A Look At The World of Heatsinks 117
A reader writes: "There's an interview with Glenn Summerfield, Senior Sales Associate for Alpha Novatech (USA) that talks about heat sinks and where some of it is going." Alpha Novatech is one of the big boys in the field of heat sinks - the responses do have a bit of "salestalk" for Alpha Novatech, but seeing industry thoughts on watercooling vs. aircooling and such is interesting, nonetheless.
Not quite sure I understand the appeal... (Score:4, Interesting)
So I have a TBird 1.5GHz machine, and it hits 100% processing capacity for 0.02% of the time that it's in use. Save the time that I do mpeg compressing, but that's rare and the difference in speed that a watercooled system would give me over this would be negligable.
Using an expensive watercooler solution (well, expensive compared to a $30 air cooler that will work perfectly fine) to squeeze out a few extra megahertz, is that really worth all of the hassle?
Even at work I had an P3/800 (don't start with the intel bashing) and did a lot of work daily including compiling, and was upgraded to a P3/933 (at the expense of my friend who was away for a week, and I
If you're just so keen that you need to go from 33FPS to 33.8FPS in your Quake3 games, then, well, your choice... But is there really any good practical applications where the cost of a watercooled solution is worth the price? Keep in mind that you're comparing not the marked speed of the chip, but the speed that you could overclock to with air vs the speed that you can overclock to with water. I'd be surprised if you can see more than a 5MHz FSB difference there, even if 10MHz difference at a 15x multiplier (which means that you're already at 1.5GHz) you can gain 150MHz, which will do what for you? Practically nothing. Now add int he factor that you could just add the money of the watercooled solution to the cost of the chip to get the next higher up model, and
And before someone starts on the noise levels, we have a Dell 1.5GHz P4 at work that you have to put your ear right next to the bloody box to hear anything at all, they are VERY quiet. They have 2 fans too (1 case that blows across a heatsink on the proc through a tube, and 1 for the power supply). They are both thermally throttled and the hard drives are mounted on a thin strip of rubber too. Trust me, these babies are SWEET boxes and QUIET too.
So, who can explain to me why this would be worth it? I'm curious to know =)
-- Sean
Re:Not quite sure I understand the appeal... (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally I hope not to deal with watercooled client pc's. But such extreme cooling measures might be necessary: A worst case 1.8 P4 consumes aprox. 88 Watts. It looks like future generation CPUs could be even greedier than that (Transmeta is a noticeable exception).
I Imagine that people buying 4-way servers, do so because they expect signicant CPU load for long periods. But 4 x 90
However, I find it likely that CPU designers in the future, will sacrifice some speed gains, in order to avoid costly coling systems, such as watercoolers.
thermoacoustic heatsink (Score:4, Interesting)
A hot story from the archives (Score:4, Interesting)
These were a CP/M based machine with two Z80 processors (the second one was dedicated to disk I/O but configured so that the main CPU was placed in a busy-wait loop while the IO occured. Obviously this was a crappy hardware solution to a problem caused by an inability to write decent firmware on Intertec's part.
Anyway -- these machines were originally designed for the US market, so the PSUs were all 110V. Around these parts the mains voltage is 230V so they included a 230V-110V transformer with machines shipped here -- and it was mounted inside the all-encompassing case that also incorporated the screen and keyboard.
Cooling on the machines was by way of a weak fan that exhausted down onto the table beneathe the machine. It was barely adequate for the 110V machine so when the extra heat from the transformer was added to the thermal input -- the machines began to overheat.
The manufacturer was useless -- offering no suggestions and losing all interest in supporting the product.
The solution was pretty simple -- use a bigger fan.
However -- there was a rather unfortunate side-effect. When you turned on the computer, the fan-blast would blow every single piece of paper off your desk. Funny as hell -- the first time.
Although attempts were made with the fan reversed so that it blew up into the machine, a couple of machines expired after a sheet of paper found its way under the case and got sucked up against the fan grill -- effectively stopping all cooling.
I Recall Sega Dropped Liquid Cooling (Score:2, Interesting)
Originally the Dreamcast was supposed to be liquid-cooled. We were pretty excited to open up the case and check that out -- no doubt it would involve hundreds of tiny valves and pipes and pumps and very small migrant laborers to work them. However, Sega seems to have engineered the Dreamcast to run without overheating and scrapped the liquid-cooling -- we saw no evidence of it when we poked around.
Instead, heat is distributed out through a large metal plate that acts as both shielding as well as a heat sink. A sizable fan runs when the system is on to circulate air -- it's both effective and a little noisy. We've had no overheating problems with the Dreamcast, even after extended 12-hour or more sessions.
- PlannetDreamcast [planetdreamcast.com]
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:2, Interesting)