More Cooling/Overclocking Fun

heretic writes "Here's another construction article on cooling components down to -40. While not quite as insane as the mineral oil solution (heh), it's still quite extreme. For only $600, it's pretty neat that he can nearly double his processor speed. I guess these sorts of techniques will remain viable until we have massive N-way SMP. "

Comments

discovered in the 50's

[hawk]

before the wide-spread use of freon in a/c. There also seems to be a problem showing a mechanism that gets the freon up there. And to top it off, ozone is constantly created and *destroyed* by UV, so there's a furhter question of whether the freon would even make a difference in the quantity present.

And of course, these are all ignored by those rabbidly eager to ban freon, and taken as proof that there's no problem (rather than an unknown answer) by those against the ban.

It's not about cost.

[tm23]

It's a hobby. And a darn fun one at that.

I mean, for all of you saying "he should've spent his money on an alpha", would you had rather loaded up a fairly boring page with pictures of an alpha box?

Sure, the costs and time involved in putting together a system as he did are fairly high. So is buying one alpha or xeon processor. Plus you wouldn't get the fun factor and enjoyment from tinkering around when you just slap down a few thousand on a typical high end system. At the cheapest, overclocking means taking some $50 celeron processor and juicing it up (usually with a few fans and a peltier unit) so that it runs faster than a $400 processor. The -40 C goal is to take advantage of properties of CMOS components when they get that cold (there's a graph of potential speed vs temperature at the hardocp). Once you hit low enough temperatures, you have the possibility of doubling the clock speed.

It's not going to be the same as spending $3000 on a high end xeon processor, but it's a lot more fun, something a lot of you are forgetting in the name of price.

Re:145Watts

[GreyFauk]

That's an interesting point...
Being able to take on more rendering projects would increase his pay... however...

What renders faster? an Empty-box (NT)
Or a Linux-box?

IS Linux faster rendering than NT?
I've never done any myself. (nor have I used NT)
Does only M$ stuff run the rendering software He uses?
I would be most curious to find out.

I would assume (yeah, dangerous I know) that he would
be able to get the same savings and speed by running
Linux as his rendering box. Not to mention how much more
he would be able to take on after overclocking it at that point.

Just curious

620 With 333s....what about tommarow?

[Mnemic]

the thing about overclocking is the fact that tommarow you can allways overclock the next proccssor... sure he can get Alphas, but he can apply his cooling system to the next generation of CPUs as well, and continue to Overclock them higher and higher. if he can allmost double his current clockspeed, imagine what he can do when 800mhz comes out running at current cpu temps, and he can achieve 1.4ghz by applying his cooling system to it....

145Watts

[Supercoolin]

The chiller and pump require 145Watts and the peltiers rewires 210W. At 7.6 cents per KW/hr. Running it continuously for thiry days will cost an additonal $19.45. Less than you internat service. And if you take into account the thirty hours a month that it saves you in rendering time at $45.00 per hour, thats a $1,330.00 dollar a month savings because you can take on more work each month. I who said speed doesn't pay.

Figurative, not literal, freon :)

[hawk]

R-12 was banned (and all leave the debates about whether the science involved was schlocky enough to toss it to other sites :).

We now get R134a, which transfers substantially less heat. Don't convert your old R-12 a/c units unless you have to; post-conversion, they don't cool as much. You need a heat exchanger about 50% larger to get the same amount of cooling, and there just isn't room for this in your car. Mercedes switched early, and the result (at least if you lived in the desert) was a $60k car that couldn't cool itself down to comfortable temps . . .

Also, R134a has a nasty tendency that R12 didn't--under the right conditions, it can explode. Some time back, i read a snide op-ed piece suggesting an exploding refridgerator as the new symbol for the extreme-fringe of the environmentalists :)

criticism

[austad]

Everyone seems to be criticizing this guy and telling him to just go buy some Alpha's or something faster in the first place instead of spending so much time trying to make it work.

It's called a hobby. Even though he uses the machine for his job, I'm sure overclocking is sort of a hobby to him, just like it is to many others. People spend lots of time and money doing things they don't need to do because it is fun and helps them learn.