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Hardware

For The Overclocking Junkie 208

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-this-is-just-plain-sick dept.
wilderf writes: "Check out this site. A group of crazy overclockers decided to fully submerge a motherboard in a liquid nitrogen cooled fluorinert? bath (Fluorinert? is an electronic testing fluid manufactured by 3M? -- $500/gallon), to see how much they could overclock the CPU. Crazy." The site is pretty impressive too, if you're the sort of sadist who loves torturing hardware.
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For the Overclocking Junkie More

For the Overclocking Junkie

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  • In the words of Stan Marsh... (Score:3)

    by TrevorB ( 57780 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @07:10AM (#965280) Homepage
    "Dude, this is seriously f*bleep*ed up right here...."

    Why is it that alcohol is always involved in such insane experiments??? I mean, Mary Shelly never said that Dr. Frankenstein was blitzed when we was working on the monster... Got to be a techie thing.
  • Of course, they *could* just go all out and directly submerge the processor in liquid nitrogen. It's nonconductive, AFAIK.

  • Or at least it doesnt work. As an overclocking site pointed out fluorinert is a gel so they would have trouble pumping it. Also liquid nitrogen would freeze it SOLID making the circulation impossible. N2 on its own would be better than this idea. Not quite potato powered web servers but close..
  • Mmmmm. In either event, the vapor won't kill you instantly.. but you won't live very long either.
  • Well, they froze that hideously expensive compound, and say that they didn't expect that. This is the first question that comes to mind!

    If you go to3M's website [mmm.com], we read:
    Key properties: typical boiling point: 155C, pour point: -57C, dielectric strength: 46KV (0.01 inch gap), dielectric constant (1KHz): 1.89.

    And they tried to cool it down to -190C!!!
    HELLO!!! ANYBODY HOME?
    ------------------------------------------- ------
  • I remember some Japanese (or was it Korean) guy doing this, except he didn't immerse the whole board - he ended up building a "wall" around the CPU, then filling that with liquid N2 - he got some impressive figures, IIRC - for the CPU he was using (PPro? Can't remember) - however, the N2 boiled off rather rapidly... Maybe someone has a link...
  • The Flourinert is returning directly onto the CPU, so the CPU should be the coldest part. At 115 fsb, you'll have a lot of components getting toasty that need cooling off too.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Chilling it to negative temps isn't the answer. Supercooled items, when they come in contact with air, condense. That's why the Kryotech attempted to keep the chip closer to room temperature, which in silicon-world, is a pretty cool temperature anyway.
  • You make a couple good points but you are, however, wrong about the Crays. Crays *do* have the "don't turn the Flourinert into mustard gas" problems. I'm not sure where he got the oxygen mask bit though - there isn't one on the T90 downstairs. The concern is not that normal operation will get too hot. The concern is that a short in the board will cause the board to burn.

    From what I heard from the guy who sets up the Crays here (and he should know since this building *is* Cray) the Cray 2 and the Cray T90's (the ones that are actually immersed in a bath of Flourinert) have this problem. The Cray 2 would vent the gas out a pipe in the roof and the T90 actually has a filtering system to catch it which could be where the guy got the O2 mask story from. So you're right that the CPU will not be functioning when this happens, but that doesn't mean that it's not a problem for the system as a whole which will have more than one CPU and these CPU's are hooked up to pretty nice sized power supplies...

  • goto http://www.tweak.cc - goto the links section, Dr Freeze is there with some other overclockers

  • These guys really are insane:
    * For doing this in the first place
    * For getting such an image-intensive, long site linked to Slashdot


    Start here [octools.com], to get to where they are actually starting to cool the thing and boot up.

    What's really a shame is that they went to all this trouble and expense just to run Windows on a Celeron 366. For less than the $1,000 they paid for the Fluorinert they could have bought a new motherboard and an Athlon running at the same speed as they eventually got the Celeron clocked to.

  • You're thinking of CO2.
  • The T90 was much later (1994 or '95) than the Cray 2 (1985? not too sure on that date) and it certainly uses that approach. See my post further up talking about what Crays are cooled in what method. Only the T90 and Cray 2 are cooled by total immersion, though a bunch of others circulate Flourinert through the system.
  • Sigh. Yeah, and I suppose they're in direct contact with the liquid. You take a piece of glass at room temperature and submerse it suddenly in liquid nitrogen

    Actually, yes they are in direct contact with the liquid. And no they won't explode either. While doing some low temperature physics experiments, I've poured liquid nitrogen into a glass dewar without it exploding. For that matter I've poured liquid helium into a glass dewar without it exploding. Both of them were at about room temperature. The people working in labs do this on a regular basis so what I did wasn't unusual at all. On this point, you're just flat wrong. If you want I can show you lab manuals that tell people to do this. If the offer for guiness is legit, tell me and I'll give you an address that you can send the twelve pack to.

  • Why is it that alcohol is always involved in such insane experiments??? I mean, Mary Shelly never said that Dr. Frankenstein was blitzed when we was working on the monster...

    Yeah, but Mary Shelley was pretty fucked up when she wrote that, so she probably forgot.

    --
  • But she has to be Open Source(TM)! Do you mean to say that you support a closed source Petrified and Naked Natalie Platform????

    ProcessTree [processtree.com]: It's like distributed.net, but you get paid.

  • I imagine that it has to do with how well the oxygen circulates through the stuff. You could choke if none actually got to your bloodstream, even if much of the flourinert in your lungs was oxygenated. Breathing will push the fluorinert around some. Otherwise you might need pumps with tubes down your throat to get it to work.

    Also like any liquid you breath, it strips off the protective mucous coating your lungs; once you start breathing air again you're *very* prone to get pnuemonia.

    IIRC they've been experimenting with oxygenated liquid breathing since the 60's. In the movie, btw, while no humans actually breathed it for real (it was pink water - Ed Harris just acts like he's breathing it) they did put the rat in matching pink-tinted flourinert.

    Then they had to film several different rats to get enough footage because they all got the shit scared out of them (literally) whenever they were dunked in the stuff ;)

  • I'm suprised that these guys didn't take more time to understand the properties of the chemicals they were dealing with, especially since they paid $1000 for them. Some simple heat circuit simulations would have told them that the liquid nitrogen was not nessecary. A good ice bath would do well enough because it can adsorb a lot more heat ( in Joules ). Water has a great specific temperature. I assume that flourinert is better ( for $500, it had better be better! ). The issue isn't so much getting the parts cold as it is in keeping them from getting hot.

    Just my $0.02. Still interesting stuff, though.


  • > N_2 (as well as pure water, contrary to popular
    > perception) does not conduct electricity.

    While true, water tends to be a bad choice for such things. Its hard to get and KEEP really pure. Plus it had this nasty habbit...if there are any electrolytes in it at all...any two parts with a potential difference will caue a small current and, while it may not effect the equipment, it will cause water to break down into H2 and O2.

    The breakdown tends to corrode parts too. I thought of water when I was making capacitors... with a whopping dielectric constant of 81 (most plastics are in the 4-7 range...mineral oil is I think 7) its VERY tempting. Of course...when you are planning on using it in a project where voltages will be in excess of 10,000 V...that nasty electrolosis habbit of water could be a problem.
  • Anyone remember the Cray-2? It used Fluorinert as a coolant, gallons and gallons of it.

    I was interested to see that it does have a freezing point of sorts .. wonder if they ever determined exactly what temperature that was. (Also wonder if 3M will let them say exactly what temperature that was .. they freaked out one time when some friends of mine did a GC analysis of some Fluorinert and worked out an approximate chemical composition .. heheh ..)
  • This is very interesting, and a really cool project, but man, for what they spent on parts/coolant you could get a pretty sweet new mobo and chip. That's not the point, of course; this was more for entertainment and geek-one-upping :-)

  • Brittleness (Score:3)

    by styopa ( 58097 ) <hillsr@colorado.DEGASedu minus painter> on Friday June 30, 2000 @07:13AM (#965302) Homepage
    The brittleness would depend on how quickly you heated it up, and if you threw it on the floor right after you removed it.

    Today, people have found out that if you submerge an object in liquid nitrogen or liquid O2 then let it heat up to room temperature over the span of ~week that it actually increases the strength of the material, at least it works for metals. (Over_simplification)This occures due to the material aligning itself into a stronger crystal lattice, which will remain if the heating process is not so sudden as cause enough immediate energy to break the bonds. When the material finishes reaching room temp, if it was heated slowly enough, the stronger crystal lattice will remain, ergo making the object stronger.( /Over_simplification)

    From what I have heard, disposable razors that have had this done to them will keep their edge for months.

    I doubt that they waited a long enough time for that to happen. And of course, if they heated it up too quickly then the material would expand too quickly and it would shatter.

    Hope that was helpful.

  • Reversal of the process (Score:5)

    by w00ly_mammoth ( 205173 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @07:14AM (#965303)
    There is an intriguing method of obtaining the same results, relatively speaking. The human operator is submerged in a clear liquid (say, water) while the PC remains above the surface. Due to the human movements being slowed down from viscosity, everything the PC does appears hundreds of times faster, thereby introduing a "relative constant of overclocking".

    There are other subtle effects. The light slows down since it has to travel through liquid before hitting the retina. Finger movements slow down, as do mouse movements.

    Water is also cheaper than liquid nitrogen, and easily available in swimming pools and oceans. Why not try this intriguing method today and see if it works for you? Oh, and you won't believe what it feels like when you're swimming underwater in Quake III. Very realistic.

    w/m.
  • Cool project! Not sure I'd spend over a G note on fluid to overclock, but I'd say their results were pretty damn impressive!! a Celeron 366 running faster than an Athalon 600?! NICE work boys!

  • Re:Short out? (Score:5)

    by cpt kangarooski ( 3773 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @07:15AM (#965305) Homepage
    Fluorinert is really neat. It's used with computers because it doesn't conduct electricity, doesn't damage the components and (these days) isn't particularly toxic. There are rumors of bored operators drinking shots of it on dares.

    I think that Cray had 3m develop this stuff from scratch back in the day when they sold 9 out of 10 machines to the government.

    They use basically the same stuff in medical situations (to keep your blood pressure up if no blood's on hand) and it can be oxygenated and breathed - as in The Abyss. What they didn't mention in the movie though was that it's so dense, you're not really going to be doing a hell of a lot while you breath it. Breathing it is hard work, it's so thick.

    Unfortunately it runs about $500 a gallon. These guys blew a grand just on their Fluorinert. Stirring fans might help a little, but it does gel up a lot between IIRC -50 to -100 C. Perhaps they'll just immerse the whole board into liquid Helium next time ;)

    (Of course, I remember hearing about one guy once who cooled his system with some kind of motor oil)
  • Assuming a minimum feature size of 0.18 micron and a 1.8V core voltage fields within the (MOS) FETs channels reach 10^5 V/cm. Drift velocities saturate under these conditions and are 10^7cm/s@77K and 8x10^6cm/s@300K.
    This data should apply for pure Si but could reasonably be extended to lightly doped channels (correct me if wrong)
    Pag 36 fig 1.17

    Now this means that the temp decrease (assuming it is uniformly distributed on the cpu) provides 25% increase in drift velocities (responsible for channel conduction)

    In bipolar devices forward biased junctions have an exp(qVa/kT) (Va= applied voltage, K= Boltzmann const, T= temp in K) term that helps boost the currents involved.
    Pag. 237-239

    Intrinsic carrier concentrations drop @ about 100 K (p. 13 fig. 1.9) decreasing background noise (?)...

    Really cool!

    All refs are to:

    Device Electronics for Integrated Circuits SE
    Muller & Kamins
    Wiley
  • An additional (possible) problem is cooling the CPU too much. At sufficiently low temperatures, silicon ceases to be a semiconductor and becomes completely nonconducting. I don't know off-hand whether that temperature is above or below that of LN2, though.

    But scott@b is probably right about LN2 directly on the motherboard not being that good of a coolant. Due to the gaseous layer he describes, you can hold LN2 in your hand without any damage. (Something that's not recommended for any length of time with dry ice, despite the fact that the temperature of dry ice is much higher than that of LN2.)

  • That was the "Dr. Freeze" project. Unfortunately, none of the links I can find work anymore. There was an article sometime back on SlashDot about it.

  • cool! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Cool!
  • ... after a while, but aparently you would be wrong.

    -p.

  • I believe that they said in the article that they positioned the return line (with the ultra cold stuff in it) to shoot directly on the processor. I could be wrong though.

  • Babylon 5, epp after they declaire independence, Garabaldi resets passwords and shuts down the computer for the changes to take effect (MY GOD MS SURVIVE!!! RUN!!!!), when it comes back on some AI doobry comes back to - very simmilar :) and pretty funny

  • This is great...Overclocking is one of my favorite past times...Does anyone know of a little bit cheaper way of cooling off the board w/o using liquid nitrogen? (and not more fans)
  • It doesn't strike any of you as odd that this meathead would spend 1000 dollars on a liquid, to be cooled by liquid nitrogen,and he doesn't even check its freezing point?
  • I bet they're just trying to get their Amigas running in the three-digit megahertz range...
  • This stuff is perfectly fine IF it does not catch fire.

    3M claims that Fluorinert is nonflammable. I didn't find any info about its chemical composition, but others have speculated here that it's a fluorocarbon or mixture of fluorocarbons, and if that's correct than it is nonflammable.

  • Re:In the words of Stan Marsh... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Alcohol is a poor choice for insane experiments. I recommend weed and LSD. And more LSD.
  • Wasn't this the stuff that Cray was using _years_ ago? Seems like an awfully long time for a substance to trickle down into the consumer market. Then again, Cray was a pretty good distance from the consumer market to begin with.
  • Or better yet, do use a glass thermos, since they won't shatter at those temperatures, but leave the top just slightly unscrewed. That way it won't blow up from vapor pressure, and you won't spend a lot of money.

    Or, even better, use a stainless steel thermos. Just don't lick it.

  • actually i think he spells it with two f's, dr. Ffreeze...
    "Leave the gun, take the canoli."
  • Posted by 11223:

    This is cool, but wouldn't it short out the motherboard? Could somebody explain why this works?

    Obligatory comment: I torture my hardware whenever I see the words 'Booting Windows NT' on the screen...

    I wouldn't overclock my system, personally, because I wouldn't sacrifice the stability. I just went with a dual mobo instead of overclocking a single proc.

  • You spent all that money to find out that the liquid you're cooling will freeze before you get to the temp you want? I'm sure somthing that costs this much comes with a pretty detailed data sheet.
  • It's about time somebody did this! I have been wanting to do this since I first heard about overclocking, and the heat problems that accompany it. 650 Mhz from a Celeron 366? Hmmmm... anybody wanna try a 1Ghz Athalon?
  • Slightly off-topic, but I could have *sworn* I already saw this site/page via a link in slashdot. It's very rare that I see something before I see it on slashdot, so maybe I just can't believe it...

    But yes... amusing, but anything having to deal with a liquid is just too much of a hassle. Although I can envision future cases being water-tight and of high-quality, I just don't think the average consumer would care to have that stuff leaking in their den/office/living room. ...which is too bad, because liquid cools better in most applications. Now, if I lived in my garage, oooh....

    Oh well. I work with so so many things that give off heat, and it just sucks how water always comes into play, and it always manages to find a way to leak. Bah. Stupid Murphy.
  • It's semantic, but what you're saying is that pure water naturally becomes impure, and then conducts electricity. the statement stands - pure water does not conduct electricity.

    of course, I'm in over my head - I only have first year physics and chem. :-)
  • ...a Beowulf cluster of these?

    (sorry, couldn't resist)
    --
  • I have to say I laughed out loud when I got to the part about the Flourinert turning to gel! In fact, that was the main reason I kept reading anyway. I have never heard of flourinert before, but I do know that there aren't too many things still liquid at LN2 temperatures.

    Yep. There's a small number of very good jokes/comedy routines/etc. where you see the punchline coming a mile away, and yet it's still funny when you get to the punchline. This is one of those.

  • yeah those guys are weak, they can't even drink the hard shit. damn good for nothing new zealander's. i'd like to see their system try to out perform my ethyl burning dual nitros injected pIII. point in short: their system doesn't ammount to jack, it doesn't even require a fuel injected starter.
  • hrm, ok, DrFreeze seems to have dissapeared - tweak.cc links to Http://www.accsdata.com/drffreeze/Default.htm - its a 404 now (was there recently though) - going to http://www.accsdata.com/ just says "coming soon!" - at a guess their upgrading, hopefully they will restore the DrFreeze webpage

  • Re:Why o/c? (Score:3)

    by WNight ( 23683 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @12:52PM (#965330) Homepage
    I realize this is a troll, but it brings up a topic I've heard a bit about.

    It's likely illegal for the store to void the warranty on the computer if you open it, even if you agreed to it when purchasing it. Consumer protection laws usually prevent the warranty from being voided by self repairs on hardware that contains user-servicable parts. That's why a lot of hardware (air conditioners, VCRs, etc) are labelled as not containing any user-servicable parts.

    So if they try to void the warranty because you opened the case, tell them you'll take it to a competitor to be fixed and bill them, and back the bill up with small claims court if they get fussy. It'll stick and you'll have made a stand against the assholes of the world.

    (This has nothing to do with overclocking. Running a CPU past its rated speed, regardless of if it will do it, will void the warranty on the CPU and mobo, unless it's a mobo from an OC-friendly company like ASUS or ABit who serve the hardware hacker community.)

    For the record, my new 600E is a happy 800EB with an Alpha PEP66T cooler. A $35 cooler, but one I can keep for years. A good investment versus spending $250 more for the faster CPU. And my ASUS P3V4X is an overclocker's dream.

  • I mean, really, liquid cooled systems would seem a lot more obvious if you looked at the evolution of high-performance cars. As their evolution moved along, they all went from air-cooled engines to water-cooled engines, because it is a much more efficient way to disperse excess heat. Even the last remaining holdout (Porsche) is now liquid cooled.

    Now, granted, you do have to worry about some liquids that would be placed around electronics, but with non-conducting liquids like mineral oils and fluorinert, you wouldn't have to worry about short circuits, etc.

    Actually, with the Celeron's ridiculous energy output of something like 27 watts at the rated clock speed, I'm surprised that Intel doesn't provide some liquid-cooled systems with the stock chips.

  • Since they said that the Flourinert stuff ran about $1000NZ, I found that it would be about $469.018US ($1NZ = $469.018US ).

    so, $1000NZ = $469.018US. okay. but $1NZ = $469.018US???? hence, $1NZ = $1000NZ??? i think i should avoid new zealand. they break the law of arithmetic. we only break the rules of grammar/splleing and such here in the us.

  • Well, you overlooked one critical fact, which is that liquid nitrogen applied suddenly to something like a motherboard would probably visibly destroy the thing. I mean, jeez, can you imagine the stress of the sudden compression of all the motherboard components? They must have had a very valid reason for spending $1,000 on a coolant (although I could be wrong, seeing as they didn't even research the stuff's freezing temperature.).

  • Yep. Or atleast something similiar. This Slashdot Article [slashdot.org] talks about the guy who used mineral oil. So the only way this article differs is they spent more money on their project.
  • It is definetly non-flamable. The problem with it is that if it gets hot enough (ie, a module shorts and burns a hole in itself, which can happen) it tends to molecularly break down and turn into (basically) mustard gas, which is not exactly health stuff to be breathing in your machine room... I doubt the guys mentioned in this article have enough juice to do that, but a Cray does...
  • I have to say I laughed out loud when I got to the part about the Flourinert turning to gel! In fact, that was the main reason I kept reading anyway. I have never heard of flourinert before, but I do know that there aren't too many things still liquid at LN2 temperatures. Jeeze, guys! Nothing to do, not too smart, too much money and too many toys. An accident waiting to happen.

  • how bout using a container made of Aerogel [nasa.gov]?

    Of course you are in hot-head debunker mode, but really, there are solutions to all of these problems, from all of your posts. just try to have a little imagination...

    :)Fudboy

    Afraid nobody on Slashdot, understands it's a beta
  • 3M says [3m.com] that "Fluorinert FC-77 liquid, a perfluorocarbon (PFC), has a high global warming potential and a long atmospheric lifetime. As such, its use should be carefully managed to minimize emissions."

    So it not only cost these guys NZD 1000, but it also contributes significantly to global warming. Right on, guys! Well done! At this rate, most of New Zealand will be underwater in a few more years. Now that's what I call a problem that solves itself.

    Here, have some more. Let's see if we can get that 286 to play Diablo 2.

  • It was only limited because they froze their coolant. With better equipment than what a few hackers can slap together in a few hours, direct liquid cooling might achieve the same result for long-term use.
  • What's wrong with a turbo Civic [strspeedlab.com]? That guy was churning out 600 ponys in a 2500lb car! The guy in my link is pulling sub 10 second 1/4 miles at nearly 150mph! So what if it's FWD and ugly? It, unlike the flourinert cooled system, is probably no more expensive than a comparably performing stock car. I know the Civic in my link cost about 25K and easily outperforms stock Diablos and Vipers... in a 1/4 mile that is ;).

    Got to love those old Crays though. Friend of mine and I finagled our way into the supercomputer center in Huntsville, AL once and just slobbered over their Crays.

  • Well, don't use a thermos. They usually have glass linings inside (the high quality ones, anyway), and those WILL shatter when subjected to those kinds of temperatures,

    That's really surprising since dewars are made of glass. It's also pretty common practice to use dewars to hold liquid helium(~4.2 kelvin = -294 C). Singal 11, you should go around and warn all the low temp physicists, NMR people, and a lot of other physical scientists since they all use glass dewars to hold low temperature liquids. At the very least, they'll get a good laugh out of it.

  • There are people who do this for brass instruments (trumpet, trombone...). The people who have had it done claim that it does make the instrument play better, or at least it changes it in some way... I'd prefer to wait the week just to make sure that my lips don't freeze to the mouth piece ;-)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Flourinert has a much higher freezing point than the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. it will freeze in the heat exchanger.

    Directly submersing it in liquid nitrogen probably won't work either. thermal shock would break things, kinda like putting hot glass in ice water.
    ^. .^

  • The motto of the S&M CPUs

    Hurt me, beat me, tell me lies
    Dip me, freeze me, but watch me fly!

  • All that work to get a 650MHz Celeron? (Score:5)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @07:23AM (#965346) Homepage
    All that work to overclock a Celeron? To 650 MHz? For a few minutes only? That's like putting a tu rbo on a Honda Civic. [streetsports.com] Trying that on a 1GHz AMD K7 might be worth it.

    Running electronics immersed in Fluorinert [electronics-cooling.com] is an old idea. The Cray 2 [microsoft.com] was cooled that way. This was more trouble than it was worth, and no later supercomputer used that approach. But Cray built one of the coolest looking computers of all time. The cabinet had windows and the liquid coolant was illuminated. Even the Cray 2 heat exchanger was beautiful.

  • The LN2 would boil around the parts generating heat. The resulting gas film is a resonalbe good insulator, frustrating the entire idea of cooling the board. The fluoriner is much higher boiling, keeping a (very cold) liquid coating over the board.

    And there is a problem in that LN2 tends to condense oxygen from any air that it comes into contact with. Thus tanks of LN slowly become liquid air, then LOX. And liquid air or oxygen tends to make things burn well, things such as you motherboard. It's better to have some isolation.

  • Re:Why o/c? (Score:4)

    by CountZer0 ( 60549 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @07:27AM (#965349) Homepage
    All the stuff I bought for o/c-ing cost me much more than the difference in price between my 400s and the 500s.

    What? I have been running overclocked machines for years now, and I never spend ANY additional money. I simply bought a GOOD fan the first time out (a good idea even if you DON'T overclock) and I use a good motherboard.

    I ran a P-II 333 at 416 for over a year. Now I run a Celeron 366 at 450. The Celeron cost me LESS than the P-II. I use an Asus P2B motherboard and a SIIG fan.

    The whole POINT to overclocking is to NOT spend extra money. Buy a chip in your price range, and oc it. If it doesn't run at a higher speed, fine, run it the rated speed.

    Oh, and as for your comments about instability, if you are experiencing instability, you should reduce your clock speed. Not all chips overclock well. (Which is why I run my 366 at 450, and not 500)

    (was I just trolled?)

    -CZ
  • Running electronics immersed in Fluorinert is an old idea. The Cray 2 was cooled that way.

    That gives me an idea. I don't suppose any old liquid-cooled supercomputers are available on the surplus market, are they? Find one of those, toss out the ECL logic, the core memory, the tubes, or whatever ancient electronics are in it, but leave the heavy-duty cooling system, and put in some modern gear. That should work a lot better than any of these homebuilt styrofoam rigs.

  • Re:From one weblog to another... (Score:3)

    by davidu ( 18 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @09:53AM (#965359) Homepage Journal

    At K5 [kuro5hin.org] you don't see noise like this. The signal/noise ratio is almost perfect...

    From a code [kuro5hin.org] standpoint, it is much more stable than slashcode IMHO, and it has been open from the beginning. People are activly developing it.

    -Davidu

  • Re:Cray and Flourinert (Score:3)

    by ColonelPanic ( 138077 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @09:53AM (#965362)
    We started using 3M's Fluorinert in the Cray-2, which first shipped in '84. The Cray-1 and X-MP series were chilled with Freon.

    The Cray-2 fully immersed all components in the nert, which flowed cold into the bottom of the tank and was taken hot out of the top. You could watch the bubbles flow upwards and it was extremely cool. It was fun to watch operators top off the nert reservoir occasionally by glugging a gallon into the inlet.

    Later machines (Y-MP, C-90, T3D, T3E) ran the nert through channels in the modules, and some had air-cooled versions for smaller configurations. The "LC" or "AC" in a T3E machine designation refers to "liquid cooled" or "air cooled".

    On the Cray-3, we ran the nert through a fuel-injector-like nozzle to spray it as a vapor on to the chips. A bunch of other schemes were tried.

    Disclaimer: I'm a software guy, not a mechanical engineer.

  • $1000 US (that would be about $1000 US)
  • Impurities in the fluorinert tend to collect at the point where the fluid boils. That tends to insulate the hot spot from the coolant, making it even hotter.

    Thermal runaway.

  • Re:cray (Score:3)

    by Boone^ ( 151057 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @07:50AM (#965369)

    The Cray 1 was freon cooled, Cray 2 was fluorinert, C90 was air (I think), XMP/YMP were air...

    Then the T90 [cray.com]s, introduced in ~1994, used a big ol' fluorinert tank. Highend, high density Cray boxen (T90 [cray.com]) use this cooling, smaller machines (J90 [cray.com], SV1 [cray.com]) are air cooled in temperature controlled environments, and some, like the T3E [cray.com] can be water cooled or air cooled, depending on the configuration.

  • Re:Extreme caution: SAFETY WARNING (Score:5)

    by Signail11 ( 123143 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @08:00AM (#965374)
    Where do you come up with this crap? When you karam whore, you might as well try to get your facts right instead of fooling moderators into (+1 Informative) with garbage.

    It is not enough for the Fluorinert to catch on fire or be next to a fire. What one does have to worry about is thermal decomposition; this will require extreme heat (according to the Material Safety Data Sheets, on the order of 1400 degrees). For comparison, a paper/wood fire burns at most about 700 degrees even with a significant fuel source and a CPU (the "Cray" that you allude to in your garbage anecdote) will not even be able to function with junction temperatures even close to a thousand degrees. You will not achieve thermal decomposition short of heating the Fluorinert on a laboratory burner or sticking molten metal into a beaker of the stuff. You must really misuse and torture the stuff to get anywhere near that point.

    Moreover, what you really have to worry about is perfluoroisobutylene instead of hydrogen fluoride vapor. HF's thresehold long term tolerability is about 3ppm and it's LD50 is a lot higher than this. It will take more than 1 breath at any conceivably acheivable concentration to kill you. In any case, even a lethal dose will take more than 30 second to take effect upon intial contact or exposure (I've seen toxicity figures of about 10 minutes for exposure to hydrocyanic acid vapor, significantly more lethal than HF). Perfluoroisobutylene, on the other hand, will inhibit oxygen uptake by selectively binding with the -heme analogues in red blood cells much more efficiently.

    Basic summary: Signal 11 is talking out of his ass again. You can mostly ignore his dramatics (but please consult your materials handling and safety staff if you plan to use Fluorinert) if you exercise reasonable prudence and care in using Fluorinert. "EXTREME CAUTION" is not neccesary, in the sense if one were handling certain organic mercury compounds or some other fluorine/chlorine compounds. Oh, and the oxygen masks: they're there so that any person unfortunate to be stuck in the machine room and who cannot reach the hold-off switch will not sufficate from oxygen displacement, not for poisoning (which would require a directed positive pressure system, instead of a mere supplementary oxygen mask).

  • What did they do for afters, build a potato powered webserver [totl.net] or overclock a 486 to 247mhz [totl.net] using a fridge full of alcohol (a la totl.net [totl.net])? Am I the only one who doesn't quite believe this?

    Seriously though, if these guy really pulled this off I'm impressed. They put in an huge amount of work and money for what, by todays standards, is a pretty slow processor, but the sheer lunacy of it all has to be enough to impress anyone...It really was quite an achievment.

  • Re:Why o/c? (Score:4)

    by Alakaboo ( 171129 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @10:15AM (#965386) Homepage
    Why improve the vacuum tube?
    Why develop switches and 1GHz Ethernet?
    Why even bother having computers in the first place?

    Okay, so maybe liquid nitro overclocking isn't very revolutionary, but it falls under the same umbrella that the above topics do. Curiousity + [moderate] intelligence + interesting subject. "What would happen if..." You know?

    As far as "why overclocking" in general... well, I just bought a Celeron-II 566 for $80, put it on an Abit SlotKET !!! and a Golden Orb, flipped a switch and BINGO an (albiet crippled) 850MHz Coppermine for about $100, $110. That's more than 8MHz on the dollar. Compared to a Pentium III 700 (which has about the same performance) for $250 or $260 (again, including slotket and cooling fan). With the money I saved I bought a GeForce.

    Morals... I'm a happy owner of an 8088, an 80486SX, and a Pentium MMX, so I have plenty to get Intel back for. :)

    As an aside: The BX chipset overclocked to 133MHz FSB (it officially only supports 66 and 100) is still the top-performing platform out of the Apollo Pro 133A, the Intel i815, and the Intel i840 w/ Rambus. Overclocking helps here, too.

    Nerds buy the newest components so they have a fast machine. If they can have a fast machine on the cheap, so much the better. If they have some extra cash to spend and they want the fastest machine in the world, they buy flourinert and LN2. What can I say? It's cool.

    Alakaboo

  • Had they simply RTFM . . . (Score:3)

    by Aerosiecki ( 147637 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @07:37AM (#965396)
    Had they followed the link on their own site they would have found a handy little list of all of the boiling / gelling points of Flourinert. It's 3 links from thier own site. It turns out they make one flavor (FC-87) that goes down to -101 deg C. That should be more than cold enough . . . stick with dry ice and your temp shouldn't go below -90 dec C, if I recall. And why not use a CPU that could go even higher, if you're going to thow a grand $ into heat transfer fluid. We all know you can O/C to ~500 mhz, I wanna see 1000+!
    --
  • I've addressed your issue about thermal decomposition toxicity in another comment. Fluorinert has a rather low viscosity, but this does not affect its volitility, vapor pressure, or molecular weight (which are what determine the tendency of the vapor to diffuse out of confined spaces). For your information, since you seem to be so concerned, here are the relavent figures (looked up in a MSDS three rooms down):

    Boiling point: 215 C
    VP: 42 mmHg @ 20 C
    Vapor density: 14x air Evaporation rate: 1.7 (Butyl acetate=1)
    Viscosity: 14 centistroke @ 20 C
  • I like the writing style.


    CAN THIS BE ACHIEVED???


    Of course it can be achieved, it says in the title that you made the bloody thing!!

    Sensationalists. I'm surprised their site is faring as well as it is, I guess not too many /.ers are checking it out.

  • Its a man thing :) some guys drive monster trucks, some submerge there puter in liquid nitrogen cooled fluids.

    BTW I think mineral spirits will do a very similiar job, and alot cheaper then flourinet.

  • Correction: insert a decimal point in 42 mmHg (it should be 4.2 mmHg).
  • The liquid nitrogen was clearly a bad idea, being colder than the gel point of Florinert, but the basic idea is sound. A small refrigeration unit cooling a small amount of Florinert to the temperature that worked best for them might be practical for normal use.

    You don't need to cool the whole motherboard. If you can just get the main chip, the memory, and the video accelerator chips (and the other chips you need to make them talk to each other) into a tiny sealed case of the stuff, this could be in every high-performance home-computer.

    Hell, they doubled the rated clock-speed with a decent liquid cooling system for about a thousand bucks. A mass-produced, much smaller, equivalent system could probably be as reliable as a CPU fan for under a hundred dollars, and make 900 MHz systems run at 1.5 GHz.

  • Re:Short out? (Score:4)

    by jms ( 11418 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @06:54AM (#965410)
    The fluid is a dielectric, another word for an insulator. It doesn't conduct electricity, so it doesn't short out the motherboard.

  • I can see it now... (Score:3)

    by Electric Angst ( 138229 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @06:56AM (#965414)
    "Men, I know the task ahead is difficult. I know that some of your bank accounts may not survive, but we must forge on. We will make this PS/2 play Quake!"
  • Nothing like a $500/gal price tag to prevent something from trickling down into the consumer market.

    Hell, for $1000, overclock the crap out of a chip, and burn it out, then just buy another ;)

    Doug

  • Wow.. (Score:4)

    by pb ( 1020 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @06:59AM (#965429)
    These guys really are insane:

    * For doing this in the first place

    * For getting such an image-intensive, long site linked to Slashdot

    Mirrors, anyone?
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • That's not the point in this case. Obviously, spending USD1k on your coolant isn't more cost effective than spending another USD150-200 on a CPU with a higher speed rating.

    It's a geek thing, you wouldn't understand.

  • Wow, those are some crazy twits with too much time and money!

    Spending $1000 on an non-conductive liquid cooling agent that you didn't even bother to check the freezing point on is just STUPID. I'm a regular old dumb guy and even I would have thought of that. End rant #1

    But other than that little rant, it was a crazy cool idea! Great idea and a very kewl setup. Worth the 10 minutes I spent scanning the site. Too bad some of the pictures with really interesting captions didn't exist.

    Oh, I am gonna say one more thing, if you have $1000 to spend on a cooling liquid that you didn't really even research, shouldn't you have a little money to put into a decent monitor? IMHO it's the most essential part of the PC because it's what you have to look at the most. End rant #2


    Not a bad idea guys, just think some more before tossing around money like that! :-)
  • 3M's Flourinert
    my colourless liquid gold
    this shit's expensive

  • Re:Extreme caution: SAFETY WARNING (Score:3)

    by Signail11 ( 123143 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @08:19AM (#965442)
    You know, that's really a surprise, not using thermos to transport LN since the glass will shatter. I wonder what Dewer bottles are? Oh, that's right, glorified thermos with a reflective coating to prevent heat via radiation transport. Glass will not shatter when cooled to very low temperatures IF you don't do anything stupid with the thermos bottle, such as dropping it on the ground. Not even a liquid-hazmat-transport container will save you from your self (such as leaving one on the trunk of a car, putting said car in reverse, and running over said container). So what do you suggest, in your infinite wisdom, to transport LN? You've eliminated glass and plastic. Presumably, you would suggest transport containers made of metal. [sarcasm]That should solve everything!!![/sarcasm]

  • Re:cray (Score:3)

    by fgodfrey ( 116175 ) <fgodfrey@bigw.org> on Friday June 30, 2000 @08:23AM (#965448) Homepage
    Cray 1 and Cray X-MP were freon cooled with a cold plate between the layers of the cicuit board. The X-MP was in the same chasis as the Cray 1. This caused hot and cold pockets to form on the board so for the next machine....

    The Cray 2 was cooled by immersing it into a big vat 'o flourinert which was circulated through a heat exchanger with water to keep it at around 55 (or 65?) degrees.

    Y-MP has a flourinert pocket between cicuit boards so it is cooled that way. That (apparently) solved the cooling problems they had with the Cray 1/Cray X-MP.

    C90, T3D and T3E were cooled much like the Y-MP. No Cray uses water cooling since water is a conductor. They have heat exchangers to cool circulating flourinert with water.

    There was a deskside version of the Y-MP and that along with J90, low end T3E's, and SV1 are all air cooled.


  • This has been in moderation at Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org] all morning...funny how things tend to repeat themselves...

    -Davidu
  • BTW I think mineral spirits will do a very similiar job
    Err mineral oil I mean :)

    Actually, mineral spirits sound much more interesting...

    User: ls
    Computer: I knew a girl named Ellis once. She was a reeeeeaaaaal looker, boy, and had the biggest damn...
    User: ls
    Computer: I heard you the first time, big shot! What, you think I'm stupid, can't understand you the first time? Huh?
    User: kill -9
    Computer: Oh, so you think your better than me, huh? Let's you and me throw down. Come on ya big pansy!


  • Good point. Last term, I did an experiment [phys.dal.ca] to find the band gap of some semiconductors as a function of temperature. For the silicon diode I tested, carrier depletion didn't have much of an effect even at 77K. The band forward voltage at 2mA did increase noticeably, though. OTOH, the LED I used wouldn't conduct more than a few 1/10ths of a milliamp, even at something like 10 volts once it was down to 77K. Figure 5 in the paper I did shows this quite well.

    BTW, there are a lot of fun things you can do with liquid nitrogen... If you put it in a pop bottle and screw on the lid, then put the pop bottle under a cardboard box and stand on the other side of the room, it makes a big bang :) If you pour cola into a dewar of liquid nitrogen, it freezes in mid-fizz, leaving a popcorn-like substance which is fun to eat (don't eat too much at once, or your teeth and tongue won't be happy!). Also fun is pouring nitrogen on the floor and watching it roll along in beads held up by the Leidenfrost effect. (boiling at the bottom creates enough pressure to keep a layer of gas between the liquid and the solid, so thermal conductivity is low. This is the same effect that makes water drops dance on a hot stove top.) Pouring nitrogen on the floor is especially fun if you are a lab TA and there are still a bunch of first year students finishing their lab reports. They scare easily :) (of course, they were sitting on stools, so I didn't give anyone frostbite.)
    #define X(x,y) x##y

  • Actually, the NSA (not NASA), does exactly this. However, they submerge entire rooms with this stuff and cool it with lots of water. The Discovery Channel had a special on this a few years back.

    They need as much power as they can get for Echelon. Of course, it doesn't prove if this is cost-effective. They are a government organization, you know.
  • <i>... fluorinert? bath (Fluorinert? is an electronic testing fluid manufactured by 3M?) ...</i>

    Everyone seems? to be complaining? about the question marks? in this story?. But I don't? see it?. Sheesh?! What's? everyone mad about??
  • Since they said that the Flourinert stuff ran about $1000NZ, I found that it would be about $469.018US ($1NZ = $469.018US ).

  • Why o/c? (Score:5)

    by c.r.o.c.o ( 123083 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @07:08AM (#965487)
    I can understand that people want faster, better and if possible, at a cheaper price that they can afford. Hey, I want that too!!! And apparently, o/c-ing achieves those goals. But it's only apparent. Granted, by submerging the mb in liquid nitrogen, the CPUs could be o/c-ed very far. It's also probably very impressive.

    BUT I DON'T THINK SO!

    In my own case, I'm running a Dual Celery 400 o/c-ed at 500... I know it's no big deal, or anything, but in order to achieve that speed, I had to spend a _lot_ of money for new CPU and case fans, thermal grease, etc. I also have to make sure my room doesn't get too hot. And all sorts of other problems.

    Soon after I did this, I wanted to push the CPU's even higher. But I realized that I'm spending so much money it wasn't even worth it. All the stuff I bought for o/c-ing cost me much more than the difference in price between my 400s and the 500s.

    That's when I realized that I'm doing something silly. I'm spending a lot of money so that I can have an unstable, warranty-voided, pretty fast computer, when I could have a stable, still-under-warranty, just as fast computer, for the same price. So that's when I decided that o/c-ing is not worth the trouble.

    But hey, for those who can afford it, it's certainly cool! :)

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