Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
"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."
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.
1)The processor is hot, the environment is cold.
2)This differential could be usd to produce energy.
3)Recovering some wasted energy may increase battery life.
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
Make me a waterproof motherboard first.
Using a stiring engine for heat recovery would likely be counter productive as your cold sink is too small to help drive the engine, this is the cooling problem you are trying to solve in the first place with the chip not cooling enough.
The drawback is to get the efficiency at that small of a scale, the cost will be fairly high. The engines can be made small enough, but for a price probably far too high for the general market. Say about $2,500 each. Then you have to shield the rest of the computer from the NeFeB linear motor/oscillator magnets used to drive the engine in reverse. Another thing is the drawback that thay are probably shock sensitive. So a good whack could cost a fortune to the average pocket book.
Once you comprimise the efficiency to the point of about say 8%, you might as well just give up on the stirling idea and go with a Peltier device since they are solid state and fairly cheap (20$~100$) and already off the shelf.
The high efficiency capabilities of the stirling engine are about the only reason you would want to use one in the first place, so the option is really not available it would seem for a cost effective and mass produced market.
--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.
Damnit, you are ruining a perfectly fine thread by adding in "facts" and using "logic". You and your practicality and fiscal responsibility can go to take a flip while we dream of cold fusion powered watches, cause damnit, we need it to last 30,000 years, yet be available in the checkout line at Walmart. Damnit.
This comment is guaranteed*
*not guaranteed
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!
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?
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
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.