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Liquid Metal Cooling in New ATI Video Card
MellowTigger writes "Water cooling is so passe, definitely 20th-century. What's the 21st-century geek to do to keep his gaming video card cool? Try the liquid metal technology that will be included in the ATI Radeon X850 XT video card using the cooling technology from Sapphire. This material is reported to be non-flammable, non-toxic, environmentally safe... and 65 times more thermally conductive than water."
Also seeks out John Conner.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Cool.
* ducks *
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
1. The card runs hotter
2. The card runs faster
3. geek cred points.
I'm voting for 3.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Liquid metal computer component cooling was discussed here not to long ago. Sorry, I don't have the relavant Slashdot URL handy. I read the previous article just for the Terminator 2 jokes (pertaining liquid metal Terminator T-1000).
When your videocard starts leaking, don't mind the components being destroyed, but worry about a T1000 dripping out of your computer.. from the FAQ: Q: How will I know if my videocard is leaking? A: Ask your parents why "wolfie" is barking and if they answer you while the the dog is actually named "Max" then your videocard is leaking.
Considering they said it's environmentally safe, I doubt it's mercury. Considering it's intended to /cool/ your gpu, I doubt it's molten lead.
Even if it were either, why couldn't it be good? 20x the cooling sounds pretty good to me, and if it's safe and environmentally friendly, what's the problem?
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How does it work? The little brief on the phys site said that it used an electromagnetic drive suggesting that the metal itself is feromagnetic such as the fluid use in the active dampeners on the corvette but I want to know about the tech. The ue of the vide card is lame and not worth my time at all tell me about the tech. Is there an artical that actually tells me what it is made of? Geez this could be cool but right now its just an advert.
It's Gallium. It's developed by NanoCoolers. I wonder if the name means it's a nano-technology. That would be exciting !
War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
So now I have to worry about memory leaks, security leaks, and liquid metal video card coolant leaks, ahhhh crap, this is all getting way to confusing.
I have enough trouble just keeping everything from blowing up everytime I get nailed by a thunderstorm, last time it was crack/fizz/is that smoke? Whats next, crack/fizz/smoke/drip?
It also doesn't mention if it's non-conducting, when I get struck by lightning 5h1t explodes, wouldn't that be fun to watch as the entire motherboard gets sprayed with a liquid metal conductive material, gaaaaaaa!
Like arts? Like cheesy little Indie mags? Check out www.artwerkmag.com, and don't laugh at the bad coding please.
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According to their website, the "TOXIC X700 PRO" features "Lethal Cooling". I think they need a new marketing department.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
They say it's not flammmable, so it's not the eutectic alloy of sodium and potassium that's liquid at room temperature. It's not toxic, so it's not mercury.
Gallium might be possible since it melts a few degrees over room temperature. It's only mildly toxic but nobody should call it "nontoxic".
A one slot and nearly-silent top end card.
Ah, bother, it's quicksilver. Isn't it?
Actually, it is the midrange Toxic x700 that uses liquid mercury. I'd hate to see what Sapphire uses in the x600.
20x
Sorry, s/20/65/
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1. NFPA requires NASCAR style fire extinguisher inside computer case.
2. House wiring must be upgraded and a 440v 3 phase outlet installed next to your computer.
3. Homeowners insurance rider for extreme fire hazard.
4. Fire retardent metal door must be installed between computer room and rest of house.
5. Town must grant zoning variance for indstrial scale use of power in a residence.
6. Special monitor must be installed which notifies the Fire Department when your frame rate exceeds 250.
61% Gallium
25% Indium
13% Tin
1% Zinc
Solid at 6.5C
Liquid at 7.6C
Heh... Liquid metal in the sense of say steel or some other normally solid metal is only hotter than water in the sense that it must absorb a certain amount of heat before it liquifies. There are however some metals that are liquid at low/room temperatures. That being said even though the substance may need to be heated to liquify, the process of heating the substance will draw heat from the source, thus cooling it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't heat capacity more important than heat conductivity in this case?
The article mentions a special kind of pump with no moving parts, so I assume the liquid is moving around from some sort of radiator to the GPU and back.
Water has the highest value of heat capacity if I'm not mistaken (4186J/KgK), so in case of a moving cooling liquid, the higher the liquid's heat capacity, the less water will have to be moved to move a specific amount of heat.
What does heat conductivity matter, then?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Here's a little bit more info, no word on T1000's involvement.
However, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that owners of this new "metal liquid cooling" at a LAN party ending quite horribly.
I can see it start with a few leaks, the liquid metal all joins together... T1000 lives again...
I'm pretty sure they're using gallium. It melts at 85F, is nontoxic (unlike mercury), and is nonflammable (unlike rubidium, cesium, sodium, and potassium, the only other metals I know of that melt at reasonable temperatures for a graphics card). Gallium also has almost exactly 65 times the thermal conductivity of water.
As it's a liquid metal.. and the only one liquid at temperatures around room temperature to 100 degrees C are lead, mercury and maby a lead tin amalgam.. it's got to be some new thing.
I'm curious about the chemical composistion of this new amalgam, as it must be (unless they're using highly reactive cesium, which I really doubt).
Anyone know any chemical details ?
What state is it in between 6.6C and 7.5C????
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Is this possible?
Last time I checked molten metal (burning death) and Mercury (deadly poison) was toxic.
AHHH, Nothing like a warm sip of heatsink juice to warm you up on a cold winter night.
--Greg
It's an alloy of gallium and indium
http://nwc.serverpipeline.com/news/54200844
First in the Blizzard range will be the SAPPHIRE Blizzard RADEON X850 XT and Blizzard RADEON X850 XT Platinum Editions. Blizzard delivers the future of gaming with the ability to push blistering frame rates and deliver environments erupting with vibrant colours and highly detailed textures rendered in High-Definition clarity.
Combining Sapphire innovations with game developers' creations, users won't miss a single feature of today's gaming titles. This hardware boasts 16 parallel pixel pipelines, 256MB of GDDR3 memory, and PCI Express interface. From innovative minds working to deliver to users who demand the peak of performance in every aspect of their graphics card, the Sapphire Blizzard RADEON X850 XT Turns the Ordinary into Extraordinary.
Is all this not a little overkill? I mean, really, isn't water-cooling cool enough for people? Certainly, I have a GPU cooled with the good 'ol fan & heatsink combo -- I get damn good performance, pretty close to what they're describing and it didn't cost me the Earth. The noise isn't bad either: it's drowned out many times over by the fans on the PSU.
The other interesting thing to note -- while this may be really useful for the up and coming mini-PCs (think Mac Mini) that need a well cooled (to prevent overheating) and quiet solution -- it'll take up too much space. An extra PCI slot is just a no go when space is at a premium. I'd also love to see this type of technology implemented on mini-PCI slots, where the extra cooling is essential for performance. Now that would be useful.
Maybe if some Nvidia cards start to use this cooler the 6800 Ultra won't need a cooler that blocks the adjacent slot.
Where did the simple video cards go to? (You know, the ones that could be air cooled)
You know John Doe likes gamming too much when they buy a liquid metal cooled video card.
John: Hey Bill, I just bought a liquid metal cooled video card! Now I can play the good games I always wanted to buy!
Bill: But can you buy the games you always wanted?
John: Oops...
Geeze, why does /. keep on linking to physorg, which has crappy articles and no links to real information about stuff.
Here's a more in depth article on X-bit. NanoCoolers has a pretty in depth description of the product. It's basically a watercooling loop but using a molten metal. The really cool part is that because the metal is obviously electrically conductive, they're using a DC current combined with some magnets to take advantage of Lorentz force to propel the fluid.
The liquid metal cooling topic was covered on /. before, eg:/ 03/1421243&tid=222/
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05
The technology probably derives from http://www.nanocoolers.com/products_cooling.php/
Sapphire is just the OEM manufacturer of ATi cards. For quite a while you could only get ATi branded cards but now you can get them from ATi or Sapphire. I doubt they have much to do with the technology besides licensing it.
From TFA
"The revolutionary use of an electromagnetic pump means no internal moving parts, low power consumption and delivers near silent operation. "
Near-silent? What is making the noise then?
Nah, it will have to reach a temperature close to the melting point to actually absorb heat in any other way than an ice cube may absorb heat when its -5 centigrades. You can't get a higher temperature in the coolant than in the "colee", so to cool by the phase transition itself, you'll need the colee to reach the melting point of the metal. That will also be needed if one is going to get a pump going by magnetic forces, which seems to be the idea here. If it stays solid, it will only be a fancy, encased, heatsink.
It'll be between the liquidus and solidus lines, so you'll have a composition of liquid plus some small amount of alpha-phase.
It's undefined, and if you dare use it at that temperature you'll just get a null pointer exception.
Both liquid and solid: Recrystalizing state.
Oh well, what the hell...
I remember that Russian nuclear submarines used to use liquid metal instead of water to cool their reactors which was a really bad idea because the metal would become much more radioactive than water and because the metal could cool and solidify, causing a clog.
"And in other news, nVidia announced that their upcomming 8000 series is going to feature a NeuralNet CPU, which is a learning processor. Finally, gamers can get their cards to behave exactly the way they want to..."
The X-bit link says that the "metal" used is patented, so it's not pure gallium like I thought - it must be an alloy, probably the gallium-indium mentioned in a couple other posts.
Anyways, there are plenty of metal alloys that are liquid at or slightly above room temperature.
But even discounting alloys, there's are a few other elemental metals other than mercury that are liquid at room temp (assuming your room has a computer or two to keep it warm): Gallium melts at 29.76 degrees C and Cesium at 28.44 degrees (I'd keep the latter far from my computer though). Rubidium melts at 39.31 degrees, so it'd be liquid at the temperatures today's GPUs reach (but I'd keep that far from my computer too).
Did some research, found the following two patents:
T O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1=nanocoolers&OS=nanoc oolers&RS=nanocoolers
T O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =2&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1=nanocoolers&OS=nanoc oolers&RS=nanocoolers
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
And
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
It looks like they're using a Gallium/Indium (rare elements) alloy. This is certainly not environmentally safe from a chemical point of view as these are toxic heavy metals. I think by environmentally safe they are pointing to the "sealed" system that they are advertising. That is, they dont exepect the systems to leak, as they do not require any refilling.
Basically, their argument appears to be that it's safe because it cant get out, just like coolant in a nuclear reactor. This is actually a reasonable claim, however, we shouldnt take it to mean that the liquid metal coolant itself is evironmentally sound, just that the system, while in operation, is.
P.S. it appears they've also experimented w/ Lead/Bismuth, mercury, and Sodium/Potassium alloys.
I'm a bit rusty from my thermodynamic courses, but I'll try: it's in transition state where both liquid and solid exists. So up to 6.5 it's solid, from 6.5 to 7.6 it's in transition and 7.5 and above its liquid. Can anyone refute or back this up? I'm not a chemical engineer, I only took courses way back when...
This might help. Or This (pdf) or This (pdf)
Here we go again!
Yeah, PhysOrg is clearly a marketing front for PR releases with any sort of science-y edge to them.
See Paul Graham's already classic The Submarine for details on how this crap works.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
When I first saw that they were using liquid metal, my first thought was "Why?!" Water has a gigantic heat capacity, and is in may ways the Ideal Coolant.
But then I saw: "Electromagnetic pump with no moving parts." So it looks like they're sacrificing some of the coolant properties of water so that they can use something very electrically-conductive, and gain the advantage of silent operation.
That said, IIRC there are no-moving-parts water pumps that use electrochemical effects (something with electrolysis and dragging ions through the water), but I've always assumed that they're limited to small flow rates.
Now I want to know how this no-moving-parts liquid-metal-pump works. Maybe use a square-cross-sectioned pipe with an insulating top and bottom and conductive sides; pass a current between the sides, and put large permanent magnets above and below? Or do it linear-induction-motor style? Hmmm...
Based on the earbursting noise produced by my current computer, I've pretty much decided that the next one I build is going to be as silent as possible. Maybe we won't have to give up graphics power for silence.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
With a cooling loop, you'd like a liquid that can carry a lot of heat per trip and doesnt get too hot in doing so. Water gobbles up a whole kilocalorie per cc for each degree. gallium is dreadful by comparison-- it has a FIFTEEN times poorer specific heat, so it either goes up 15 degrees per cc as it passes the GPU, or the pump has to put out 15 times the flow rate to give the same cooling rate as plain old H20.
Good old H20.
Please, Sapphire has one of the worst history among all 3rd party card manufacturers for overheating.
They are notorious for cutting cost at the fan level with a $1 plastic fan instead of a $3 one.
If they build terminators, it'd be made out of paper.
sodium isn't exactly fireproof
Actually it's a cool thing to see a piece of sodium in plain, simple, pure water....(hint: google for sodium and water)
Here we go again!
Transfering heat over a short distance conductivity is more important than capacity - because getting the heat IN and OUT of the coolant is the bigger issue.
Transfering heat over a long distance capacity is more important than conductivity, because you're physically moving the coolant far away. What you really want in this case is high capacity and low viscosity - for a cooling setup like this "how much work the pump has to do" is probably more important than "what volume of coolant does it use" In very small spaces water has a very high viscosity due to surface tension related effects. (IIRC, basically because it's bipolar) That's why you should always have antifreeze in your car, even in the summer - the water pump can't handle pure water.
While I'm not sure, I doubt water has the highest heat capacity bar none. This application certainly qualifies as a "short distance"
Water is usually used so prevalently for industrial heat transfer for the combination of high capacity, low toxicity and extremely low coolant cost.
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Gallium is a fun metal. It melts at around room temperature, in fact you can hold a bit of it in your hand and it will melt right before your eyes. I havn't had the opportunity to play with it, but I've seen pictures. Very cool shit.
Learn something new.
A silent magnetic pump.
Gee, does this mean we could take this and put it on a submarine and have our own Red October?
No, wait.. We need our own sub-launched ballistic missiles....
Shucks.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
This opens the door for cooling systems based on knives and stabbing weapons.
Salt.
:) ( Na + H20 = NaO(2?) + H2 ) Basically the reaction gives off so much heat that the resulting H2 ignites, at least when exposed to water in large enough quantities.
(Sodium Chloride = NaCl)
I'm not sure if Sodium is flammable or not, it probably is at very high temperatures, but usually people get it too close to water to ever find out.
-Bill
This has been used inside aircraft engine exhaust valves since the 1930's. Liquid Sodium would be sealed inside the valve. It's non-toxic and is still used today.
The buzz of the high voltage lines powering it.
Moo!
In the advent of a snow storm and a loss of power your comp might go below the freezing point you would be out a $500 graphic card. no a good i dea if you live some where cold and blizzard prone
sodium is extremely reactive.the comonation of pure sodium and water will result in an explosion
Although it might be "environmentally safe" insofar as the leaked metal is not toxic, it's still far from being environmentally friendly. The fact that a graphics card needs liquid metal cooling is cause for concern.
Efficient cooling just means transferring the heat generated away from the card more rapidly - the energy input is still high, with all the negative consequences of that (cost, pollution, geopolitical instability, etc.). What we should really be demanding is more efficient systems that don't waste so much energy in the first place. Still, the Mac mini is a step forward in that regard (although not in the same graphics league, I concede).
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
non-flammable, non-toxic, environmentally safe
Yeah, they said that about water too but stupid college students die from it every few years anyways.
Seriously, this is cool stuff but any new substance should be considered at least slightly suspect until long-term dangers are known. That's not to say we shouldn't use it, only that we should be intellectually honest with ourselves.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Please give an example of something that is absolutely without use.
I would assume that they're using some kind of an alloy that has a lower freezing temperature. One possibility is an alloy of gallium, indium, and tin (also known as Galinstan) which has a freezing point of -20 degrees centigrade.
..wayne..
Couldn't they focus more on producing chips that DON'T generate so much heat?
That way we wouldn't need to spend another N bucks on the cooling system.
...that would rather see this technology in a CPU cooler (and maybe also in my PSU, as that's damned loud) than in a videocard?
I, for one, welcome our Skynet overlords, and their lieutenants, the T1000s.
"We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking." -Mark Twain
Then I could run a turbo without a heavy intercooler.
Overclocked PCs as lava lamps using real lava...
"So Dave, any idea if you can knock your cpu down a few cycles? The tremors are rattling my windows and keeping my kids up at night and the pyroclastic flow last week incinerated the fence, my garage, and my fishing boat. I know that building a Doom 3 terminal server capable of hosting five million players in real time is important to you, but..."
Speaking of which, go read Eric K. Drexler's Engines of Creation regarding the kind of cooling that some nanocomputers would require. Pipes with flows of many gallons per minute, superheated high pressure steam being output...
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Score -1: *WAY* too late with the terminator jokes/
...which melts at an even lower temperature
u id_metal/liquid_metal.html
See also:
http://www.scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/thermo/liq
( kudos to venkeroz on tweakers.net for that link in a post on this story 4 days ago )
you're posting on slashdot... you can't have a girlfriend, as it's against the rules!
Setting all that aside, I think some poster above has discovered that the metal in question is a gallium alloy. So, y'know, we're offtopic.
To remedy that, can anyone riddle me whether or not the better heat conductivity is related to lesser electrical resistance? If so, a leak would be considerably worse than water, if I understand things correctly.
::jafomatic
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Another sibling post mentioned that Na is caustic - it's not the Na that is caustic, it's the NaOH given off when the water on the surface of your skin reacts with the metal. :)
February 9th, 2009 8:55pm: Slashdot becomes self-aware.
What I wonder is where the fan is... They are moving the heat away from the core silently, but that heat has to go somewhere, and in general, that means a fan.
All in all, isn't this just a heatpump with some new marketing-driven name for the liquid inside?
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Gallium melts at 29.76 degrees C
No idea how hot your room is, but mine is normaly around 20 degrees C. That means that the metal is solid when you turn on your PC.
When the PC is on, the metal around the CPU will start to melt, but the rest of the metal will still be solid. That seems like a bad idea. It has to be liquid when the PC starts, not when the CPU is melting.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
There is a slide deck on this website
http://www.techpowerup.com/?3105
http://fudge.org
I dunno, it just seems somewhat ...wrong...when our computers are running SO HOT they need liquid cooling of any type. This is not the way it's meant to be.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I saw that but didn't buy it, since when you're actively pumping coolant, I was under the impression that you didn't really need a ton of conductivity in anything but the heat exchangers.
The mixture is nontoxic. Here, check out this badass website for Periodic Table information. (Damn, I love Google.)
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
The Russians used liquid metal cooling in their nuclear subs. It was efficient, but unfortunately the liquid metal carried the radiation well, and all cooling tubes had to bne coated in lead along with the reactor itse;f
Cool stuff indeed.
u id_metal/liquid_metal.html
http://www.scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/thermo/liq
Say something's wrong with the card and in my infinite wisdom I decide to take a screwdriver to it, pry it open, and fix it. Will it try to defend itself like other hardware?
Note that this uses electromagnetic induction to move the coolant. Caterpillar drive, anyone? "Are those torpedo doors?"
Is this something that could potentially be used by Apple for the PowerBook G5? They are going to have to do something different to make it all work inside the 1" case.
There seem to be a lot of "WTF?? electromagnetic pump w/no moving parts?!?" posts here and while I do not know the intricate details of this particuar implementation I STRONGLY suspect that a casual perusal of the science behind the Einstein-Szilard refrigerators would prove highly informative.... Its a bizarre and almost unknown chapter in the history of safe refrigeration techniques.... and Einstein's life for that matter!
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
...the fucking article is light on details. It just says it's non-toxic, non-flammable and environmentally friendly, but it's not water. Hmmm... that rules out Mercury because that's certainly toxic and not environmentally friendly. But it's the only "liquid metal" I could think of. They've either discovered new matter, or it's just a marketroid name for some other chemical. The only other thing I can think of that is liquid, non-toxic (by some accounts anyway although I have my doubts), and environmentally friendly is, well... um... piss. Holy cow, I hope that's not what Liquid Metal is. ;p
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
It won't be used for heat sinks because heat sinks are made for idiots - stick it on with a phase-change pad, power up machines, and be done with it.
The integral heat spreaders are a good example of how things are engineered for the lowest common denominator. You can achieve significantly better cooling by prying off the heat spreader, lapping your heat sink (and in some cases, the CPU) and properly applying a thermal compound, because the thermal transfer between the die and the heat spreader isn't that good. However, in the *worst* scenario, where some idiot has screwed up the interface between the CPU and the heat sink, the greater surface area of the heat spreader makes it a significantly better design. Fewer returns = higher profits.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Well, it may be solid, but that doesn't mean it isn't absorbing heat. Melting typically takes significantly more energy than would be absorbed by a temperature increase, so the melting metal would probably actually cool your CPU better than the liquid result.
In addition, metals (by definition, I believe) have good heat conduction properties (that's why some heatsinks use metal heat pipes these days), so a large portion of the metal would probably end up melting and start flowing. You probably wouldn't just get a bubble of super-heated liquid gallium frying your CPU. You'd just start off with a normal-ish metal heatsink until the gallium melted.
Of course, there are other reasons not to use gallium, as other people have mentioned here.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
A computer crash would be so much more entertaining if it were traced to a pinhole leak in a liquid-sodium-cooled video card.
Yes and no. The higher heat conductivity of metals in general compared to molecular materials (e.g., water) is a product of the closer association of atoms within the metal lattice and the higher electrical conductivity is due to the 'elctron sea' effect wherin metals tend to exist as a mass of +ve cores embedded in a 'sea' of loose electrons. (Apologies if this sounds weird, another chemist would know what I'm talking about in detail but I'm trying to make analogies)
So, the heat and electrical conductance are related but not identical. As an extreme case, consider diamond. The best thermal conductor I know of, and an absolute insulator (when pure). High thermal conductivity due to the tight framework but no loose electrons, so no conduction band.
Anyway, the alloy in question here is being touted as useful because of a combination of factors. Liquid metal alloys tend to have low melting points and vapour pressures (so the tube doesn't explode) along with very good liquid range (2000 degrees F in this case IIRC) and high thermal conductivity and specific heat. Specific heat is a measure of how much energy it takes to raise the temperature of a compound (the SH of water is one calorie/degree celsius/mL, this alloy is probably more). A high SH means more heat can be moved around at lower temperature, so the core never gets as hot.
Note that this effect must be balanced against cooling efficiency. Heatsinks pump heat out best when the heatsink is much hotter than the air, so you would get the most efficient cooling at several hundred degrees. This would not be an ideal situation for the chip though (or the melted puddle of copper that is left anyway).
BTW, since when do we need to type in some ridiculous text to post? Have I just never noticed it before?
Sick of WoW? Try the thinking man's MMORPG: EVE Online
First post seems to have slipped through your fingers.
The potential cooling of the Nintendo Revolution which will be using an ATI video chip? Small and quiet......
Interesting. Does that alloy have a name btw?
Yes, Zintinindigal.
I think, therefore I am. I think?
I've wanted a DB bus about the house, particularly the kitchen counter and bathroom, for eons. So many little appliances that would be useful.
.
I could extend this to the whole house for computers . .
hawk
Yeah, but it stains your hands and can be annoying. It's too bad that there's no good substitute for mercury. Dang you, mercury, for being toxic! It means that people can't do stuff like this any more. :P
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
Worse than that, the NaOH then reacts with the natural oil in your skin to form (blech) soap.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Slush.
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Why wouldn't be something easily available like this Bismuth Alloy available at Small Parts. They have the greatest stuff for building things.
Oh, and I'm Austalian and a chemist so I use joules normally. I was just trying not to confuse the poor Americans in the audience.
Sick of WoW? Try the thinking man's MMORPG: EVE Online
Jelly state.
I wonder how the cooling will be while the gallium is still solid in parts of the system that are still below 85 F, like right after you switch on...
Than H2O.
First of all the substance is Gallinstan, if it was pure Gallium it would corrode away whatever they put it in unless it was teflon coated, but then you can kiss your head conductivity goodbye.
Water has the highest heat capacity of any natural substance, there are others that serve different purposes (I use Dowfrost in my loop), but water is still the best in most cases.
Just because the head conductivity is 65x (Sapphire-speak) its thermal capacity is horrible (12x less than water). Now whoever said that capacity is not very important is wrong. These cards pump out heat like there is no tomorrow, and you would have to 1) Pump 12x as fast to get to WATER-comparable temperatures EXTRACTED from the core, and you would have to have a fan running fast in order to cool that liquid as its flying through the loop (we are talking over a 1000gph is necessary for effective cooling of Ga).
Also, this cooling is not that much "better" than water because you will still never acheive below ambient temperatures, it is a physical impossibility, so whats the point on spending so much on this junk (it would cost you in the realm of 500$ to fill a loop with it) when water will work JUST as well, even better, and you still have silent cooling available (MCP 350 anyone?) and its dirt cheap (200$ will get you an entire quality loop, easy!).
These are just heatpipes on steroids, you can't use a pelt because it would freeze the metal, the pump is expensive and needs rare earth metals in order to create enough of a field to actually spin and pump this stuff through...
All in all its just marketing. Gallium is a super cool metal to play with, but cooling with substances other than water or water based products is still pointless, as water has the highest natural heat capacity.