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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.
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.
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.
...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?
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
Yeah, remember back when Gene Amdahl introduced the innovation of an air cooled computer back in the '70s? Up until then, they had always been water cooled... this ain't new technology, folks!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
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.
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/
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 --
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)
Zalman TNN 500A fanless computer
Now, is this something most people would need or use? In terms of noise most definitely.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
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.
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.