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Cooling Down Hot Processors

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the feeling-hot-hot-hot dept.

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."

7 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. cool chips by Luxifer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:cool chips by MC68000 · · Score: 5, Informative

      We already have that. It's called Speedstep and it's on Pentium M processors.

      --
      E = m c^3 Don't drink and derive E = m c^3
  2. Move! by turboflux · · Score: 5, Funny

    Best way to cool your processor is to move to Canada. Hands down.

  3. And why was this article accepted?! by William_Lee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    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 /. I forgot for a moment...

  4. Re:Better than water cooling by Blue-Footed+Boobie · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I built one of those a while back...

    Here it is in the "mostly finished" stage:

    Picture 1

    Picture 2

    --
    DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
  5. What a disappointment by Noose+For+A+Neck · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Here I was, all set to read an interesting article about technical solutions to the problem of heat transfer on microelectronic chips, and instead all I get is a bunch of fluffy gibberish that looks like it was written by a sophomore communications major in college.

    Color this mechanical engineer disappointed.

    --

    Software piracy is victimless theft.

  6. Re:Laptops by LurkerXXX · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.