Slashdot Mirror
Self Contained Water Cooled Radeon X1900, Retail
Spinnerbait writes "Graphics cards are all the rage in the Enthusiast Computing community, where
overclocking standard off-the-shelf components is commonplace. Recently
innovative cooling solutions have been brought to Graphics cards in an effort to
tame the thermals of their power hungry GPUs. It looks like some of the
major vendors have taken it up a notch in this area, with this ATI-based
Sapphire Graphics card that employs a self-contained water cooling system.
Not only does the card have potential for serious overclocking but it should do
so relatively quietly as well."
I wonder how much power this uses if you have your own water cooling for everything else, then a seperate system just for your video card?
Ryan - http://www.thecosmotron.com/
Wait, no, it's from ATI, nevermind.
Man, I've always wanted a water cooler in my PC. Maybe now if I press "Tab", I really do get a Tab?
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
The "article" is a shitty little blurb with a few pictures. Not a single performance number or any bit of useful information.
/. in a while.
My first instinct? Check the link for the submitter's webpage. Oh, what a coincidence.
Look, I'm not one to normally complain about poor stories and worthless submissions, but this one takes the cake. It's the most obvious grab for clicks and advertisement revenue that's been posted on
For shame, CowboyNeal.
Since the article is really only a teaser, there isn't much to be said about it. However, assuming this thing works well, it's a nice direction to see the high-end GPU market head towards. Now if only I could afford one...
This guy's the limit!
Overclock all you want and you are still playing the same game as everyone else.
I'm not trolling, I'm just bitter that everyone is focused on pushing the graphical boundaries of games and leaving the game play for later. I remember a time when it was about hours of game play not frames per second.
*goes off to play Deus Ex*
I really don't want graphics cards with better cooling systems. I want them to RUN COOLER in the first place. Water-cooling a device just allows you to push the problem back a little further, before it really starts causing problems. Pretty soon you'll have to upgrade your power supply and home airconditioner to use a shinny new GPU.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I think it is about time to start thinking about the GPU as a device, like a cd-rom or harrdrive instead of a card.
They already require an external power supply in some cases, and with SLI are using a special type of connector.
I'd like to see a GPU that comes in the form of a 5.25 bay expansion, with a pci-x card that connects it via a cable to the mobo.
Then I think the industry could come up with a standard cable for all cards. Or not, given that nvidia or whoever could come up with just about anything. I could see a card that interfaces through the memory slots ( if your motherboard had enough realastate). A GPU directly connected to Hypertransport anyone?
It could be someting other then water, like antifreeze.. Woudl be able to use a peltier block and run it even colder then you can with water.
;)
Or even sodium. So what if it breaks and the user dies
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Does it have to be water to cool these GPUs? Is it water because of its relative hight Specific Heat Capacity, or because it's cheap and readily available?
I can see slashdotters increasing the capacity of the "tank" that stores water on these GPUs to make sure the GPU stays cool.
Remember when that company introduced cryogenically cooled PCs? I got one at work. It was amazing - it ran at 1GHz and I had the fastest machine in the building. But a few months later it was no longer the fastest in the building but it was definitely the dumbest machine in the building - especially with the 5 minute wait for it to cool down before booting. I won't make the same mistake with water cooled graphics cards.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
Is it actually self-contained if you have to refill it?
Is it actually silent if it still has a fan?
I think what TF[A|S] actually ment was 'pre-fitted water-cooled ATI'
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
The last publicity pictures I saw of this card had a couple of "Models" showing it off. The blonde one looked like they had picked her up off of W124th and Lennox at about 4AM.
Shudder.
sig?
When I looked at the pictures, my first thought was that it would not be more silent, since it still would have to move the same heat, while it might be good for overclocking. But I guess that there is a possibility of it running quietly since there are a bigger surface area for the air to move the heat than on a normal GPU cooling fan and heatsink.
I made my own PC watercooled about 1½ year ago with the purpose to make it more silent. My idea was to cool the CPU and GPU using both passive and active cooling.
I got a radiator from Innovatek.de for passive cooling inside and a small deep one for the inside for active cooling with a Papst fan.
Then I got a microcontroller that can run on its own, measure the water temperature and control fans, as well a a emergency shutdown if the water gets too hot or the pump fails.
The end result were fantastic, the PC runs almost silent when doing anything than playing games(which I don't do much anymore) but when playing games it still have the power. It manages to run mostly with passive cooling when not playing games. It is so silent that you have to look at the power LED to make sure that you have turned the PC on. When I do play games and the water starts heating up, the microcontroller starts the watercooling fan and adjusts the speed to keep the temperature down.
On mistake that I did make was that I went into it with my usual approach of reading tons of reviews on the internet to find the best cooling CPU/GPU heads and generally getting parts from different vendors that I determined would make the best solution. Exept from the internal radiator that was deeper than any other I could find, I can now see that it didn't matter which parts I used when I was not going to do overclocking.
It is better to stick with parts from one vendor so you don't have problems getting them to fit or work together. Like different sizes of tubes etc. Also the microcontroller from one vendor could not monitor the pump for another.
Anyone care to recommend a $100 non-AGP graphics card? I'm looking to upgrade from integrated graphics on a new system, and don't have the coin for a high-end choice. I'm not expecting to get 7800-level performance; just wondering what might offer good bang for the buck.
That ain't liver; that's beef kidney!
The EVGA GeForce 7900GTX CO 512MB Black Pearl is water-cooled, but not self-contained.
This card looks very boring. My quad fan card with state of the art stealth cooling fins and racing stripes looks way better. If they added some gold and diamond dust to the water to increases this cards bling I would consider buying it.
Hobby Robotics
On Sapphire Technologies there is a little more info, but not much.
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
What keeps the graphics RAM chips cool? Usually air is blown down onto the processor whence it goes across the RAM chip coolers.
In the photos, the RAM chips still have cooling fins, and they're still aligned radially around the core; however, since there is no airflow there they're surely going to overheat...
I guess today is a passable day to die.
Watercooling doesn't require you to wait for anything to cool down.
Once you get past a certain number of frames per second, it doesn't freaking matter. It's not going to one bit more for the quality of the experience.
One day, graphics cards will be able to do soo much on their own, they won't even want me to play the game with them anymore.
They grow up soo fast. =P
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Why do ATI give Mobile chipsets the finger? Acer is one OEM that is not supported in their mobility, why can NV provide Unified driver sets and ATI cannot, is it too technical for ATI? ATI as usual, let down their end users by drivers in favour of OEM's. Money from OEM's, Finger to the end user. My next laptop is a dual core AMD but most likely they will be ATI mobility chipsets and as such if it is Acer im screwed out of the box.
A handy database for those shopping for a videocard.
...onto more efficient chips rather than just bolting on cooling to the problem. That goes for the entire processor industry too.
CUE watercooling wich takes the heat via the water outside of the case where you can have a slow unobstructed fan get rid of the heat.
Almost every design I seen always gets the hot water out of the case to be cooled down by large unobstructed fans.
Yet this setup seems to pump the water from the hot graphics card to a spare PCI slot in your PC where the fan will be blowing the heat away right inside your computer.
If you unlucky right back onto your gpu.
To be efficient the cooler would have to be outside your case, with the water cables coming out of the back of the gpu and the cooler not having a PCI mounting but something that is easily attached to your case.
It is not the first time I seen this mistake, people put the nicest fans inside their case but never spend any time considering that all that does is blow the hot air around if you do not somehow setup a flow to carry it out. Oh and another to get cool air back in.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
you obviously have never touched the wires of the 'safe 12v' car electricity system when you're starting the engine, go try it out, i promise it will be fun. probably not lethal, but fun enough.
:s). if currents inside the computer continue the rise, we have to find methods to make the connections safer.
but you're right about the ovens and cars, if they are built the right way, it won't really be dangerous to you, but then again, you don't beat the battery connections in the car or the wiring of the oven when you miss a frag do you ?
the electric cow fences run at a moderatly low voltage, but the current strenth in it so large that if you touch it with bare hand, you'll remember it for the rest of your life (i remember it pretty well
i on the other hand am looking around for machines with mobile cpu's or even built ontop of the via or transmeta cpu's, because the eletricity bills are starting to get really large if you have a lot of boxes running and an alternative must be found. sure the via cpu can't do what amd or intel does, but 3 boxes of via will do better on my threaded stuff than 1 p4 box, and will consume less energy at the same time. for a quite and economical multiprocess server machine , a 4 way via or transmeta box would be much much better than a stupid p4 box which takes more energy and does less.
ofcourse gamers will continue on the gigahertz race unless somebody totally redefines the 3d engines in the way that it can be run on many many economical cpu's instead of one that blows your fuses.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Is this some sort of lame pun?
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Check out this picture. It looks like it just dumps the heat inside your case... great...
" the electric cow fences run at a moderatly low voltage, but the current strenth in it so large that if you touch it with bare hand, you'll remember it for the rest of your life (i remember it pretty well :s). if currents inside the computer continue the rise, we have to find methods to make the connections safer."
if the current was high, you'd be dead, its a high voltage line, with current limiting circuits to not kill things. yeah, you could do it the other way by having it a high current with limiting voltages, but well, 100mA will kill someone if applied right.
if high voltages killed people, shag carpets would be illegal due to the static buildup.
As for the rest of your post, some processors nowadays do step down their speeds when they aren't in use to save power. Also, a 1KW PSU will not always draw the max wattage, it depends on the load inside (like starting up a drive)
That was my first reaction. This thing eats up a lot of room in a case, more than an SLI rig I would think (which strikes me as the competitor). Are you better off with this or with 2 X1600s in CrossFire?
Overclock all you want and you are still playing the same game as everyone else.
If I can see you but you can't see me, are we really playing the same game?
If I can turn and point faster than you can, are we still playing the same game?
That's the whole point behind the video card race, and why I went to console gaming. Becuase at least there, more people are indeed playing the same game (not as true now that some people play in HD and some not).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
electric fences for the cows in the ussr didn't really have any protective measures, i can promise you that. ofcourse it wasn't deadly, my post wouldn't be here if that would be the case.
;)
and from the eager time of my youth, repairing of home electronics, i can also tell that this wasn't nowhere as 'harmless' as a regular shot from a 220v line. that fence hurt as hell and definetly leaved a blue trace for at least a month on my arm. maybe it really was high voltage mixed with weak current, but it certainly didn't feel like ac. and all the safety claims for the 12v computer lines here presume that the hardware&electronics work correctly, but if you've got a 1kw fuse and something goes wrong (and according to murphy it does), you should know that 100mA@12V isn't always the case.
ps. as for the rest of your comment, the cpus suck at stepping down if they get peak loads over 5 second intervals for 1 second. it's a hopeless attempt to up/downscale a server cpu if the server is used in similar style to one that a http server would be used. peak there , peak here, stepping just wont cut it. ofcourse in laptops it works fine, i give you an A on this one.
but on servers you need something that keeps itself down on the wattage drainage all the time and still manages to do the work. i think the person who administrates google network electricity bill would agree too
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocute
100 V measured across the human heart can kill.
meaning if you stick two of your fingers across a car battery, you might be safe, but if you use both hands, you could die.
Not that you should try that.
Nevertheless, putting water, electricity, and flammable materials in the same space is very dangerous, and any lawyer can spin that into a multi-dodacadewhateverploillion monetary-unit-of-your-choice verdict. As the person you responded to pointed out.
The idea of a water-cooled piece of computer equipment is dangerous, and "Performance" should come second in any endeavor like that.
TAKE NOTE THAT
the article says it's "liquid-cooled"...
but the slashdot headline says "water."
this is how controversies are born, ladies and gentlemen...
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
to get a dangerous current through the body without going to implanted electrodes you need a high enough voltage. 12V simply isn't sufficiant to do this (note however that some parts of a cars electric system are at far more than 12V the ignition system contains a step up transformer).
static shocks are high voltage and high current but very short duration and so do not have enough total energy to do any real damage.
i think electric fences also generally work on the short duration shock principle (it gives plenty of pain with little risk of harm). its possible the ones in the USSR were rather cruder and/or set higher than the ones we see in the west though)
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Cheap thrill? You clearly weren't the guy who drilled the hole.
The world can be wrong today for once.
Actually, just sitting in a tub of water with a toaster is likely not to hurt you. Only if you become the shortest path to ground (IE get out of tub). Else the power will just arc in the toaster (just where the power cord is soldered into the board)
:)
I think. No, I won't test it out
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Why do you assume they will be putting electrolyte in the water?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I would like to remind everyone that the reason why water or whatever fluid is inside it helps cool down the card is because of its high heat capacity. This also means that its slower to cool it down when it's already very hot.
i'd imagine it would depend on the bath. If the bath and the waste plumbing plastic you'd probablly get away with it. The bath water would oscilate in potential but you would just ride up and down with it and i can't imagine there would be any significant current outside the toasters case.
now if there are other paths out of the bath for electricity thats when things could really get nasty especially if the toaster didn't have an earthed metal case.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Not exactly true. Anyone who's ever played a shooter can tell you that your FPS mileage may vary depending on what's going on around you. If you're running at 40 FPS when there's two guys on screen, but 20 FPS when they start shooting, the game ends up being choppy during fire-fights and that could get you killed.
Case-in-point, I saw an Anandtech review of some new hotness video cards and they tested F.E.A.R. on the highest settings, and they averaged about 50 FPS, until some explosions went off and their framerate dropped to zero. Having more FPS means that when shit happens, you don't take a hit that will kill your experience.
Granted, that doesn't justify buying an expensive-as-a-game-console video card.