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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."
1. Because it's possible
2. It's kinda cool (literally0
3. It keeps overclockers off the streets
4. It gives us something to do
5. It's just interesting
6. Performance!
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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This seems a little complex and extreme for the home builder. Maybe a specialty co-lo opportunity, though? "Icebox netbox"? No good for gamers, of course. But for others who need MIPS for problems that can't be parallelized...
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
I've always wondered this but nobody's ever given a satisfactory answer to "why not".
Why not overclock network cards as well as CPU and graphics cards?
think about it
If I can get 10mg from a normal network card and overclock it for say 15 even if I need shorter cables, that's only shorter than maximum isn't it? So instead of 30ft cables I might be limited to 20ft. Big deal in a home network, NOT. I could overclock some more of my machines and have them all going at 15mg, and get better network speeds. I'm surprised there have not been articles about this. Or what about modems? or monitors? or even sound cards to get higher frequencies and better bass from them?
Why stop with just a cpu when it's not even a slowest part of a system but hard drives might be more difficult
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
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
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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Sounds suspiciously like they stole the technology from Michael's computers...
Too much cold can be just as bad as too much heat..
Because that system is toast. And smoking. And there's a puddle of liquified metal under the rack.
Anyone got another link?
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%.
"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.
This reminded me of another extreme hobby, BBQ lighting by George Goble, who also happens to be a systems engineer (go figure).
To do something just to show that it can be done is one thing, but I don't think anyone should seriously consider doing this for any other reason than to merely say "I did it".
And for those asking "why so cold", I can answer that one, it has to do with total thermal inertia, and thermal gradients. Basically, the larger the temprature difference, the faster heat will attempt to move from hot to cold. Just because the outside of the chip may be 0 degrees, doesn't mean the inside of the chip is.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
These techniques seem like brute force schemes to deal with the thermal resistance of chip packages -- you have to cool the heatsink to -110C in order to keep the "intel inside" at less than +60C). Why not use backside thinning. to bring the hot circuits of the processor within microns of a high coolant flux chamber. Backside thinning could get the coolant to within 10 microns of the junctions. If the CCD people can thin a massive 2k x 2k CCDs (the die is bigger than 1" square), I'm sure an enterprising overclocker could thin a Pentium.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Won't work in the summer, but you'll be too busy trying to scrape mosquitos out of your cooling fan to care.
it's -273.16 C
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
that's why i like heat sinks. they can only fail if you fuck up their installation. or if the fan fails. or if the power to the fan fails... hmm...
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
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.
Now this is the ultimate cooling system... =)
The last part of the video (the flower thing) is even scary!
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....
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.
Saying that people can perceive more than 30 fps is like saying that people can hear beyond 20 kHz. Sure, you have the occasional freak who MIGHT be able to perceive it, but for the most part it's just people who *think* they can perceive it. People who claim they can tell the difference are either, a.) freaks of nature, b.) lying to themselves or c.) just want to pull off some kind of macho attitude about how keen their senses are. In general, the level of arrogance from those types is very much like the level of arrogance you get from an audiophile who claims he can tell the difference in the way something sounds if there are green dots on the wall. I can't stand audiophooles who think they have superhuman ears and the same goes for the gamer who obesseses over useless high fps ratings. To both group, I say, get a life.
Un-news
Early in the 3D hardware days, you could use two cards to double performance. One card did the even scan lines and the other card did the odd scan lines. Not sure if this was possible with all games but it certainly was with Descent and/or Descent II.
With all the hubub about video performance these days, I wonder why it's not still done today. Probably had scalibility factors...?
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
The only way to cool is not to get hot.
Go C3.
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.
Ultimate Cooling System ???
Yeah right. There's no way this thing can top a quality speed-demon from Michael's Computers.
Yes. The original poster saying 30fps is the maximum is mostly correct, in that gamers who say they can tell 300fps from 250fps are full of crap.
However you're more correct in the specifics, in that the limits of what a human can notice with respect to frames per second is more along the lines of 60-90fps. Almost all humans with sight can notice the difference in smoothness, some a little higher some lower.
If you get the chance watch a movie recorded in 60fps, played back on machinery that can handle it. It's a truly disorienting experience as you DO notice a much greater level of smoothness and there's less motion blur in even fast switches, which is more akin to that of eyesight experiencing a real event. I had the chance to see this while at University several years ago.
RST
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.
I was a sysop for a BBS back in the dark ages before Internet, and one of users once asked me if it was possible to overclock a modem to get higher speeds. I promptly answered: "Do you have an external modem? Good, just replace your current transformer with something that gives you more volts for your modem." He thanked for advice and logged off.
He never called back.
Why yes, I do like reading BOFH stories, why do you ask?
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
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).
My other car is first.
Yes, but don't forget about condensation. You need some sort of super-dehumidifier, or a solution such as that used by Tom's Hardware several months ago (when they booted a P4 to 5ghz). Too lazy to link/whore karma.
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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. :)
You do run into one problem; is your 75 frames from your refresh rate synced with your rendering? I'd hope not.
Rendering software found in games generally doesn't keep track of the refresh rate of the monitor. In fact, I don't know that any rendering software outside your graphics provider (X under Linux, Windows has its own.) depends on the refresh rate of the monitor. Even then, I think the refresh rates and dot clock are used to control the resolution, not the actual drawing.
What that means is your game can keep drawing new frames to represent the absolute latest state in the physics envrinment (position of moving bodies, ect.), and have that latest frame ready when when the next scan proceeds on your display.
If your rendering was slowed to coincide with your refresh rate, only one frame would be rendered per screen redraw, which means that the frame could be as old as just barely after your previous redraw. Depending on how your OS's scheduling, you might even miss drawing a frame, which could cause you to offset. That could lead to a desyncing of audio and video, so the smart thing for an app to do if it finds itself behind schedule is to simply skip the frame. (I don't think that'd be as much of a problem if your physics and rendering were in two separate threads.)
If you dropped a frame, the viewer would probably notice it. Especially at lower refresh rates. At higher ones, they might not be able to explain what they saw, but it would probably cause some minor measure of confusion.
If you held onto that frame and wound up with an offset, the viewer would definately notice a desyncing of audio and video over the course of the game, and you might end up with other programmatical errors resulting from too many held frames.
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