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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."
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.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
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.
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.