Ultimate Cooling System

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Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday March 21, 2004 @03:39AM from the break-out-the-thermal-underwear dept.

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."

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Blasphemy! by _Sharp'r_ · 2004-03-21 03:43 · Score: 1, Insightful

Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to just buy a multi-processor box, rather than invest in all this gear to make one cpu run even twice as fast?

I mean, there's only so far Hyperthreading will take you...

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1. Re:Blasphemy! by LordoftheFrings · 2004-03-21 03:46 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  For the ATI radeon overclock, no. For raw CPU power, probably, but a video card (generally speaking) needs to be fast on its own. I don't think you CAN piggyback a whole bunch of video cards to gain such speed improvements. Hell, I bet with a 660mhz core, that card could run Doom3 at 3 fps! That's INSANE.
  
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2. Re:Blasphemy! by Naffer · 2004-03-21 04:05 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Troll? Honestly guys....
  a video card (generally speaking) needs to be fast on its own. I don't think you CAN piggyback a whole bunch of video cards to gain such speed improvements
  This statement is absolutly correct. For gaming, the video card is of incredible importance. In most modern games it is the limiting factor, not the CPU. You'd see much more of a performance increase overclocking your video card by 30% then your CPU by 30%.
3. Re:Blasphemy! by TyrelHaveman · 2004-03-21 04:29 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  If you have two 3.2 GHz processors, you can't run at 6.2 GHz... you can just run two things at the same time at 3.2 GHz. This means dual processors only benefit a single program (such as a game) if it multithreaded. In that case you could probably have some noticable improvements, but not the same as running a single 6.2 GHz processor for sure.
4. Re:Blasphemy! by vadim_t · 2004-03-21 05:08 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Two things:
  
  Film has motion blur. Games don't, because calculating it would be slower than outputting more frames per second to make its absence unnoticeable.
  
  Second, 30fps when looking at a wall will often become 10fps when looking at a big area with lots of things going on.
5. Re:Blasphemy! by jrockway · 2004-03-21 07:09 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Well, first of all there's only one AGP slot :) Next, I think it would be inefficient for two cards to sync their memory, hence defeating the purpose of drawing even and odd scanlines. By the time both cards had the same internal state, a single card could have drawn four more frames (or something).
  
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Re:Why? by Hi_2k · 2004-03-21 03:51 · Score: 3, Insightful

Zero degrees isnt enough. The lower the temprature, the easier electrons move and the faster gates switch. If you were to try to get a prescott to run at 5.5ghz normaly, it would result in errors as the gates wouldnt switch fast enough to keep up with the clock. With this level of cooling, it's no longer about heat concerns, but the speed of the logic gates.

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Re:Why not overclock other things? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-21 03:57 · Score: 1, Insightful

Because 'overclocking' a 10megabit (not mg. that's nicotine) network card to a massive 15megabits is pointless when you can buy a new 10/100 card for $15.

Unless you really do have some way of getting 15mg of nicotine out of your network card, in which case I wish you the very best at your new addiction
Re:Why not overclock other things? by drinkypoo · 2004-03-21 03:58 · Score: 3, Insightful

Or you could just upgrade to a 100Mbps network. Or, 1000Mbps. Much easier than trying to overclock.
The bottleneck is usually not the network card, it's the internet connection, or the rate at which you're going to utilize data (say when streaming.)
The only time overclocking helps is when you've identified a processing-time-related bottleneck.
Incidentally usually a 10baseT network maxes out at about 8Mbps with no collisions. Many of the older 10baseT devices were only capable of pushing a megabit or so. So, just getting a more efficient network card and somehow prioritizing up network traffic will already provide you more bandwidth.

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What about thermal stress? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-21 03:59 · Score: 2, Insightful

Too much cold can be just as bad as too much heat..
Why not overclock other things?-User. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-21 04:06 · Score: 2, Insightful

"Why not overclock network cards as well as CPU and graphics cards?"'

Hew! Why not sound cards, so that only our dogs can hear them?

Or our TV cards so that we can watch TV faster.

Or our mice so that darn cat's unable to catch it.

There are some things that overclocking will really do nothing for, and just increase cost and complexity.
Re:??? Profit? by ipjohnson · 2004-03-21 04:40 · Score: 2, Insightful

Would you really want to be processing large amounts of data through a machine that is overclocked? How can you say the data is reliable when you're pushing your gear way out of spec.
The only... by Creepy+Crawler · 2004-03-21 05:49 · Score: 2, Insightful

The only way to cool is not to get hot.

Go C3.
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Beyond design limits? by Leomania · 2004-03-21 05:59 · Score: 3, Insightful

While I don't work at a microprocessor company, I do work on the physical implementation of mixed-signal ASICs and I'm surprised these CPUs can work at -110C. As I recall even military limits only go down to -50C (at the maximum allowable voltage, usually no more than +10% of nominal) for design timing closure; beyond this (higher voltage and/or lower temperatures) the flip-flop to flip-flop paths may get fast enough to result in a "hold-time violation" . This is when the signal from one flip-flop reaches a downstream flip-flop so quickly that it is registered one clock-cycle early (basically, it is captured on the same clock edge as it was launched). This is most critical on timing paths with no combinational logic (occurs often in shift registers and cross-clock domain synchronizers) and is further complicated by clock distribution networks that take advantage of "useful skew" to borrow time from one timing path for use on another. I'd be surprised if even CPUs were designed with enough hold-time margin built-in to handle -110C.

The other variable is the fabrication process corner, so assuming the CPU isn't on the edge of being "fast" there could be some hold-time margin on a given chip to allow this kind of cooling to result in a working processor. Still, I'm kinda surprised it works at that temperature with any reliability.

- Leo

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Re:??? Profit? by jrockway · 2004-03-21 07:46 · Score: 2, Insightful

How can you say it's reliable when it's IN spec? Original pentium, anyone?

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