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Doomsday PC-Cooling With Dual-Cascade Coolers
An anonymous reader submits "Four (4) compressors cooling one PC! Yes, it's big, yes it's heavy, yes it's loud and yes it does get your CPU and GPU cold, very cold. Is -100C cold enough for you? Cascade cooling is yet another chapter in a Finnish overclocker's neverending quest for optimal PC performance. Those things go down to -80 to -100C and can maintain the temperature. See here for the whole article with the pictures of the project."
Just that - Why?
Hey, I can appreciate water cooling. Keep the chip at basically room temperature, it increases its life and the OC'ers can push it a bit. But -100? WHY??? What possible use can this serve?
It doesn't even seem "cool" at this point (beyond the obvious pun). Wasting hundreds of watts, taking up way too much room (extra-large form-factor, anyone?), needing a fork-lift to move it... How does any of that benefit the PC or user?
Some things have an upper limit to what still constitutes "bigger/better/faster/harder". This definitely crosses that line with regard to chip cooling techniques.
Lets face it, there are far more destructive ways to waste money than by attempting to make the fastest Home PC on the Planet.
Why climb the mountain? Because it is there.
Doing it just for the sake of having done it is enough, if that is what you want to do.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
I can't remember how low we went with the Transputers but they ran damn fast dunked in liquid helium. The processors did not reach the level of the helium because it was constantly evaporating.
The limit to overclocking is highly processor dependent. Some designs will simply end up in a race condition because some parts of the chip will work much faster than others and you end up missing the right edge of a pulse. Basically you give yourself a whole new region to discover timing errors in the design.
I don't think that the physical process is going to be a fixed limit, clearly this will be very dependent on the physical packaging. Chips are sent into space to face some pretty unpleasant temperature ranges.
Depending on your material there is a point when your band gap goes all wonky and things start breaking down. Most times what you are worried about is the effect in the high temperature region, but there are equally wierd things in the low temperature region.
This is definitely not something that is recommended for most applications. There are a couple of oddball ones, like cryptanalysis where it is really hard to get a result but once you get one it is trivial to check. I would not be surprised if GCHQ has a swimingpool sized machine for brute force key cracking dunked in some type of cooling liquid. The NSA would just chuck money at the problem.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
For all those wailing "Like, WTF?" and "This isn't worth it!" I'll say this once:
Well duh. Do you think we don't understand the value of time, space, and money and can't do an investment/return calculation?
This is cool because they can do it. It's on Slashdot because lots of us think it's nifty to turn a 2.2GHz processor into a 4+GHz processor.
Yes, it does cost more, take more space, and more time to set up than two 3GHz machines, or even a dual processor 3GHz.
But it's like my high school instructor telling me 10 years ago that making a microcontroller controlled light dimmer is non-trivial. I did it then, and it requires fewer than 25 lines of assembly code on a simple microcontoller. Was I geeked when I finished? You bet.
People are constantly trying to break records, and this is no exception. The higher the record is set, the more effort and resources must be put in to beat it.
-Adam
Why is it becoming harder to post on slashdot? 4/5 of the time I get an incomplete page when I press submit or preview.