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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.

8 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Good thing it is 70% efficient by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    otherwise all that waste heat would be wasted.

  2. Pff by illegibledotorg · · Score: 5, Funny

    MSI just threw this together so that their lead engineer could finish his bitchin' Steampunk case mod.

  3. So ... by LordKaT · · Score: 5, Funny

    It has to heat itself to ... cool ... itself? Goddamnit, I hate recursion.

  4. Re:Please define efficiency for me by Naughty+Bob · · Score: 5, Informative

    That being said I'd be surprised if they were as high as 70%
    Prepare to keep those eyebrows exactly where they are- The 70% refers to the transfer of heat energy to air pressure 'power' within the piston. It's still impressive, but the +70% claim relates only to one step of the process.
    --
    "Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
  5. Re:Please define efficiency for me by BoChen456 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I suspect 70% efficiency means they can reach 70% of the theoretical limit maximum at these temperatures. The theoretical limit for heat reservoirs of 55C and 25C is about 10% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_heat_engine#Carnot.27s_theorem.

    So really this fan can convert up to 7% of the waste heat. This doesn't sound very impressive, but as long as it provides a little bit of convection it'll be better than passive cooling.

  6. But the winner is... by whit3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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'.

  7. Re:Headline misleading by slackergod · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:Buh? by billcopc · · Score: 5, Funny

    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