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MSI Develops a Heat-Driven Cooler

Posted by Soulskill on from the it's-not-easy-being-green dept.

V!NCENT tips us to a write-up about an addition to MSI's Ecolution motherboard which harvests heat from the chipset to power a fan. The device is based on a Stirling engine. The heat from the chipset expands a trapped gas, which pushes against a piston to generate power. The article contains a YouTube video of how the device works. According to MSI, the device has 70% efficiency.

1 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Are we going to get religious about the subject? by Z00L00K · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The idea of using a Stirling engine is actually not bad, but you may also be able to run peltier elements backwards, in which case you wouldn't get any mechanical problems related to moving parts.

    But even better would be if the energy loss could be decreased in the first place. Heat produced by a computer is actually only annoying.

    The Stirling engine was invented by Reverend Dr. Robert Stirling.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.