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Cooling Down Hot Processors
DonnaMai writes "Face it: the only scorching hot thing you want with a chip is salsa. Any other overheating is potentially counterproductive, and can be downright damaging to the microprocessor -- or other components. This article uncovers potential ways to chill the chips."
Because nothing says "fiesta!" quite like third-degree burns on the roof of your mouth...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
To maximize my ROI i use my p4 as a hotplate/Pizza Warmer when I'm not surfing the web.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
When I was a kid we had to cool our chips by using our little brothers as a heatsink.
What we really need is a spare, low-power, mimimal processor without all the fancy extensions that you can switch to when you're just, say, reading a webpage or email, or such.. you could integrate this right into the motherboard and completely shut down your processor when you're not using it for real stuff. IMHO... maybe an engineer will give me a reason this is unreasonable.
The easiest way to keep it cool to not run Intel.
We used to build a little dam around the processor with putty, fill up the reservoir with freeze-spray, and drink margaritas while the whole shebang evaporated noisily.
No fancy metal heat sinks for us...andd we liked it!
Best way to cool your processor is to move to Canada. Hands down.
Ice cubes work well.
They don't last very long, though.
Perhaps we should be working on a better ice cube!
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Dr. Trevor Mudge (U. Michigan) came to give a lecture at my University last year. He had an interesting proposal which I suspect is probably going to end up being used in nearly every architecture. The energy usage of a procesor is proportion to the square of the voltage - so dropping it as much as possible is desirable. The only problem is that once you get too close, you start getting bit level errors. He proposes to use a shadow register to keep track of values as they pass through and detect bit errors automatically, and route around them. If run at the optimal voltage (1.4 volts) a razored process will see a dramatic drop in energy consumption with a virtually-nonexistant hit to processing power.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
As reported on /. a while back. "Record Attempt: The 5 GHz Project"
Tell the truth and you won't have so much to remember.
I don't know what the problem is, I like hot chi... oh wait, you're talking about chips, nevermind...
hack a day
There are many, many ICs that run happily for years at high operating temperatures (Blaupunkt's Digiceiver digital RF processor being one I'm familiar with).
Saying this, I do run a 12" G4 PowerBook and can appreciate the delights of a 20degC chip...
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
a liquid cooling system that is also a conversation piece http://nobispro.com/aquatank/?
How do I cool processors? Simple: I underclock them. Even a 10-20% less MHzs is usually enough to get rid of a noisy fan, i.e. the most stupid idea in the history of personal computers. Most of today's computers are I/O-bound anyway (Moore's law) so there is no performance loss whatsoever. Seems like an obvious solution.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Since the [tt]ime that salsa is made with Habaneros (which aren't really peppers) that will burn a hole straight from your mouth to your ass. Considering that most people here on Slashdot don't have any real distance between those two sections of the body, I guess it doesn't mean much tho... ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
There was nothing new or innovative in the article, and it had the depth of Paris Hilton as far as actual real world cooling suggestions.
/. I forgot for a moment...
There are a ton of different solutions out there both onchip and off including aircooling via different heatsink designs, watercooling, peltier cooling, and self contained refrigeration units.
This article barely scraped the surface of anything useful or interesting related to cooling.
Oh wait, this is
When I first got my Prescott chip, it ran *way* too hot. Realized that the stock thermal pad was just acting as insulation, so I scraped it off and replaced it with Ceramique. It still ran warm, so I superglued a piece of 3" PVC pipe to my case fan. Now air blows right onto the processor area, and the CPU temps are great. I highly recommend the ducting. Cheap, easy, and oh-so-geeky.
Call me a curmudgeon, but it seems like most of the heat is created by wasted cpu cycles. Eye candy is nice, but at 200 million computers in the U.S. alone, each Watt saved represents about $31 million in annual energy costs (assuming 40 hrs/wk, @ $0.074/kWHr. Reducing power consumption by 10 W would pay for a lot of good beer to fuel software development for more efficient software.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
...but would increasing the size of the actual chip help any? Like a vented, flow-through design. The actual chip is about the size of a fingernail, i know, but if we increased it to the size of the whole plastic skirt around it (that which has all the pins) wouldn't that help heat dissipation?
I haven't taken any measurements, but i'm willing to bet that the skirting around that wouldn't be much bigger- we've got more length on all sides, so we don't have to go as deep.
However, i don't design microprocessors, and don't know anything about electronics, so i'm betting there's something i'm missing out- i.e. the impedance or capacitance effects of increasing the microscopic traces. I would assume someone has thought of this once before, but with all the rush to make stuff smaller and smaller, can it be overlooked?
It's not like we don't have any spare room in a PC case, y'know...
do() || do_not();
Here it is in the "mostly finished" stage:
Picture 1
Picture 2
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
Color this mechanical engineer disappointed.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
This is so lame, I think I should post it AC...
... but...
The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire!
(Or, for the Futurama fan in you, and me, Nixon: "The loot, the loot, the loot is on fire!")
How to fry an egg on an XP
Does anyone else care that the submitter, DonnaMai, ripped off the article for his/her "submission"? How is it that on a website for nerds, we can't think of a way to at least paraphrase or summarize an article?
Crap, I say!
I can one up you. I built one of these, but instead of using mineral oil, I used vegetable oil. I run Gentoo, so I'd download a copy of Gnome, recompile from scratch, and then toss a bag for fries into the oil. They'd cook up really nicely in about 7 minutes. A friend of my brother, built one of these contraptions, and installed Gentoo from stage 1. He managed to deep fry and entire turkey. It was delicious.
Their problem is the megahertz myth...
They've been pushing this for so long, that they can't look back now. Yes, the Pentium M's perform great, but they're still only around 1.7 GHz.
While that out-performs P4's with MUCH higher clock-speeds, what are they going to say? Buy this CPU, it's 1.7GHz! Joe Sixpack would say "But I can buy this here Penteeyum Four with 4 GHz... 4 is better than 1.7."
AMD has been rating their CPUs on performance to keep competitive with Intel's. If anything, Intel will have to follow their lead and do the same if they really want to push the Pentium M's to the masses.
Someone needs to figure out an efficient way of makeing use of the huge surface area on the lid of a laptop for cooling. When in operation, it's facing away from you, so you wouldn't feel all the heat from it. The problem is tranferring the heat to a part that has to hinge away from the area that's making the heat. Plus there might be problems if it transfers too much heat to the LCD screen rather than to the air on the surface away from the user. It just seems a shame not to be able to take advantage of all that surface area.
From the Slashdot summary
and from the first paragraph of the article itselfAside from the removal of one sentence and a slight re-wording of the last, this is word for word the introduction to the article. If you were to submit this in a paper for a college (or even high school!) class, you'd be a good candidate for a plagiarism investigation.
Once again, Slashdot editors, there's a very simple way to deal with this -- change the author attribution. Rather than saying, "DonnaMai writes ...", use "DonnaMai quotes ..." or "DonnaMai poorly paraphrases ...". By properly citing the summary as a quotation or paraphrasing* of the article, you would avoid the impression of plagiarism.
* Yes, paraphrasing is allowed by fair use. In fact, if you're going to summarize an article, you want to paraphrase. However, paraphrasing is not, "Copy a sentence with a changed word here, drop a sentence there." You need to write a summarization in your own words, not take the article's words and (poorly) "massage" them so that they're not 100% identical (90% identical is still a problem).
Water cooling is the WORST for of cooling if have encountered.
When a water filled radiator is used on a cpu instead of a fan the heat that leaves does not get dealt with. Small components overheating aren't any better than the cpu. Sure, you can put in a powerfull (loud) set of case fans to deal with the extra heat, but what's the water system there for then?
I worked in a small "geeks for hire" computer support team. ALL THREE of the water cooled systems I worked inside of had HEAT problems. And one was leaking!
The problem with computers heating up is caused by tower cases. If you lay the components out on a sheet of plywood and use regular fans you get superb cooling. Submerged in mineral oil works great too. Don't be an idiot though, you need depth, a few millimeters over the cpu won't cut it (this guy is going to use a pump and copper radiator for what would have cost $2 in mineral oil!).
Primer at www.silentpcreview.com
std. disclaimer: i am just a fan. ba dum bum.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
"Not to get into a clock-waving contest (excuse my pun), I'm running a Prescott 2.4GHz chip on a microATX board inside a gutted Mac Classic with one 8mm fan in the side, one 12mm fan out the back, and it runs at an average 96F. Just my two cents."
VERY IMPRESSIVE. Hell, I don't even know where I can find an 8mm or 12mm fan, let alone ones that would actually cool anything.
Hotness is all about Intel's branding....
Did you hear about the new hotness? Intel Pentium, SCORCHING PERFORMANCE! ssssssssss!
Stick a Prescott on a long stick and apply that scortching brand on the rear end of any Longhorn cattle, and you've got yourself a stampede of sales, yeeeee-haw!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Yes, but they are solvents for the plastic parts used on the MB. Over time, the plastic parts (such as slot connectors) will swell, and eventually they might break the solder joints.
The pcb itself might swell, and if it does, it will break the plated thru holes and vias between the layers in the board.
I can't believe nobody has said this yet, but the absolute FIRST thing you should do if your system is running over-hot is check the airflow and direction of all of your fans.
Most ATX cases like to have a fan blowing in the front, and other fans blowing out the back, check your case documentation. If one of your fans isn't working well, or is actually facing the wrong way, the entire airflow scheme goes straight to hell. I've seen this happen several times, but now that cooling is so critical incorrect fan placement is often a show-stopper.
Today's story? My buddy builds a new system with a new P4 3.4HT. It exhibits classic signs of overheating-- the fan sounds like a 747 taking off all the time, odd beeping, memory errors, and when his brother who actually built it for him runs 3DMark, it scores something like 40% of what it should have on CPU. Everest says it's running at >80C. Much freaking out is done, and they order a hardcore Thermaltake fan to replace the standard/weak one that came bundled with the processor. That comes, and it helps somewhat, so the processor isn't stepping itself down to non-melting temperatures, hanging at 65-70C full-performance. Memory errors still a bit of an issue.
So I come over to look at it. Dumbass neighbor (Best Buy Geek Squad employee/Frat Boy) had put the front fan on facing backward while assisting with the assembly, so the front 80mm case fan was blowing OUT of the case.
I unscrewed the fan, flipped it around, and two minutes later the computer was playing Far Cry and humming along at 40C, by far the quietest computer in the room.
Moral of the story? If you have a misplaced or broken fan, your cooling power drops massively. It pays to actually look at your case documentation now. Oh, and buy Antec.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin