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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."
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.
...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.
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
Ok, just looked up and did the math. The theoretical maximum efficieny of an engine is
(Hot Temp - Cold Temp)/(Hot Temp)
with all temperatures in Kelvin.
So if you're at room temperature and your chip isn't melting, the maximum efficiency will be about 20%, unlikely to be enough to bother about.
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.
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.
Minor problem with your idea, if the water heater shorts, it throws a breaker, possibly frys it, but generally not a big deal.
If you computer shorts, you potentially loose a lot of very expensive data and a lot of very expensive hardware. Yeah, there should be backups, but when was the last time you backed up you system at home, and even if you have done so recently, there tends to be quite a bit of time involved in recovering the "lost" data. Somebody has to pay for the time it take to recover, and it cost quite a bit more and generally takes quite a bit longer than replacing a water heater.
'And all the monkeys aren't in the zoo Every day you meet quite a few...'
-CPU either 1. a AMD Barton clocked down to 1 GHz or 2. A AMD Opteron 1.8GHz (242) clocked down to 1 GHZ. Both these will run cool with only a heatsink and without a fan. Asus MB
A 1.8GHz Opteron use max 55W. At 1 or 1.2GHz it will use approx. 30-35W.
-Video; Sapphire Radeon 9600 Atlantis PRO 128MB AGP, "Ultimate Ed.", DVI, TV-Out, Retail, no fan Acyually quite a overkill but maybe she will start gaming?
-A Antec PSU modded with a low noise fan (probably Papst)
-Two Seagate Barracuda V 80GB mounted indside an enclosure with low nois fans to reduce heat and noise.
The hard-disks will probably make most of the noise but I think I will get the noise down to about 20db.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
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
Units do matter if they aren't purely scalable. Kelvin is. Centigrade aren't. So if you have, say -10C and +20C then 20- -10 / -10 obviously is going to give the wrong number.
Well, sure, the actual formula is:
( Tin - Tout) / ( Tin - Tzero)
but everybody uses kelvin where Tzero=0 instead of -273 or whatever the heck absolute zero is in centigrade.
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!