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MSI Develops a Heat-Driven Cooler
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.
otherwise all that waste heat would be wasted.
MSI just threw this together so that their lead engineer could finish his bitchin' Steampunk case mod.
It has to heat itself to ... cool ... itself?
Goddamnit, I hate recursion.
Because I thought to get 70% efficiency there would have to be a couple of thousand degrees C difference between the hot and cold sides. Or have AMD decided laptops are not their core market for the next generation of chips?
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A fan can't draw much more than a few watts. What's the point? It seems like a complicated array of technology just to save a few watts of power. You'd be better off buying a more efficient power supply if you wanted to be "green".
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The moving part is cute, of course, and gives a bit of visual
tension to the apparatus you see through your peekaboo case.
Still, it's a bit of a clunker compared to the old-tech way of
making a no-moving-parts air pump powered by waste
heat. I refer, of course, to the 'chimney'.
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.
No, it works best when the temperature difference between the CPU and the surrounding ist highest. Which usually is the case due to the CPU getting hotter.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
In a physics sense, no, that's not a cooler.
Typical "air conditioner" situation: you want to make the inside of a room cooler than the outside temperature.
Since the room starts out similar in temp to the outside, you have to spend energy pushing heat "uphill" to
an increasingly warmer outside. Making heat flow against the direction it would normally flow,
that's a cooler in the thermodynamic sense.
In the CPU situation, you want to make the inside of the cpu EQUAL to the outside temperature.
Since the running CPU starts out way warmer than the outside temp, the heat will flow naturally on it's
own "downhill" to the outside. Any sort of cooling system merely hastens the flow.
In this situation, any device like a fan, etc is merely a more efficient radiator...
as the temp of cpu gets closer to the outside, this device loses efficiency... and in no case
could it get the cpu any _colder_ than the outside.
Being able to do that is what makes something a "cooler" in the physics sense.
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
If it is idle, it is too cool to drive a fan. So fan does not cool it. If temperature raises too much, there is plenty energy for fan, so it cools the chip. What is so hard in understanding it?
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
Large scale practical sterling engines use a source of coolness
That's why every MSI board will be sold with a life-size poster of The Fonz.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
It reduces the temperature of the chip. I would call that a cooler.
... well, do I really need to spell it out? Or does referring to the common house fly as an anthropod, and your coworkers as invertebrates have any value?
Using a general term when a more specific one would be more appropriate and more meaningful is
The OP was correct. They're plastic fans. No more, no less. And if Wikipedia is any indication of common or appropriate usage, a cooler is most likely where you'll find fermented malted barley refreshments.
Hell, while I'm at it, there's no such thing as soy milk. it's SOY JUICE! Soybeans don't have and will never have teats.
Ok, I feel better.
The rest of what you say is mostly true[*], but just because a term has a specific meaning in a specific context does not mean it's wrong when it has a different meaning in a different context. In both cases, the chip is cooled, making them a cooler, i.e., something that cools.
[*] I say "mostly true" because even in an air conditioner, the heat is "flowing downhill", as it were. The difference is that is the "bottom of the hill" is being manipulated through changes in pressure (or more generally, through work)--essentially by also raising the "top of the hill". In both cases, the net temperature is being raised (in compliance with the laws of thermodynamics).
Additionally, I wonder if you are confusing the terms "cooler" and "heat pump". Is a "cooler" something distinct from a "heat pump" in a "physics or thermodynamics" sense? I'm thinking the former is merely an informal term for the latter.
Peltier modules are nowhere near as efficient as sterling engines. Using a peltier module, you would be lucky to get enough power to light a small LED from the typical chipset to atmosphere temperature differential. They work fine as heat pumps since you've already got a big sink strapped to the hot side, but when you start trying to use them the other way around - to generate power from a temperature differential - their inefficiency shows through.
There is also about a $100 price difference between those two chips. I imagine they are manufactured to different quality standards. The mobile chip probably has less leakage or something to that effect.
You're absolutely correct that an ideal Carnot engine would have to have about a thousand degrees if it rejects heat to room temperature.
Typically what's done in these cases is to compare the efficiency of the engine to the Carnot efficiency. So the claim of 70% efficiency really means that the engine is 70% as efficient as a Carnot engine at the temperatures it operates between. The real efficiency then is n_carnot*n_engine. Their real efficiency claim is therefore probably closer to 4.9%.
But that's not the only convention. Sometimes the comparison is made to the ideal version of whatever cycle they're using. For a stirling engine, I believe the ideal still approaches Carnot efficiency, so that wouldn't affect their claims, but you can see how some shady math can be used to get people excited.
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The main reason for this is wear and tear on fans. Bringing a DC motor to a total stop and starting it again is expensive. Heck, too many systems are delivered in a preconfigured case with no fan-speed adjustment at all. If the temperature is too low to drive the fan, it should not be needed. If that's not true, it's just as much of a problem at full speed as at idle.
70% is a lie. A total conversion efficieny beyond 5% is probably thermodynamically impossible.
you should know.
Ah, still remember those long summer nights. Sleeping under the stars and driving the beans across the plains...