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Ultimate Cooling System
OCGeek writes "This should be interesting for the overclockers as
VR-Zone has an article up on building a
cascade cooling system that
cools chips down to -110C. The guide shows you the components that are required
for the cascade cooling system such as the compressors, condensers,
refrigerants, evaporators, heat exchangers, oil separators etc. and the tools
you would need. It allows hot chip like Prescott to reach over 5.1Ghz and ATi
Radeon 9800 XT card to reach over 660Mhz core."
In a controlled situation, you wouldn't have any problems with condensation. I imagine when they turn the coolers off, they would want to bring the temperature back up to room temperature via a controlled sequence. You will get condensation if you go from that cold to warm rather quickly.
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http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:M3MveYmm8lQJ: www.vr-zone.com/%3Fi%3D618%26p%3D1++site:www.vr-zo ne.com+cascade&hl=de&ie=UTF-8
Why not overclock network cards as well as CPU and graphics cards?
Two reasons: First, you'd have to overclock every network card by exactly the same amount, or they'd not be able to communicate. Second, the limiting factor is the ability to get a signal through the cables; unless you're going to have LN2 jackets around all your cables, there's not much you can do about this.
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Thermal stress is about temperature gradient. If you don't cool evenly then yes the thing might just shatter. Since semiconductors are designed for good thermal flow in the first place this shouldn't be a problem, so long as you aren't just plunging the thing from +250 to -100 instantly.
Um, there are no 5.1GHz Prescotts for sale anywhere, nor are there likely to be anytime soon. Essentially they were achieving something that could not be purchased for any amount of money off the shelf.
I had my overclocking phase, but realized that I really wasn't getting that much more out of it that justified the time and energy expended and the issues that I had to deal with.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
The ./ article and the
site
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Aside from the cost of peltier cooling, my past research (I was interested in this, too) has indicated that they get cold too fast, creating condenstation on the chip before the CPU gets hot enough. Then, of course, you have to devise a way to get the baking heat from the other end of the peltier out of the case....
I have seen a couple instances of people making this work. One involved using a lot of rubber sealing compound and essentially making an airtight seal around the CPU socket and the CPU itself. Another involved a seperate unit with a power regulator to solve this 'instant condense' problem. It worked very poorly, though.
Now... if you could create a better delay-on control for the peltier unit, that might work. I also had an interesting concept of mounting a heatsink to the CPU, putting the peltier square on the cooling fins of that heatsink, then attaching another heatsink to the hot side of the peltier, and a cooling fan for that, with maybe some kind of ducting pipe for direct ventilation of the heated air outside of the case. The peltier would have to cool the CPU's heatsink first before forming condensation on the CPU itself, and I imagine that would be enough of a delay for the CPU to get warmed up. But that'd be quite a tower stacked atop a processor, and I wouldn't want to discover a fallen Tower of Pisa inside of my case....
It's even more complicated than that. Intrinsically pure silicon is basically an insulator. When you add small amounts of impurities, the impurity electrons disturb the electronic structure of the remaining silicon. Extra impurity electrons (n-type Si) are fairly easy to pop off their host atom, and the thermal energy of 300 K is usually enough to do that.
You don't get much more conductivity if you heat doped Si, because most of the impurities are already ionized. But if you cool it too far, you won't have enough energy to ionize those impurities, and your Si becomes insulating again.
What I wonder about this system (currently slashdotted, so I can't read the article), is that you can't really cool anything. You just pump heat around. So, yeah, you can generate a local cold zone for your chip, but you have to find some place to move all that extra heat *to*.
your eye has 2 parts, rods and cones.
cones are the colour receptors (iirc) and do have a "refresh rate" of about 30fps.
rods, on the other hand, are the b&w receptors. the rods "refresh" at closer to 60 fps.
this is why most people can see a flicker with a 60hz monitor but not with 75hz and up. its also why people can see the flicker from flourescent lights.
your eye has a higher density of cones near the center of your vision, but a higher density of rods near the peripheral. this makes your peripheral vision more sensitive to flicker (one of my old bosses cant see 60hz flicker if he is looking at it, but can if he is looking beside it).
honestly i would say that if you could do 75hz refresh on the monitor with a video card capable of doing a consistent 75 fps throughout the game (which currently is not the case) then you would have about as perfect of a look at the game as you can get.
i can see a big difference between 30 fps and 60 fps, but beyond the 60fps i cant hardly tell anything different at all (even with 120hz refresh)
60 feels ALOT smoother than 30 (was tested using a game where keeping 60fps was not an issue given the hardware that was being used) but both are playable.
a bigger issue is probably the fact that on a modern game if you peak at 30 you hit lows of 5, so peaking at 150 would give you a low of higher than 30.
Well, the ideal is to have a constant fps equal to the refresh rate of your monitor. My monitor runs at 75hz. The ideal for me would be 75fps. Any more than that, and it makes no difference, because my monitor will only DISPLAY 75 of them each second. Any lower than that, and I am not using my equipment to its fullest. There probably is no real difference between 60 and 75fps, but since my monitor runs at 75hz, I might as well have 75fps.
/usr/games/fortune
Or you could somehow use the on-chip diode or the temperature sensing diode mounted on the motherboard under the CPU.
Never tried it, it's just a theory, but it should work. :)