Slashdot Mirror
Mega Heat Sinks
An anonymous reader submitted a stream of obscenities,
but amidst them was a link to this page
which is a sweet heat sink- in fact, it actually was able
to accumulate a quarter inch of frost. Could be useful with Intel's
track record of releasing chips that can double as
microwave ovens.
In my opinion, a heatsink that can do that is a bad thing(tm)
Could someone please mirror the site if they get in? Slow as hell.
Frost means moisture. I don't want a quarter inch of moisture on top of my cpu. You probably don't either, if you have a clue of any non-negligable size.
Or there's this variant where someone used the 12V Peltier junction from a beverage cooler to cool his overclocked K6. Computer parts in the auto parts store.
so where can I buy one of those Perltier heat sink? how much does one of those baby cost?
Has anyone heard of Velox? do they still make those kinds of heat sinks?
The distributed.net client is a great way to stop :(
peltier coolers from freezing cpus, unfortunatly it crashed on one occation, and I once found a block of Ice, a pool of water and a permanantly dead cpu
Some of the better peltier coolers now have a thermistor on the cpu side of the junction to reduce the cooling effect if the temerature gets too low. I would strongly recomend these over the sort of coolers that create blocks of ice !
Site's down...slashdot effect? But of course!
Check out tellurex.com/resource/protkit.htm
I was thinking the same thing. I can't speak for everyone, but the last thing I want is frost developing inside my computer.
This falls nicely into the rumor that I've heard that Intel will be putting wire mesh into the plastic casing of the Xeon and PIII chips like the door to the microwave oven. This would keep the radation from the cache lines from being really bad.
I feel sorry for those poor bastrards that purchase chips and take those plastic covers off to "cool the chips better"
Also, any remarkers that are creating false plastic covers to hide the reworking of the insides to get past the latest overclock protection so that they can make a quick $200 by selling remarked chips are selling harmful merchandise possibly.
What you don't know CAN hurt you.
Y'know... at this rate /. could be used to rate the stability of different platform+httpd combinations :)
-- Soruk
Technically there is no difference between taking heat from something, and cooling it off. Molecules always move from a more excited state to a less excited state until they reach equalibrium.
I agree with the HAHAHAHAHA statement. If you need a heat sink that bad then you can go to @#$%ing radioshlack and pick up a generick heat sink with a fan for $4!
AWSOME SITE!!!
10061
Connection refused
An error occurred while trying to retrieve your URL.
This error could have been caused by:
Bad / misspelled URL
Your access permissions
Your network connection and/or transient conditions on the Internet
An error on the source web server
Yes, a refrigerator is not a heat sink.
However a refrigerator has a component much like
a heat sink -- it has the coils in the back which
carry the heat away from the contents of the
refrigerator. They dispense heat from the coolant
to the environment around the refrigerator. In
the same way, the end of the heat sink we're used
to looking at is the part that gives off heat to
the atmosphere. The other end, the part attached
to the hot chip, should get very cold in order
to work well.
This is no joke.
What this was was a reverse thermocouple.
A thermocouple is a junction of two metals which
generate a voltage as a function of the temp
difference. Well, if you apply a voltage to a
junction of two metals, then you will get the opposite effect (i.e. a temperature difference)
This is why the wires go to two different parts
of the plate. This is the only way to generate a
temperature less than room temperature just with electricity and nothing else.
For some _real_ cooling, check out www.kryotech.com.
That stuff is awesome. Can we say "500 MHz K6?" Heh, heh.
Wondering where I can find one of these...
I believe that as others have pointed out, this is indeed a peltier effect cooling system. Unless you are genterating some SERIOUS heat, i.e. overclocking a Cyrix processor (!), most people don't need this much cooling. There would be no frost, assuming the processor is generating heat that is being cancelled out by the cooler. The disadvantage to this system is that while one side gets cold, the other side gets hot -- at least as hot or hotter than a passive heatsink. Normally, the fan draws away this heat. When (if) you shut down (why would I do that?) the fan stops and the remaining heat in the heatsink travels back INTO the CPU, resulting in a sudden jump in temperature. Not good. .1 amps. Most power supplies now are rated for like 230 watts, so 24 watts in no real big drain, but it is still power that can't bu used for your hard drives, cdrom, etc.
An active system also draws much more power than a fan. I'm not sure exactly the power drain, but i'd guess about an amp, maybe two. A large fan probably draws
I own a Coleman cooler based on the peltier system. It'll keep cans cool very nicely without ice, and if left on for an extended period will frost up the heatsink inside. It takes like 10 amps @ 12V (120 watts) to keep that 12-pack cool, though.
I can't offhand think of any way to stop it..
If something gets real cold in a comfortable
human environment, water and ice result.
The point of things like Peltiers, at least,
is that you don't have to run them that cold.
Attach a small sensor to the cold side that
adjusts the power to meet the demand without
reaching condensation temperatures and it's
no longer a problem. Excess capacity is a
good thing provided you don't actually use
it without some halfway valid reason.
People, people.. Maybe I'm missing something
fundamental here, but how can this be an
insurmountable obstacle to we prop-heads?
Surely a simple transistor heat sensor that
only powers up the thermoelectrics when the
CPU temperature raises above 0 Celsius
removes the risks entirely and allows
you to toggle overclocking at will?
I am a mechanical enginer and we studied Peltier Effect Semiconductor Refrigerator/Heat Pumps. This looks a lot like one of these with a
sink/fan on top.
By the way, heat tranfer through conductuction is determined by temperature gradient.
q=-kA(dT/dx) so a cooler plate defintitely means more heat tranfer from the CPU.
Now think about it, if the CPU were next to the Sun it would get hotter (gain heat), and if it was next to an ice cube it would get cool (lose heat).
check out Melcor Matireals' website, www.melcor.com, for all the info you'll ever want on peltier coolers. They even have a (win32 only) program to determine what you need to buy from them. For a CPU that dissipates about 40W (celeron clocked to ~500MHz), you'll probably need two of the cp2-127-06L modules (about us$60 each) to get down to about 20 deg.F. Don't forget to insulate the entire celery stick to avoid condensation. You'll also need a 12V power supply that can source 12 amps! That's not all, though, because you'll also need a heatsink that has a thermal resistance of around .2deg.C/watt (very big with lots of fans).
If Intel makes hot chips, how come my Celeron 300A running at 450 runs very cool to the touch (26'c) and a Cyrix P200+ (Even the low voltage) running at 150mhz is very hot to the touch even with the recommended heatsink/fan???
And let's not forget the AMD K6-233, the hottest x86 chip around...
I think this company makes heatsinks for AMD & Cyrix... not intel...
When was the last time Intel made a Socket 7 chip??? (Although I guess it would work on a S370, but it wouldn't need it)
Now if they drilled two holes in the peltier device, they could mount that sucker on an alpha chip... I bet it wouldn't be making frost then...
One thing that bugged me, at the end of the site, he mentioned that the frost left the cooler VERY fast??? Does this mean after you cut power it HEATS your chip temporarily???
most new motherboards have onboard temperature sensors (such as the Winbond 1 or 2, or LM78s, etc.) The temp. info is reported to the bios, and several programs are available that can extract this and show it to the user. Asus boards come with Asuslm and PC Probe (or something like that). My personal favorite is Motherboard Monitor Lite. MBM Full can trigger alarms, or even shut down the computer, if the temp gets too high.
Um.... well, since air is a pretty horrible conductor of heat, that would not be such a good idea. Comparing the direct removal of heat using a peltier device and a heatsink to a cold air blower and a heatsink is like comparing holding your hand ON the hot plate of your stove, to holding it several inches ABOVE the plate.
The direct contact method using an active heat sink is far more effective in terms of removing heat.
As to the the issue of frost prevention. As Toms guide pointed out at some stage, refrigerators have been using heating strips around the doors for DECADES... so I see no reason why a heating strip cannot be implemented at the very periphery of a heavy duty peltier junction cooling device, with an insulating strip between the heater and the chip, to prevent dew point conditions. You will probably lose about 1%-5% cooling effect by doing this in such a small space.
Do a search for "Peltier heat sink" on Google or Metacrawler and you'll find several sources. They've been around for a while.
Of course, to get frost on the outside of such a device you'd have to use one which you can plug in backwards -- so the outside would chill while it heats up the processor chip...
You're possibly thinking of Kryotech. They retail overclocked Alpha and AMD-powered boxes, with their patented refrigeration system built into the case.
Posted by unixmj:
I could really use one of these for my dtv-box. Its called Sagem and you could fry eggs on the mpeg2 chip in it, got a p133 fan in it now - but still it overheats now and then. Perhaps Sagem is really a Intel company??
Obviously a ploy by Intel aliens to get you to buy more Pentiums when your current one burns out from moisture.
Microwave? Uh, sure... Try "convectional" instead. It would sound like you knew what you were talking about...
I can't imagine how ANY heat sink could produce this effect unless it had some kind of a refridgeration unit in it. Furthermore, his comments about the one wire connecting to one part and another wire connecting to another is fairly counter intuitive to normal power mechanisms.
sigs are a waste of space
?
Similarly, though not quite as strong, 1.2 GHz is a harmonic for the 2.4 GHz microwaves and can have the same effects. A lot of the cellphone EMF scare has its roots here.
(notext)
A chip operating at a certain frequency radiates at such frequency, plus every odd multiple of the base frequency. Of course the radiation is low, but it is there. Usually shielding will block most of it, although no method of shielding is perfect.
Where I work (for a major defence contractor) we use similar devices for cooling things where there's no possibility for airflow (i.e. the displays in an aircraft cockpit).
They're really not all that new technology, as I recall. The concept is simple, based somewhat on the idea of a Peltier Junction.
A Peltier Junction is formed when two dissimilar metals are physically bonded. If you put a current across this, heat is transferred from one side to the other. Thermoelectric coolers use a similar idea, but use massive arrays of specialised semiconductor diodes to achieve the same task much more efficiently.
We get ours from ITI-ferrotec and they have a pretty good web site explaining the basic concepts, as well as how to use a thermoelectric cooler in certain applications. If you let one run uncontrolled, it could easily develop frost like the web page indicates. It's typical to see TEC's with a temperature differential above 40 degrees C.
Most applications where you want to avoid frosting your sensitive electronics require a controlled feedback loop where you can vary the current to the device based on its temperature. Just power cycling them (as with a standard thermostat) is fairly detrimental to their life-span, so in high-reliability applications (like the displays in aircraft cockpits) we have to use a specially programmed microcontroler driving a darlington power transistor to control the current, combined with a thermocouple sensor to monitor the temperature on both sides of the device.
Even more interesting is that if you reverse the power to the TEC, the heat flow will also reverse. Great for when you have to start up your F-16 on a really cold morning and the LCD has frozen up.
I have heard that it was actually liquid nitrogen. I have seen pictures, and it was very cool looking (yes the pun was intended) :-)
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
cordless phones have been approved for the 2.4 GHz range. I have heard claims of 7700ft range in them!!!
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
I have always wondered about the possibility of using a small fridge w/ a bowl of silica gel to absorb all the moisture. Anyone else had this idea?
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
The point of using microwaves, of course, is that such wavelengths are easily absorbed by water molecules, which tend to be prevalent in food. But that doesn't mean that any microwave radiation will cook food. Quantity, not just quality, counts.
Kythe
(Remove "x"'s from
Kythe
So anything that cools itself down to any extent can remove the heat from any device.
I thought I got in ahead of the crowd.
Arrgh!
Velox? The only Velox I know of makes rim strips fo bicycle tires. :-)
Little Debian: America's #1 Snack Distro!
What's the deal with everyone yelling about Intel? I personally have a PII 400, it ran at about 100F when running at 400mhz and I now overclock it to 600mhz and it doesn't get over 120F, and it is rated to well over 150F, if memory serves. Have those who are talking about Intel chips being 'microwaves' actually have any experience with them, or is it just fun ripping on big companies. Remember, also that Intel is supporting linux and an Intel/Linux platform is probably the BEST (value) server out there nowadays, save possibly dec alpha.
Didn't say anything about a 150mhz bus, I overclocked using the bus / multiplier ratio and setting that to 6 [ 6 * 100 = 600 ].
Like I said, it is the bus / clock multiplier ratio that is being increased, and that is on the motherboard, not the chip. Maybe I just got a God-sent chip, but I haven't had a problem yet. All I know is I upped the multiplier, it ran faster and a little (but not much) hotter.
Erm - I wasn't seriously suggesting tat you could cook with it, but that we may have problems with interferance...
Frost on a heat sink is obviously a joke. I haven't been able to see the link yet, but if it's true it can't be a passive heat sink. You can only get as cool as the ambient temperature obviously. At 20degC ambient and 60% humidity, DEW doesn't even form until the temperature is 10degC, approximately.
Some folks mentioned Peltier heat sinks. I have never heard it by that name, but it sounds like a thermoelectric cooler. Put the current one way, it's a cooler, switch the direction of the current and you have a heater. We use it all the time to cool detectors used in space applications.
Check out http://www.melcor.com/teccover.htm if you really want one.
I think it's pretty bad that you would ever need active cooling for a CPU. That really has to hurt reliability.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
"We could be happy if the air was as pure as the beer"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
forget a better heat sink for my processor, i need one for my banshee, atleast my processor won't fry eggs
This might have a tolerable cost if you made the liquid nitrogen on the fly. This isn't difficult.
I personally am using sandwich bags filled with water to cool my PS/2 Model P75 486. It has 24MB of memory in the form of 2MB SIMMs <shudder>. Its 486DX/33mHz also has a habit of overheating, which makes these interesting displays like ``??? 111'' when the parity checker catches the error, or if it doesn't, I get ``data modification'', which is IBM speak for random bit changings. That causes neat things like diskette copyings to suddenly fail, DHCP requests to come back with funny IP addresses, and the mouse pointer to suddenly morph into a strange shape. These are all things that have happened before I was watercooling.
Cheers,
Joshua.
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
Couldn't get through to the reference page (Slashdotted already?), but I can't help but wonder if this could be some kind of Pelter Junction device. For those who've never seen one (a local electronics shop here has one on its demo display), a Peltier Junction transfers heat from one side to the other when a current flows through it. It's the first thing I could think of, small enough to be built into a heat sink, that could actually make something cooler than the ambient temperature.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
I bought a great stack-type heatsink at a local surplus place. The thing looks like the cylinder on a lawnmower, but its amazing! I mounted a case fan next to it, so it blows the heat up (tower case) into the power supply (I of course reversed the ps fan). My K62 now runs at 42 deg Celcius (before, it ran at 50-55).
I just thought I'd remind some folks that a heat
sinks job is to help take heat FROM the processor, not to go frosty and cool it off... a sink which dissipated heat fast enough to freeze doesn't by itself make any sense...
j. scott olsson
If you're going to be actively cooling your cpu, why not go the affordable route. Liquid nitrogen... at around $0.12 a liter, maybe a liter an hour... only $2.88/day... $20.16 dollars a weak... **ONLY** $1048.32/year!!
FROST GUARANTEED!!
j. scott olsson
The trouble with frosty heatsinks is: I go outta town for the weekend, the power to my apartment dies. My UPS is only good for about 15 minutes, so in a half an hour, this thing stops cooling my CPU. Then the frost melts. This is a bad thing(tm). A much better solution, having not actually gottten to this slooooooww site, would be the Kryotech system. Check out Kryotech. They cool the CPU down to -40C with no frost. They actually have little heaters in the heatsink to prevent that, but still cools the chip!
"Just another damned fool idealistic crusader..."
well, when someone figures out that cold air is good and the moisture is the bad part, then we'll get somewhere. why not make peltier card slot fans ? i have fans in my servers that push/pull air thru the card slots. why not put this peltier stuff around the tunnels they use ? would make the machine blow dry cold air into the machine, more effectively cooling the entire system. eh ?
ElecMoHwk
CEO / Founder Dashin.org
card slot fans. they push/pull air through card slots in the back/bottom of the case. someone figure out how to wrap peltier stuff around the opening of those, and control the moisture, then you've got a good effective cooling system pushing dry, cold air, into the entire system.
seems alot safer than putting condensation on my cpu and still alot more effective than just a normal fan. eh ?
ElecMoHwk
CEO / Founder Dashin.org
Hmmm, OK so that's how it's done. Interesting.
:)
One question tho. Is having a cold surface like that on a chip ( questions of the moisture asside, at the moment ) actually going to cool it any better? I thought the idea of the heat sink was to transfer heat FROM the cpu, and dissipate it. Now, I'm not totally convinced that putting a colder surface on the CPU is really going to be able to cool it down any better ( you're still going to want your heat transfer and dissipation properties of the heatsink ). And yes, I realise that the object in question was definately a heat sink. The question being is the cold contact surface going to make it perform better than any other heatsink?
THEN we get to the question of whether or not you'd want something that produces moisture like that near our computers. I dont' know about the rest of you, but my answer to that is a big fat NO!