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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."
....wouldn't they just put their computers outside to get this kind of cooling?
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It's not cold enough unless it can offset global warming. AND refrigerate my beer.
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
A Beowulf cluster of compressors on a Beowulf cluster of computers!
Umm.....
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Billy Bob, don't cha think ya got a little too much time on your hands?
Wouldn't your legs and feet get cold sitting next to that thing?
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Perhaps they should consider applying this research to their webserver, which appears to be having dififculties keeping up with requests ATM...
Looks like Intel might license this for their new P4s at 4 GHz. After cooling it down, the chip is almost cool enough to run!
Keep playing around with stuff at -100 and the quest is going to end one way or another
Yes, it's big, yes it's heavy, yes it's loud and yes it does get your CPU and GPU cold, very cold.
You talking about my wife?
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
How close to absolute zero would we have to cool a processor so that we could overclock it enough to handle a good slashdotting?
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
Doesn't it defeat the purpose of overclocking?
I thought you did that to get more out of your CPU than what you paid for.
If you are spending more on the cooling than on the computer, then why not get a faster one, or a second one (or dual, or whatever)?
Heh, I guess there's the whole hobby "I do it because it's fun!" thing that explains it...
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
I don't know much about this kind of cooling, but if the compressors are being used to cool the air going through these machines, wouldn't they be worried about physically damaging the machines by cracking them? Keeping a computer cool is all well and good, but at a certain temperature the physical elements composing the hardware are bound to contract different amounts, causing damage. Maybe this only happens at -250 degrees, and not -100, but presumably there is a reason that hardware manufacturers state a minimum operating temperature for their components.
Alphanos
What's the finnish word for ... compensating?
looks like someone is ignoring the fact that overcooling your processor will lead to early failure.
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.
This seems all well and good while the machine is running. What happens when you boot it up or shut it down, though? In the summer, you could be dropping or increasing 130 degrees C. Even if the cooler can normally regulate this, what happens if the machine loses power? (no, I couldn't rtfa, it's slashdotted)
when you have an accident with liquid nitrogen you lose a finger. when you have an accident with liquid helium, you lose parts of the neighborhood.
You're thinking of liquid hydrogen, not helium. Liquid helium is damn cold, yes, but it won't explode.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
"And The Geek Shall Inherit The Earth" --Jeff Darlington
In my book, 'optimal PC performance' involves consistant operation over a long period of time. This ignores the fact that the processor may be capable of more speed because of the nature of MHz ratings, but in the long run, this is 'optimal'.
This is interesting, and impressive, and admirable as an engineering exercise, but not exactly in persuit of mainstream 'optimal' performance characteristics. (Unless I RTFA and find that the processor does indeed last a good long time, and not burn bright and die out as I imagine it to under these conditions).
Maybe I'm just old fashioned.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
I don't think you could do that. Liquid nitrogen is diamagnetic, meaning it is slightly affected by magnetic fields. In other words, the coolant could possibly conduct enough electricity to cause damage the hardware.
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
someone will be able to play doom 3 on doomsday
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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
Summary: Four (4) compressors cooling one PC! Yes its big, yes its heavy, yes its loud and YES IT DOES GET YOUR CPU AND GPU COLD - VERY COLD - EVEN DAMN COLD! Is -100C cold enough for you?
Forget the cold feet, it's going deaf from the noise all that cooling generates that is your real problem. What's the point of having a PC that's so loud that you need to wear ear mufflers to be able to use it or else risk losing your hearing?
Being able to hear yourself think while you work or hear the in-game audio while you play is a good thing.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Parts of the neighborhood will absorb the helium and float away into the sky.
no, no, liquid plutonium is far deadlier
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
(with apologies to Inigo Montoya)
Wah!
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/
But what is that in F?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Simple, they are enthusiasts and love what they do. Sure they could go buy a faster cpu for the money they spent on doing it, but the idea when you goto such extreme cooling isnt enlarging your "e-peen" it's pushing the envelope to the next level.
Example: A rig with a barton 2500 (pre the multiplier locking bs AMD pulled) comes stock at 1.83 ghz.. with a good hsf you could probably get 2.5ghz but not much more than that becuase the power you need to pump into it, if you can get that processor running at -c you can push it way beyond 2.5ghz maybe even 4-5ghz range (barton 2500 was a very nice stepping core, almost as good as the tbred B 1700 JUIHB) now sure, I spend 89 on a new 2500 + the money I spent on a new watercooling and peltier I could have gotten a much better proc and went air cooling, but the joy of overclocking, pushing the envelope is what drove my decision. Someone who buys a high-end retail processor and uses that stock POS hsf would never know the acomplishment I would feel seeing that 3.5ghz mark outa a $90 Processor. Also realize that the cheap processor and the cooling rig is a one time fee, if another sweet processor (high scalability) comes out cheap I can just grab that new one and stick it in my rig and boom, another huge OC for me and the satisfaction of it aswell.
______ Eagles may fly but monkeys don't get sucked into jet engines.
So, he was able to obtain somewhere around 4.4 GHZ on a 3GHZ Pentium setup, with XP to boot [blegh]. Not bad, but give me a year and I'll have the same thing at not such an inane temp. and size. Admirable project, nonetheless.
Use Minidisc? Join the Minidisc.org forums.
No, but with the right materials and time to develop a Pentium with superconducting transistors, they are only 13 K away from being able to use a "high temperature" superconductor. -100 C is 173 K, and according to my link, one of the highest temperature superconductor they have found works at 160 K. Not that I RTFA; it was /.ed at 50 posts.
Summary: Four (4) compressors cooling one PC! Yes its big, yes its heavy, yes its loud and YES IT DOES GET YOUR CPU AND GPU COLD - VERY COLD - EVEN DAMN COLD! Is -100C cold enough for you?
Intro
If you are an overclocker you know that keeping things cool is the key for big clockspeeds. The cooler that comes with the CPU ain't going to get you very far. It must be replaced with better cooling if you want to get really high clocks out of your hardware. But what is good enough? Even the biggest and baddest heatsinks won't get your temps much colder - in other words they wont give you much extra in terms of MHz. Watercooling is a nice option cos it has huge cooling capacity but does it really give you a big gain in CPU speed? Usually no because it can't get colder than the air cooling the water. So what can you do if you really need to get more speed out of your system??
Vaporphase cooling is the answer here. Vaporphase cooling is what keeps your freezer and ice cream cold. Vaporphase cooling is what 'all the xtreme-overclockers' are using nowadays. Several people have noticed that going from +40C to -40C makes quite a difference in CPU overclocking potential (talking about 200-600MHz here). There are even commercial solutions that go all the way down to -40C and even a bit colder. If you feel that you must get one of these just go to nVentiv website, check who is your local reseller and get one
But what if you are a real speedfreak and -40C ain't cold enough for you?? Well there is always dryice (-79C) or Liquid Nitrogen (-196C) or even liquid Helium (-268.6 C) for you but the problem is that its not really possible to get constant CPU cooling with these. LN2 and helium are actually too cold for your little CPU - it just wont operate properly at such low temps.
But you know those low-temp freezers they use in labs? Those that go down to like -80..-100C and can maintain the temperature. Good temps for CPU cooling eh?
These are cascade vaporphase coolers. They are called cascades because of multiple cooling stages (normally two). First stage uses 'normal' refrigerant like R404 or R507 and cools down to around -40C. The second stage uses a special low temp refrigerant like R23 or SUVA95 or R1150 and can get the temperature down to -100C level. The first stage evaporator is cooling down the condenser of the 2nd stage - this makes it possible to use a refrigerant with very low boiling point in the 2nd stage. Normal cascade design uses two compressors - one per stage. This also means that it is not a very compact cooler.
Here is a picture of such a freezer (the door has been ripped off):
Cascade cooling is yet another chapter in my neverending quest for optimal PC performance. I've tried quite a few cooling solutions already (waterchillers, peltiers, R404 vaporphase, dryice, ln2 etc.) but cascade vaporphase was something new to me.
This time I was lucky enough to locate not only one but TWO cryofreezers - both were supposed to be broken - so I got them for free.
The first one (the one in the picture on page 1) had problems with the system fan and because of that the owners decided to send it to the junkyard. True, there really was a problem with the fan. It didn't blow any air at all - but then again no power was coming to the fan powerconnector. I made external power input for the fan and it started to work nicely. With the freezer door closed it would get the inside temp down to -91C.
Obviously it would do nothing for PC cooling in its original form so I had to convert it to a CPU cooler.
Testing cascade stage 1 - its charged with R404 refrigerant and it went down to -40C.
2nd stage parts installed - CPU cooler is ready for a test run.
Its working! First test run got it down to almost -100C with no heatload. Pretty good with R23 refrigerant (boiling point @1bar = -82C).
Here is a picture of the evaporator installed on P4 motherboard. I was using a 3GHz P4 CPU here and it would clock to around 3.6-3.7GHz with good heatsink. W
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.
how about liquid mercury. oh never mind.
Go easy on her, it's on my ISPs web space. Wait a minute, I'm still upset about not have truely unlimited access so on second thought: bag on it! ;)
and they still can't wring out enough power to avoid being slashdotted...
> Liquid nitrogen is diamagnetic, meaning it is slightly affected by magnetic fields. In other words, the coolant could possibly conduct enough electricity to cause damage the hardware. This is not true. That it is diamagnetic means it slightly repels magnetic fields. This has no impact on its electrical conductivity.
I don't use my freezer a whole lot except for ice, So, I made a partition in it and fit a miniitx into approximately half of the freezer box (the network cable comes out of a hole in the freezer lid). Nothing fancy there, I did it just so the whole thing can run fanless. And also because it's something neat to show off to classmates (the dean said I was nuts, but that's the same thing he said about when I said I wanted to build a solar powered boat)
The first thing I thought is this is too complicated. A single LN2 compressor, some insulating tubes running into the box, and a heat exchange instead of a heat sink, you could easily chill that baby to 150K. The compressor would not even have to be in the same room. You would even have to charge it often if you kept the N2 clean.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
With all that was spent on the cooling he could have bought a new processor instead of overclocking his 386 to 4Ghz.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
(Affected by magnetism) != conductivity
If they can make PC case big and put a door in it, it can be used for long-term food storage. 'Internet connected refrigirator' anyone? :)
On the other side, with freezing turned off, you can cook food on CPU, which qualifies it for 'Internet connected owen'.
Useful thingie. And a computer too!
-- grmbl woz heer
Ok, I know I'm a late post to the story, but I did RTFA, and he didn't say a word about condensation.
When he temp-tested the main die, it was covered in frost. Now obviously, this setup was only done to set records, so he's not running it for more than a few minutes.
What do other sub-freezing cooling systems do about the frost?
--
hmm. so to be absolutely safe, you either wear a parka while working with liquid N2 or go buck naked. That sounds like a reality tv show right there.
Although liquid helium is the coldest known substance, it has a very low, ah, what, 'heat of vaporisation'. Meaning it takes a very small amount of heat to raise a given amount of liquid helium to its boiling point. So that, even though it's very very cold, it makes a rather inefficient refrigerant.
I'm going back 35+ years for this, back to the days I was a kid interested in cryogenics and spilled a whole thermos bottle of dry ice and alcohol slush on my hand. Screw that, I took up model rocketry (launched parallel to the ground.)
"You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia.' But only slightly less well known is this: "Never go in against Slashdot when bandwidth is on the line. Ha ha ha ha..." PFFT.... host not found...
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
... and AMD/Intel will bring out a processor with that clock speed anyway! And he'll look a bit stupid when his friends have their 4 Ghz desktops and
he's got his 4Ghz , err , industrial freezer!
there is almost always a little ambient moisture in the air. wouldn't condensation form on the heatsink and thus threaten the stability of the whole system.
it's awfully cool--pun intended--but are below freezing cooling systems necessary.
granted, haven't gotten my hands on doom3 yet.
just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!