MSI Develops a Heat-Driven Cooler 173
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.
Are we going to get religious about the subject? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] was invented by Reverend Dr. Robert Stirling.
They need a rechargeable battery. (Score:2, Interesting)
How much waste heat can they get from a modern power-efficient CPU? Let's see the thermal dissipation:
AMD Athlon x2 BE2300 or Inten Penryn. Both at about a few Watts at idle, and 60 (AMD)-90 (Penryn) Watts under load - so average let's say is 30W, assuming a box idles more.
30Wx70% = 21W for a fan. That's PLENTY for moving a fan - if the CPU is doing work.
However, at idle, you may only get 4 Watts if you're at 70%. However the fan speeds don't necessarily drop by that much in a normal computer that you see. Probably due to an engineered safety margin, but the fan is not getting a lot.
So unless the heat charges a battery and the fan is drawing from that battery, they may not be able to produce enough fan speed at idle.
And of course, using a battery lowers your total efficiency to around 40%. Again, even if you cut the 21W to 13W, it's still plenty to drive a fan. So the question is, how they're going to use the excess energy to charge a battery to use when the CPU is idle.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Pff (Score:3, Interesting)
Efficient? Sorry, what's that? Yes, I know we're just re-using heat that would otherwise be wasted, but we'd be getting multidimensional cool...
Re:They need a rechargeable battery. (Score:3, Interesting)