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Silent Pump for Water-Cooled PCs
Wycliffe writes "New Scientist has an article about a silent pump for water-cooled PCs.
The system, developed by a Californian start-up company, aims to silently solve the problem that the faster chips get, the hotter they become."
That's really cool.
I've often wondered whether we couldn't attach a Stirling engine directly
to the surface of the processor and recover some of the energy being lost
as heat and turn it into electricity. If we could do that then I could have
a cooler laptop that has a longer lasting battery since processor heat is
being used to power the processor.
Anything that stops my laptop burning my private parts and makes the
battery last longer would be very nice. If at the same time it makes
no noise (especially compared to the lawnmower like noise my Dell laptop's
two fans make) it would be even better.
John.
Californian start-up company, aims to silently solve the problem that the faster chips get, the hotter they become
I know what you mean but... they aren't solving the problem. They are developing a way around the problem. Solving the problem would be to break the laws of thermodynamics and develop a chip that gets cooler as a function of time.
I use an engine from a nuclear submarine for my water-cooling pump, you insensitive clod!
When are they going to move to water cooling for video cards? The GeForce FX fan sound can be compared to a vacuum cleaner.
My sig can beat up your sig.
These guys have been selling this for a while. I have one and it's awesome. Use it with CompactFlash to boot from, and there is absolutely NOTHING that spins or moves, so no sound at all. Great for your home entertainment system.
Unfortunately they don't support the very high end CPUs. When I bought mine the max was 1GHz PIII, which is still ample fast for most apps.
The pump was developed by mechanical engineer Ken Goodson at Stanford University.
Don't you mean to say he thought 'wouldn't this be cool' and then his grad students developed it?
While they say it pushes 200mL/min, they don't say how much power it requires to do so... peltiers are incredibly effective, but suck an obscene amount of power to do so.
If this new pump requires 75W or more, then you're unlikely to win in the long run - you'll just need a bigger PSU (and bigger, noisier fan in it) to get the job done.
Anyone have any more detailed links?
Namaste
...stirling engine...
To work, a Stirling engine needs a temperature differential - a "hot" side and a "cold" side. Doesn't matter which is where, but you need that differential or there won't be any expansion or contraction to work with.
So, what you'd be doing is using the Stirling engine as a heat transfer device - going from the inside of the case to the outside. Easier and cheaper to just cut a hole in the case & let it go out by itself, or bump the fan up a bit.
nt
"Even if all the technical details are ironed out, I think it will be five years at least before fans are replaced. They are still the cheapest option."
Seems to be a way off. I wonder if in 5 years we will have different processors, where this will not be effective. Think little bacteria or DNA or something organic as a CPU.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Insert some vague simpsons reference here about lisa, the laws of thermodynamics, and the obeying thereof.
"Even if all the technical details are ironed out, I think it will be five years at least before fans are replaced. They are still the cheapest option."
/. crowd. It's the geek "cool"ness factor (groan).
However, that's not the point with the
However, others are cautious about the idea. "I don't like mixing water and electricity," says Paul Lee, at QuietPC in North Yorkshire, England, a company that specialises in PC noise elimination. "Even if all the technical details are ironed out, I think it will be five years at least before fans are replaced. They are still the cheapest option."
I really got a kick out of this statement. This is an example of how insecure people are and how most people view change as a bad thing. If Paul embraced the technology, perhaps his company would win the OEM contract with Intel. Imagine the money! But not with that thinking.
I think it's clearly about time that computers move into the liquid cooled stage. Look at what it did for automobiles. Anyone here own an old air cooled porche is a big city?
Skip: It's a cpu cooling system...like a jet engine for the water. Only there are no moving parts, so it's very very quiet.
Ryan: Like how quiet?
Skip: Doubtful another computer user would even pick it up. Even if they did, it would sound like...whales humping...or a seismic anomoly. Anything but a cpu cooling system. We fooled with this a couple years ago, but couldn't get it to work. *Pauses* This isn't a mock-up, is it? They really built this thing?
Adopted from Tom Clancy's The Hunt For Red October . Thank you.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
From the good ol' FA:
However, others are cautious about the idea. "I don't like mixing water and electricity," says Paul Lee, at QuietPC in North Yorkshire, England, a company that specialises in PC noise elimination. "Even if all the technical details are ironed out, I think it will be five years at least before fans are replaced. They are still the cheapest option."
Poor Paul Lee. He doesn't like mixing water and electricity.
He must take cold showers, because heating water generally requires a device called a "hot water heater", in which an electrically-operated device is actually submerged in water! Horrors!
Actually, he probably takes his baths in the spring out back, since water from a centralized system at some point was pumped by electric motors, and some of that electricity might still be in the water.
If he's not lucky enough to have a spring on his property, his kids probably wake up every morning and hoist the bucket up from the well.
And we don't even want to think about his other bathroom facilities...
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
No it didn't. In HFRO they used a screw drive that actaully had a screw being turned. This uses ions moving to move the water. RTFA.
Old "air cooled" Porsche engines are primarily oil cooled. And my '72 911S is running fine, thanks!
A sterling engine wouldn't help cool the chip unless you ran it backwards (as a heat pump) by aplying power to the shaft.
Sterling engines impede the transfer of heat much more than heat sinks
Really, we don't need better cooling. Every heat problem we look at revolves around better ways of pumping heat away from the CPU. As soon as we come up with something cool (pardon the pun), the chip manufacturers have implicit carte blanche to produce hotter chips.
We Need Cooler Chips. We need CPUs and GPUs that consume maybe 10W instead of 80+W, and then we can go back to heatsinks perhaps with small fans. Looking back on my first x86 machine (a 486), I discover that it was the last processor Intel certified for use without a heat sink (or maybe without a fan--something like that). Now we have BIG copper heatsinks, monster CPU fans as well as extra case fans and dual-fan power supplies, and the companies are starting to look at liquid cooling as a mainstream "solution."
When will it end? At this rate, we'll actually be maxing out 500W power supplies in a few years. Half a kilowatt is too much power to be drawing for a computer! (and consider that it doesn't even include the monitor or peripherals.)
Let's start leaning on Intel and AMD, and get them to reduce the power consumption rather than giving us meaningless MHz increments.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
before the I get modded to oblivian, I've looked everywhere for the answer to this question... all I find is overclockers bragging about their 15C AMD1600+ OC'd to 3.5gHz, which doesnt help me...
I run an AMD 2600+, and it sits about 53-57C (its on a chaintch zenith 7jns board)... is that too hot?
I was thinkig of getting a water cooling system, but I dont know if its too hot or if I am just not used to a high powered AMD processor/mobile heating station...
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of mini pumps used to power a super silent nuclear submarine!!!! HUNT FOR THE RED OCTOBER ALL OVER AGAIN
In every sytem I've built, the pumps (no matter how big, and I had a few large ones) were never louder than the fan to cool the radiator. Bongs are loud from splashing water. Who cares if the pump doesn't have moving parts, you've still got to cool the water off.
And as we go from one generation of CPUs to another, the heat dissipated by these chips doubles as well.
The sneaky squids cool their reactors with natural convection of water. In plain English that means that there is no pump for cooling a goddamn nuclear reactor.
I don't know if this unique to the US subs (maybe the Brits have something like this), but it's just so fucking cool.
Make me a waterproof motherboard first.
However, others are cautious about the idea. "I don't like mixing water and electricity," says Paul Lee, at QuietPC in North Yorkshire, England, a company that specialises in PC noise elimination.
Translation:
However, others would like the idea to go away. "Let me think up a reason to discourage this," says Paul Lee, at QuietPC in North Yorkshire, England, a company whose business model depends on PCs being noisy.
I really like QuietPC as a company, but this has got to be the dumbest quote ever attributed to anyone. Paul, 5 years ago, you didn't need a fan, just a biggol mehonchie heat sink on your 486.
I do own an air-cooled VW in the city, and it's fun driving past people who have overheated due to a limited amount of cooling volume. The problem isn't that air is inefficient, just noisy. I think fans will always be the low end option, but water has been a high end option that is now becoming much easier to buy.
So why doesn't Paul Lee get the clue that this is an article about a tech that has come of age, and stop sounding like a moron luddite who fails to comprehend the march of technology??
Yeah, but I don't park my car in the living room for one. Second, in a car, the water is kept well away from the electronics, typically. Third, I don't want to worry about replacing liquid, maintaining levels, etc. Fourth, it'll always be more expensive than a cheap case fan.
Admittedly, there's a trememdous upside as well, but I don't think there's any reason to belittle concerns with claims of insecurity. It's one thing to do for your hobby, but I can see why the guy isn't willing to bank the business on it.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
They've been doing that for a while. They also do chipsets. Now you're also starting to see watercooled hard drives.
But I still remember back when I was in college and I got to take a tour of Cray headquaters. I can still remember seeing one of the first Cray-2's there, in its clear shell. It was about 3 feet tall and 3 or 4 feet in diameter, and the whole computer sat inside completely submerged in fluid (not water). You could see little bubbles rising up through the densely packed circuit boards and wires. And nearby was a really cool lighted fountain. So cool. Of course the engineer there said it created so much heat that there was an entire building out back which was just the heat exchanger for the fluid.
Click the link before you moderate, folks.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I remember reading a story about one of the Crays (Y-MP?) that was cooled by a synthetic aproximation of human blood plasma. I think it was used to cool the memory. I also seem to remember a picture of the plasma flowing over a fountain type thing.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Any noise at all on a pro studio floor is unacceptable. That makes the PC you need for a soft synth or effects quite expensive. Even my Shuttle SN41G2 is too loud to use live in the studio. I wish I could modify it to be fanless, without it costing a lot.
The alternative is to put the PC in the control room, which means long cables, or else an enclosure, which will also be expensive.
I could mitigate the problem by putting the PC in a rack case, but 1-u rack cases tend to be too deep for the typical musician's rack, and again, it's an expensive solution.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Well done, moderators. :D
How about trying to inform yourselves by following the provided link, before moderating it as "informative"?
But maybe a page with a load of crap from the Complaint Generator is "informative" to you?
There's more on electrophoresis and osmosis over at the General Osmosis Association To Save Electricity.
How would these grad students (employees) have the chance of developing (earning) anything in the first place if they had not been hired by the professor (employer)?
So shut the fuck up already. Communism is dead.
Ryan: She started compiling the new Linux kernel this morning.
"I don't like mixing water and electricity," says Paul Lee, at QuietPC in North Yorkshire, England
YOU GIRLY WUSS MAN!!
--Swiftech announces their new liquid cooling system that uses coffee instead of water. Now geeks can have their cooling and drink it too..
Actually, you seem to have missed the actual attribution of that quote. It's not from the company making this new water-cooling setup but from a guy at QuietPC whose whole livelihood is based on selling competing products. He's just some guy saying the tech won't be ready for 5 years. The article's author doesn't seem to have bothered to ask the guy from Cooligy how soon he thinks it will be on the market.
I wonder if in 5 years we will have different processors, where this will not be effective. Think little bacteria or DNA or something organic as a CPU.
Don't you think it's a little early to be quite this drunk?
BFL
There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland
I am very tired of idiots who post about being worried about water near electricity, rust, you name it. I think it shows how basic science education is being neglected. So I would like to make a few points.
Pure water is a poor conductor of electricity. That's why ordinary condensation caused by the lowering temperature of humid air rarely causes problems with electrical equipment. The conductivity of good quality DI or distilled water is actually not high enough to affect most digital systems. It wouldn't be good if it got into rotating components, but in the low-resistance 5-12VDC environment, a little damp is not a problem.
Furthermore, in the absence of dissolved air, water does not promote rust. Generations of science teachers have shown kids that iron nails in distilled water stay bright while those in aerated tap water rapidly rust.
The biggest problem I am aware of with water cooled electronics - and I have been involved on and off with liquid handling since 1980 - is inappropriate choice of materials. The common polyamide (nylon) pipe is water absorbent, as are some other widely used polymers. Cast metals are also often prone to porosity, pinholes and slag inclusions, which can be major sources of leaks. Pressure testing is a good idea.
Another problem with water cooling for electronics is inappropriate design of connections, resulting in too much mechanical load either on the connection itself, sealing faces of pumps, or the attachment of the cooling plate to the substrate.
Unlike automotive cooling, vibration is not usually a major problem.
This isn't a howto essay, but here are a few pointers.
DO NOT EVER use automotive components. They are designed for robustness and can handle high levels of sludge, and in any case are designed for use with glycol mixtures.
DO NOT create high pressures. The object should be to have wide flow paths working at low pressure differentials with minimum turbulence. I'm amazed when I read descriptions of heat removers describing them has having internal passages designed to promote turbulence - because turbulence is bad. You want, ideally, laminar flow across the hotspot so that it is in contact with a constantly changing flow of cold water.
Platinum cured silicone tubing is very good. It contains no cure residues that could make the water acid and it is very flexible. It needs to be carefully routed to prevent kinking but it puts low stresss on joints.
Flow back to header tanks should avoid bubbling to prevent aeration, and header tanks should be covered except for a minute hole (filtered) for pressure compensation. If you can keep spores and bugs out of the water, you will not grow algae.
Ideally all metal parts should be the same metal or at least metals of similar electrochemical potential.
Use lab grade DI water.
Use compression joints rather than just relying on the elasticity of the pipe.
NEC has said they are working on a system designed to eliminate leaks - their curious reference to "resin" being, I suspect, a reference to epoxy or nylon components that are prone to leak slowly. The automotive industry has done it: liquid cooled auto engines now require hardly any maintenance of the cooling system. I'm sure that once the serious manufacturers get on the case and the amateurs start to fade into the background, liquid cooling for personal computers should come on rapidly, for all the same reason as automotives (more power in smaller space, more accurate temperature control, able to reach less accessible places, smaller block mass needed for heat exchangers). The technologies are all there, the need is obvious.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
In The Hunt For Red October they were using Magneto Hydrodynamic drive, where the magnetic asymetry of the water molecule is exploited by using an intense magnetic field to align the water within the drive tube (much like what is done in a MRI), and then moving/pulsing the magnetic fields along the drive tube to push the water through it.
There is no screw. (except as a backup.)
If you've ever seen pictures of the levitating frog (being held up by magnetic fields), it is the same principle.
What is the difference between a small revolutionary change and a large evolutionary change?
Read
the
fabulous
article.
Period.
The system, developed by a Californian start-up company, aims to silently solve the problem that the faster chips get, the hotter they become.
As far as I know it's impossible to solve that problem without inventing some new thermodynamics, and in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics! This thing isn't going to banish the heat to the astral plane, it just makes moving the heat around a bit quieter and more efficient, allowing for faster CPU speeds. If you are running a P4 Prescott that dissipates 100 watts, it's still going to turn your office into a sauna unless you have a vent or an open window removing the hot air from the room.
Be careful not to hit anything with your elbow while wanking however.
You sound like you're speaking from experience.
The system, developed by Californian start-up company Cooligy, aims to silently solve the problem that the faster chips get, the hotter they become.
Water cooling only improves the heat dissipation by some constant factor, keeping the chips from melting down until they get yet faster and smaller. Next year, I guess we'll be hearing about liquid sodium cooling systems.
But note that exotic cooling systems don't actually make the the heat go away, they just move it to a different part of the room. This does nothing to solve the closet-full-of-computers problem. Your home is still going to get hotter than you want in summer. In fact, cooling systems themselves generate heat so any cooling that isn't actually needed to keep the processor from melting down actually makes the heat problem worse.
It's always nice when noise goes away though.
Back to the heat question, this kind of thing is great for pushing forward the frontier of single-cpu systems. But single cpu systems aren't where the action is, it's in SMP and clusters. For that reason, I'm a lot more interested in systems that generate fewer calories per mip in the first place.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Anybody overclock PPC chips and have the motherboard fry?
Danke tres mucho, tovarishch.
Something I've wondered....
Would increasing he size of the chip die help with heat dissipation? The die itself is about what, 1/2" square (approximately, and using an AMD Athlon as a reference)..
If we were to increase the die itself to the size of the `skirt' around it (that which holds all the pins)... perhaps a vented or flow-through design on the die also. I don't forsee that this would cause any major repercussions as far as motherboard size increase.
My other thought...
Aren't processors fast enough as it is? Maybe we'd do ourselves some real good by focusing on the other bottlenecks in the system and getting them up to snuff.
Besides.... we all know (whether we'll admit or not) that even the most modest computers in use spend most of thier time simply waiting around for the user to make them do something.
Or maybe focusing on efficiency- for reduced power consumption (and ultimately heat generation).
Or maybe, scrapping the whole thing and starting over (as has been talked about frequently in the x86 world). At least it's been said by people who understand hardware better than myself that the current state of x86 is a total mess.
I dunno. Maybe i'm not geek-worthy, or something.
do() || do_not();
If I recall correctly, it's a simple plastic tube, with a motor driving a pair of rollers to maintain flow, leaving the system completely closed (usually these kinds of pumps are used in heart/lung machines, dialysis machines, etc). Also, having seen such a pump in action before, they're incredibly quiet.
e dotasp/PagEnd/QStr/TargetInventoryID/Eql/36054/Pag e.htm
The closest reference I could find is at http://www.appraisalmedical.com/PagBgn/ProductPag
There should be a way to manufacture a similar pump for far cheaper, since you wouldn't need as accurate a pressure control, or have to excessive monitoring.
The benefits are:
(1) Virtually silent, no impeller noise.
(2) Pump/Motor are completely isolated from the coolant fluid, leading to a lower chance of failure due to pump contamination/oxidation/short circuits.
(3) The pump speed and thus the fluid moved can be controlled with a potentiometer. As such, with a bit of creative work, you could conceivably design a failsafe mechanism to increase coolant flow when temperatures appear critical.
(4) Replacement parts *should* be cheaper, you can replace a roller, the hose the rollers ride over, or the motor individually, rather than the entire unit.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I have a pump in my small water fountain that is pretty quiet. I think that it would work famously in my computer.
I look forward to the day where this can happen you, too.
As others have said, rust is a non-issue if you use the right materials.
Pure water is a very poor conductor of electricity (worse than air, I believe).
And computers hardly last a lifetime. At BEST they have about a 5 year lifetime, and by then they're way out of date.
no comment
Interesting to think about this in terms of Moore's Law. ML states that costs of costs of chips will come down (and/or transistor density rises.) Regarding costs, what good does it do to make chips cheaper if the costs of electricity negate the benefit? Some CPUs are exceeding 100W consumption. Over the course of a 3 year lifetime, at 15 cents per kWh, we get a cost of: 100 W * 3 years * 365 days / year * 24 hours / day * $0.15 / kW - hour * (1 kW / 1000 W) = $394.20 So that Pentium 4 that cost you $300 actually is going to cost you that again just for electricity!! Not everyone leaves their machines on all the time, and YMMV, but this is only going to get worse over time. It will be interesting to see how CPU manufacturers repond with more efficiency, rather than just more transistors.
I do own an air-cooled VW in the city, and it's fun driving past people who have overheated due to a limited amount of cooling volume.
I'm fairly sure that this is a case of not maintaining the vehicle and making sure the coolant level is topped off, than an actual design failure of the cooling system. This may have been what you meant by "limited amount of cooling volume".
Dear Slashdot community,
This product sounds fantastic, but it's not currently available on the market. How about some links to water-cooling kits that are available for purchase now? Which ones are recommended? Which ones not?
As a bit of backstory, we have a couple of new AMD Athlon computers here in the office with excessively loud fans. They're so loud that most of us (myself included) choose to do our work on old laptops, only using the desk computers when we need to calculate tabulations for our research studies. It's a real shame to see good computers wasted, so I'm thinking that watercooling may be the way to see that our investment in hardware actually gets used. Interesting/informative watercooling kit links would be appreciated.
Kind regards,
Michael Judge
SurveyComplete
if you left your computer off and the population got large emough then when you switched it on the pump would clog. the pore size is 1 micron. which means a lot of bugs will get wedged in the pores.
viruses would pass through the filter. so maybe the way to keep the bacterial population down wold be load the water up with viruses that kill bacteria.
this of course is just ludicrous speculation. and lots of reasons why it might even be gibberish.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
That is what the poster's private parts are for: The heat sink...
On a related note I have a story. It was a late night bull session at a science fiction conference about fifteen years ago. I was in a group consisting of two authors, an editor and a couple of fellow fen in an otherwise empty con suite. The con suite staff tried to close down the bar, but ended up just giving me the keys because we weren't about to leave (I was known to the concom).
We went for hours carrying on a typical SF bull session, ranging across a variety of subjects, when we got onto the subject of whether intersteller war was worth the energy expenditures. After all, the amount of energy required to boost to, say, 1/3 C and then decellerate a good sized spacecraft is itself enough to char a good sized planet. In fact you would be better off to use that energy directly to create whatever it is that the other solar system has that you want. Economically it makes no sense. There just aren't many resources worth the effort to transport, much less sending a conquering fleet as well.
There was some agreement that someone might launch an invasion fleet for religious reasons, but a couple of people disagreed saying that, even then, the cost could not be justified to a taxpaying populace. But then one person, Raul Reyes, made an interesting suggestion for a resource that could not be created easily: Truly large heat sinks.
It works like this; if you are doing enormous (godlike enormous) industrial works you are going to need equally enormous heat sinks. How big? Well, comets in the Keiper belt and Oort cloud would work, but rounding up enough would require so much energy that it isn't worth the effort. Uranus and Neptune are about right. Saturn would work as well, but it is really too hot to be very efficient.
So final agreement was reached about the time the sun was coming up and the wine was running out: Intersteller invasion is worth the cost if you need to use someone else's trans-Jovian planets as heat sinks. And we figured this out years before the Athlon was even a glint in AMD's eye.
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Interesting. A friend-of-a-friend is a distributor of ionizing air cleaners. You've probably seen ads of Sharper Image's Quadra Breeze products.
These generate a pretty decent airflow with ionic (electrostatic) propulsion. No idea, however, about the many claims of cleaning the air, improving one's health, killing germs, et cetra, et cetra, et cetra.
I have one (received as a gift from the friend-of-friend) in my house. If I leave the bedroom door/windows closed during the day, I can definitely smell the "ozone" when I get back home at night.
Well said, well said.
/. we have a crowd of 98% hobbyist, do-it-yourself types who keep a close eye on technology and how the guts work.
I see the geek reaction to water cooling as very similar to the hobbyist reaction to everything useful in recent history. Let me elaborate.
Think back about 100 years to the start of aviation. The really dedicated aeronauts built their own planes - in fact, the Wright brothers were basically hobbyists compared to Mr. Langley, who was well-financed, especially by the government. What was the reaction among the hobbyist crowd to mass-produced planes?
Think back about 120 years to the start of the practical automobile. The really dedicated enthusiasts built their own cars. What was the reaction among that crowd to the Model T? "Junk. Never sell well. Impractical." Let's take that one a step further. "Computer controlled ignition and fuel injection systems? Preposterous. How can I tweak it?" Well, where are we today? When's the last time you drove a car with real points or a carburetor?
Think back about 50 years to the early days of home audio. The really dedicated geeks built their own systems - remember the Heathkit stuff (or am I too old for this crowd)? Build your own TV, you could. Same thing for stereos, etc. What was the typical audiophile reaction to the idea of a mass-produced stereo? "It'll be junk. Never work. Sounds lousy. No control over the details." Sorry to mess with that world view, but walk into any WalMart and you can take home a stereo system that sounds far better than many of those hobbyist's systems, and costs about 1/10 as much.
Think back about 20 years to when PCs were solely the domain of either the goverment/high-end research facilities, or hobbyists. What was the reaction to mass-produced PCs? Remember IBM's reaction to Bill Gates? Even more to the point, how about the hobbyist reaction to Bill Gates?
What I'm getting at is this: the folks who do the most whining and complaining about anything going mainstream is the hobbyist crowd. Why? I believe it's because the hobbyist perceives it as a threat to his control over his hobby. It's inconceivable to him that something could be mainstreamed successfully. Certainly, here on
Okay, but what's the reality of the situation? Simply put, does your grandma care how her PC works, if she even uses one? No, she simply cares that she can turn it on, use it, and turn it off again. The chance that she'll EVER see the guts of a home PC approaches zero. Same thing with a stereo, or a car, or a plane. Most non-geeks not only don't KNOW how most things work, they emphatically don't WANT to know.
So I see water cooling the same way. It WILL work, it WILL be accepted, and it WILL be part of many systems soon, regardless of how many hobbyists think it's a mistake. Because OUR desire for control over the innards of the PC is completely irrelevant to the mass market. PCs are simply not built for us anymore - they are built for Joe Sixpack and your grandma.
As proof of this, take the average notebook PC. They're accepted widely, but almost completely impossible to upgrade, or hack, or tweak. Well, water cooling is going the same way. The manufacturers don't care if water cooling is good for the computer hobbyist, as long as they can make it work in a mainstream, sealed-box PC. And that's where the average home PC is headed - a sealed PC that is effectively non-upgradable.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Hah! Great idea. But wouldn't a hot surface cool more quickly in shaded-outer-space as opposed to being in contact with any medium such as your trans-Jovian planets?
Just a thought.
Moderation: +1 pwnage
If you integrated a Stirling engine into your laptop, people would look at you funny as they saw the piston going in/out very close to your genitals.
Nope. Turns out that vacuum makes a great insulator. (Remember vacuum thermoses?) So all cooling must be by radiation, which isn't nearly as efficient as using a heat conductor and a heat sink.
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Should I tell my friends and co-workers to avoid water-cooled solutions until the noise problem is solved? Seriously, when did water pump noise become a problem? There are very reliable and quiet water pumps out there. Here's an example: http://www.petguys.com/-015561105650.html This pump runs for years without any maintenance. IMO, this brand is tops, most all are very quiet in airless mode. This particular model pumps 270 gallons per hour (283ml per second), and costs $18.99 mail order. I've had several that have run for 4+ years without any maintenance. Also, this is the mid-level pump from this manufacturer. There are several that are smaller, and quite a few that are larger.
-- No sig for you!
Don't be a fool and get caught up in propoganda. I'm only posting this because I'm so sick of people spreading this crap.
.18 and .13 microns. Of course it uses 1/4 as much power as a classic Winchip, so would anything with that much shrinkage.
The Eden chip runs extremely cool because it doesn't DO ANYTHING. It is a brute-force, simple yet inefficient processor design.
It has no branch prediction, no out-of-order-execution, no register renaming, and a half-speed FPU. These are the exact same specs the Winchip had when Via bought it, they have simply shrunk the die to
This means you have to wait forever in CPU time to get anything done, which means you get real-world performance in the PII 300 range. Sure, each cycle wastes a tiny bit of power, but when you take 3x as long to do something, you use 3x as much real-time power.
This is what I am referring to when I say it's an inefficnent design. Sure, it's low-power, but you have to compare it to OTHER architectures to get a feel for how good it really is.
Consider that an Intel Pentium III Tualatin LV clocked at 733MHz would have only %50 higher max thermal power than the Eden chip, and you start to get the point. You could clock the Tualatain at 500MHz and match the Eden's max thermal power, and have significantly higher performance.
Consider that an 800MHz Pentium M would have ONLY 2 WATTS higher max thermal power, and it smacks you upside the forehead. Here we have a chip with roughly 2.5x the efficiency of the Eden ( processing power to power consumption ratio ), thanks to the fact that it has been DESIGNED FROM THE START to be efficient.
The Eden is only "low power" because it is inefficient, and it didn't sell well when it was sold as a normal desktop processor. The whole small form-factor ITX is the only thing the platform has going for it, and as soon as small systems with low-clocked Pentium Ms come into play, VIA's market will evaporate.
You could make the most inefficient core in the world run extremely cool, even say a Pentium IV, so long as you throttled the clock speed and shrunk the process. This is all VIA has done with the Winchip core used for Eden.
Incidentally, VIA finally released a new Winchip core, the Nemiah, with 6th-generation features like OOOE, branch-prediction, full-speed FPU.
GUESS WHAT? It performs better, but the power consumption is up too. Sadly, even Nemiah wasn't designed as efficiently as CPUs already out there.
EFFICIENT != LOW POWER.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I want silent water-cooled underwear to protect my high-IQ payload.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Remember when 486 chips were really cool?
I remember my 486 DX/2 50 could run with only a passive heatsink.
So could your Athlon XP if you clocked it at 50MHz. In fact, it would probably outperform your 486 by many times
The only reason we need high-wattage powersupplies and advanced cooling is because the market keeps pushing performance levels. The CPU architectures themselves have actually gotten more efficient.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
They're back up.. at least for now. It looks like a nice product, but I don't understand Korenglish, so won't be ordering it.
I don't understand why EaSL manufacturers don't court the largest potential consumer group with coherent sentences! Just hire a translator.. a few new sales would give a quick ROI...
If people laugh at their kids in schools, ignore it. Making someone feel stupid is the best way to encourage him/herself to learn some stuff.
Right now they're only effective at 200'F but hopefully they can improve on that.
?Who controls the past now, controls the future.
Who controls the present now controls the past.?
In fact, I run my processor at negative voltage, and now it functions as a small air conditioner.
Oh no! With all this water cooling, suddenly this joke won't be funny anymore! Damn you, nerds, killing the fine art of comedy!
SANDURZ: We don't have visual contact yet, sir, but we have it on the radar screen. Shall I punch it up for you?
HELMET: Na, nevermind. I'll do it myself.
SANDURZ: Very good, sir.
HELMET: What's the matter with this thing? What's all that churning and bubbling? You call that a radar screen.
SANDURZ: No, sir. We call it, "Mr. Coffee." Care for some?
HELMET: Yes! I always have coffee when I watch radar. You know that.
...or diamond-based processors?
The Diamond Age
This is what cooled a Model A Ford when the fan belt broke. Just forward motion, gravity and heat rising.
If you do a search, you can find all kinds cooling, mostly for avionics.
If you plan to BYO, these stories (and all the others at this site) help a ton:
overview howto
kit vs DIY
IANAL, but I play one on
China: You pay now! Now!
Bart: What happened to you, China? You used to be cool.
China: Hey, China still cool. You pay later! Later!
Keeps the cool side cool and the hot side hot. Tasty!
To get the cool side of a Stirling engine you need to waste energy which causes heat, which is what we are trying to get rid of in the first place!
Last time I checked neither the Intel nor AMD plans included organic processors in 5 years. And they do plan 5 years ahead. But I'm just a human. Let me ask HAL here... Oh yeah. We haven't yet been able to even create a computer with the intelligence of a 2 year old child or a grey parrot or a chimpanzee. I forgot.
Well, anyway, I'm late for my inexpensive trip around the rings of Saturn. Oh yeah, even though we landed on the moon over 30 years ago, no human has traveled beyond it. Were you alive when the first human stepped on the moon? Wake me up in a couple of months when we have holodecks, intersteller space travel, replicators, transporters, time machines, and organic computers. I'm sure it's all just around the corner. And there's certainly no question that we'll all live to see it because the problem of immortality will surely be solved before 2005. Until then I think I'll just take a short nap.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
> To be fair, I said "this is what we need." Not, > "this is what's going to happen."
This seems too pessimistic to me.
Look at what premiums laptop users pay for a Pentium M (Banias / Centrino) over a plain P4 or Celeron.
These chips have roughly the same computing power, but the Pentium M uses much less than half the power at more than twice the price.
Of course, you can attribute that mostly to clever markeing, but I think it really did appeal to great customer demand.
And I do not want to know how many million PCs get replaced every year, inspite of the fact that they are still perfectly adequate for their tasks - just because the fans started getting noisy !
I think that as soon as the innovation speed in LCD displays cools down a bit (say, in 2..3 years), another form factor besides "desktop", "tower" and "notebook" will be the "clip-on", a flat 12 x 8 inch enclosure holding a motherboard, a powersupply and one or two drives.
The clip-on will be about one inch thick and clip to the back of your LCD display, using standard connectors for mains (in from LCD), video and USB-like busses (memory-sticks, digicams, etc) that will have passive connectors in the LCDs front bezel or stand.
This will allow you to upgrade PC and Display seperately, as you do today with desktop-PC and crt - but without the annoying cabling, and at a smaller footprint.
I think there will be a huge market for this (especially corporate), and it will take off, if intel gets the mechanical specs standardised like the ATX-form-factor.
While some of your pointers are correct, there are two shining errors.
There are so many reasons why watercooled machines don't use just DI water, that it will take me time to type them out... but here goes:
1) Pure water doesn't transfer heat as well (bad).
2) Pure water can harbor algae and junk, because you can't hermetically seal this kind of system no matter how hard you try (bad).
So water wetter is added to the water. It reduces surface adhesion, transfers heat better, and helps keep bacteria in check. Now, without pure water, you CAN use automotive components. The heater core from an old Chevette is one of the best darn radiators for watercooling out there (and $16 vs. $60).
The next error is in your amazement about turbulence in the the flow. As an aerospace engineer, I've taken classes on aerodynamics and heat transfer and have some knowledge here. I also have done the research on watercooled blocks (as have the professionals who actually make and sell them, and research it EVERY DAY!). Laminar flow is good for some things, but not for all. A plane wing is designed to ONLY have laminar flow for a portion of the airfoil, and turbulent for the rest. The seperation is a design to balance lift and drag (turbulence is better for lift, but causes drag). Now, for heat transfer, I'm a little less informed. I'm guessing that the reason why EVERY waterblock out there is designed to cause turbulent flow is to increase the number of water particles that come into contact with the hot spot. Think about laminar flow... the same water particle will flow all the way across the hot spot, increasing its temp. It will keep increasing its temp all the way across the hot spot and only transfering a small portion of the heat to the other water in the system. In turbulent flow a particle will hit the hot spot, gain temp, then move away and a cooler particle will come in to take more heat. You get much more balanced heat transfer. Laminar isn't a constantly changing flow of cold water, it is a steady flow of the same water. Turbulent flow is constantly changing.
The rest of your pointers are good, though... but it seems like, while you may have done water handling in the past, your experience with watercooling is limited.
IANAL, but I play one on
Voodoo Computers (voodoopc.com) has been touting their new cooling system as "completely silent" for a few months now, but are mum on the details. Is this a variant of it, or is it what Voodoo is using? Does anybody know? This cooling system was used in Maximum PCs latest Dream Machine, so I'm sure it rocks. If anybody knows for sure fill us in.
It's all air cooled in the end.
On one of those discovery channnel shows I saw some video footage of some guy who actually built one of these drives in his powerboat. His particular drive wasn't really powerful enough to get his boat going very fast though. A few Knots I think.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Moderated as funny? The whole post or just the last line?
Oh well...I'll just sit back and enjoy the karma boost.
BFL
There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland
This water pump with no moving parts seems great. I'll be the first to buy one once the price drops from the $1000 that it's likely to start at down to like $50. It doesn't solve the problem of creating a quiet pc though.
Historically water cooling has been used more for overclocking than for quiet PCs. There have been some experiments in passive, convection based, water cooling. One experiment was particularly interesting, but I can't find the link. One trick is to use very large diameter tubing. The larger the diameter of the tube the slower the water can move and still cool the CPU.
Unless you attempt some kind of open system that gets water directly from the house plumbing or groundwater, you still need a radiator and fan to cool the water. The advantage is that you can go to a larger fan or even two or more fans and a much larger heatsink (radiator) than is possible directly on the CPU.
With an open system, you could put that waste heat to work as a water heater with the addition of some kind of storage tank.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Not in the book I read, it isn't. I forget what they called it, but the Red October used an impeller system - instead of a large prop at the back, it had a series of small turbines ducted through the hull. Nothing particularly exotic.
Are you talking about the movie?
Unless you're exposing the tubing to chemicals that would leach out the plasticizer from the tubing (not very likely in a watercool rig, mind...) or exposing the tubing to direct sunlight for years on end, you're NOT going to get cracking or stiffening in timeframes that are applicable to PC's.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Maybe he has more practical experience with it than you do. Plumbing leaks, whether it is water, hydraulic fluid, helium, nitrogen or natural gas. Plumbing systems also have to worry about contaminants, corrosion and critters.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
If MHz/GHz sold CPUs, why does Intel keep dropping the prices? If MHz/GHz were truly what sold CPUs, Intel would keep ramping GHz without dropping prices... but the past 10 years of computing has seen price drops in computers, for $4,000 for a 33MHz 386 to $600 for a 3GHz P4-Celeron...
What sells computers? Evidently it's not the Hz, but the price. So if a hotter CPU is also cheaper to produce, *then* it will sell the CPU, because then manufacturers can lower the price and get people to buy something they don't really need or want ^^
GPL Deconstructed
Price is *obviously* not an issue. I mean, Opteron? Radeon 9600 Pro? Noise reducing power supplies and hard drive cases?
A Mac is well suited for computational biology, scientific imaging, bioinformatics as well as music. I mean, building and supporting her PC for her is all well and good... but how about the next MSBlaster or SoBig she'll have to deal with? How about being able to ssh into her machine to 'deal' with some maintenance, patching, and updates so she won't have to, or just being able to debug odd behavior remotely while she's busy in class?
A G5 may actually be too noisy, but I doubt it; there are still powerful, quiet, and portable laptops, if she wants *truly* quiet, and they are extremely flexible to boot, being able to move from her practice sessions, to her room, to the library, to the lab, to the field, and to the lecture hall as she needs it. Not only that, but because of the way OS X is architected, with an iPod, she can boot and carry her information/data on any Mac out there, plus the odd PC that happens to have Firewire and a USB2 port...
But if you're not comfortable with this, by all means get her an Opteron or Barton...
GPL Deconstructed
Yeah, perhaps he does; however, his nay-saying does not good to further technology. It's proven that liquid can cool better than air.
s /s ilicon_eo_pumps.htm
Why do you think they use liquid coolant on nuclear power generators? That's the ultimate of mixing electricity with water. Or how about hyrdro electric power?
Fans also have to worry about contaminants, corrosion, and critters. Fans break, the sieze up, they make noise. This water system they are talking about can be a real revolution to the cooling of personal sized chips. Just because plumbing leaks, doesn't mean that we should ignore it for that reason.
Take a look at this article..
http://www.stanford.edu/~dlaser/silicon_eo_pump
And thats pretty lousy. A typical eheim 1046 pump - pretty common in water coolers is rated at 300 Liters/hour.
Granted it won't put out that much under load, but probably the other pump wont either...
..........FULL STOP.
Some nuclear reactors, such as graphite moderated reactors, are cooled with helium.
Any power plant that uses water/steam also has water treatment equipment to keep the water free of dissolved oxygen and other unwanted contaminants.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
does this firm include a sump pump for the times the system 'leaks'? if they asked me, i would use another inert liquid/gas/refrigerant as a coolant, instead of a conductive one...
And there isn't any electricity generated in the cooling systems of the PC. My point was, that there is a large amount of water involved around the production of electricity. So I think that Paul Lee's statement was pretty backwards.
The solution that was proposed includes water as a heat transfer medium; however, in this case it's sent away to disperse the heat from the chips and that's it. Wouldn't it be cool if we could have the water power a small steam turbine which supplimented the power supply of the computer itself.. perhaps the other fans in the computer could be run by this mini generator?
Some standard aquarium pumps (like the Hydor 30 that I'm using) approach complete silence already. When I was leak-testing the system, with no fans running, no PC power supply running, the only way I could hear it at all was when I put my ear next to the pump. Also, if you bleed the system properly you shouldn't have any splashing or hiss in the reservoir.
Their pump may be a good solution for laptops, but that's an issue of size, not noise.
-Rich
Moron - didn't you read the article? This Eden is based on the Nehemiah core, which has a full-speed FPU. Also, I find it unlikely that underclocking a 31W processor could get it down to 1-6W.
Seriously, though: Dude, lighten up. You never said something in a clumsy way? Slashdot isn't the fucking Times of London, it's a bunch of people having a conversation. When people are having a conversation, formalities are not essential. Little slips of the tongue are deserve a little good-natured kidding, nothing more.
Or as Miss Manners would say, Get a Fucking Life!