans with Pabst. It's not "noisy" by normal standards, but not quite as quiet as it will be when I'm done.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
At my company we tried using water cooling for one of our computers and had all kinds of problems. Turns out that where there is water, there is life. We had these weird algae blooms that would clog the hoses. We used a biocide to keep that under control, but the biocide caused other problems. Do home water-coolers get gummed up hoses too? How often do you have to shut down for maintenance? We eventually had to go back to florinert.
....this.
VapoChill
--------------
Combine the computer and cooling system in a large container. Sprinkle with madness. Refrigerate.
Serves 1 CPU.
Now that I give it a little more thought I think I can see how it could be doable.
If someone can produce a water cooling system that is A) cheap B) reliable and C) simple and painless to install then I think it could be done.
If you could pick up the part for maybe $20 or $30 and the install really wasn't any harder then say installing a PCI card then I think it would be feasible.
But it would be critical that we could get a reliable 2 years out of it.
I am suggesting throwing away the old and replacing it instead of topping off the water or cleaning the radiator.
I think the general public would have no issue with a replace/throwaway part. But if you start talking about topping off liquids and cleaning radiators, wow, I shudder at the trouble that could cause.
Why are these manufactures focusing on water? Or, perhaps they intend to standardize on a platform that allows "liquid" cooling, and all this mention of water is just watered-down conversation? There are many liquids that have better cooling properties than water (better thermal conductivity, cause less corrosion, etc.) that can and are being used in high-end electronics. Alcohol and glycol solutions are the first things that come to mind. I suppose anything involving sodium might be applicable also. I'm no expert here, I'm just asking questions.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Is for that heated water so somehow be used to recharge my laptop battery. I'm use that would at least lengthen the time between charges, no?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Pluggable liquid-cooled rack-mounted modules are not the way to go. Ask anyone who had a liquid-cooled IBM mainframe. It used to be said of the IBM 370/168 that it needed "six plumbers and a CE (customer engineer)."
OK, it has a big specific heat capacity, but given that you can just increase the pump speed to compensate, why not use something non-conductive like paraffin? This wouldn't wreck your mobo when a joint popped.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
This is just doctoring on the symptoms, the cause is the power consumtion itself
Lets have a look, almost every processore manufacturer has a low power line of their processors but the biggest ones simply refuse to open them to desktop systems but sell it to notebook manufacturers.
I think the wole situation stinks.
Me and my 1974 still-running Beetle would like to object to your indensitive, cloddish tone.
It has heatsinks all over both sides. This has to cost a small fortune and be quite heavy!
A chip that dissipates 103 watts is well over the line. Geez, and people used to laugh at the DEC Alpha in 1993. Sure, you can get that heat away from the CPU...and right into the room with you. This moronic race of trading an 8% clockspeed increase for a 15% increase in power consumption is the beginning of the end of modern CPU design...especially as the keyword for the 21st century is *mobile*. The last thing we want--a few years down the road--is every insurance saleman and secretary havinga Prescott on his or her desk, simply because there aren't easily available alternatives
Here's to whoever breaks the trend. Transmeta looked pretty dumb and slow a few years ago, but now the Efficeon looks to outdo the Pentium M by a large margin. But what we need now is a revolution, and not just another giant pseudo-RISC chip that trades a teensy bit more performance for over the top heat problems.
Where did you get that? I've got the source for the MSVC 6.0 RTL, and that line is nowhere to be found.
Why less than sensible? Do you know anything about heat transfer?
Once, our coolant system was "infected" with some funky bacteria -- they had to flush and disinfect the entire cooling system -- major downtime and expense. The System Admin kept a mason jar of the infected coolant on his desk for a few months after that. It was mostly clear fluid, with a big hairy brown-green ball that floated in the middle.
Anonymous Kev /.er's since 2001
Proudly posting as AC since 1997.
Getting ignored by most
3: Dont run your water pump when there is no water passing through it. (that one is actually a serious one...)
Indeed, and this can apply to almost any liquid-flow system - especially using a pump. Ever been told not to let your gas tank run too low before filling? That's because if your pump sucks air pockets (going up a hill with gas sloshing in the tank) it has to work really hard to keep up flow. Additionally, if you have an in-tank pump, the gasoline fluid supposedly helps cool the pump itself.
Same thing in a fish-tank, or a PC. Sucking air overworks your pump. If things start getting hot, it can also steam, which can actually damage part of the pumping system or corrode pipes. I've had this effect in a car with a low "overflow" in the rad, steam is damaging to the pipes.
Combine the glucose engine posted last week and you could get both power AND cooling from blood. The body is a great radiator.
Hmm. Maybe a little messy to setup, but you can't get much more portable than that!
Liquid nitrogen has already been used a couple of years ago for a submersed system. Great article, and there is a second attempt which uses dry ice if you click all the way through it...These guys are crazy!
Something clever...
" A college roommate and I had a nice setup of liquor bottles filled with highlighter ink in water (1 marker per bottle). When the blacklight was on, the bottle glow would almost light up the room."
Don't host a party.
It's a matter of time before some drunkard decides to go for the pretty glowy booze.
Yes, this happened once during a party my apartmentmates and I held my senior year. Fortunately it was nontoxic water-soluble paint...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Remember - Fans get noisy when they start failing.
A vacuum cleaner and some silicone lubricant can do wonders for a GF4 fan - I had one that became very loud and then stopped. I vacuumed it out, unscrewed the fan (On mine, the heatsink is epoxied but the fan can be unscrewed from the heatsink) and sprayed lubricant into the workings of the fan.
It's quieter than ever now.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I'm not an OCer but I wonder about this...what about the heat generated by hard drives? Hard drives generate a huge amount of heat. If you cooled the hard drive using a water cooling setup, how much could you OC the CPU without water cooling it since the ambient temp in the case would have been reduced by some large amount.
If you water cool both, you could probably run the computer with only the evaporator fan.
Came with Visual Studio 6.0. Screenshot here.
Yen-symbols in place of \r?! Nihongo wa hanasemasu ka? Nihonjin desu ka?
everything in moderation
Nihonjin de wa nai keredo, nihongo wa hanasemasu ^_^
I live and work in Japan, hence the funny backslashes. See my homepage in English or Nihongo.