Watercooling Drifting Mainstream 268
pacc writes "With Prescott said to dissipate 103 W and the dual Apple G5 playing in the same league, air cooling seems less than sensible.
Nikkei Electronics has an article about watercoolers getting standardized by Hitachi. A technology pioneered by a NEC desktop last May."
Go to the junkyard instead (Score:5, Interesting)
Not a bad looking box, either (though I usually end up looking at my monitor more than I do my computer case.)
It seems to me that with all the concern over cyber-pollution these days (discarded monitors and other computer components) maybe it's time to take a greener approach and harvest whatever relics we can from the last great love affair with speed and power: the automobile.
The trend is towards customized boxes we build ourselves anyways, right? So go to the local junkyard and shop American for a change.
Re:Go to the junkyard instead (Score:2)
Re:Go to the junkyard instead (Score:2)
But seriously, that guy is taking the "hot rod" metaphor a little too far!
Re:Go to the junkyard instead (Score:2)
Ok, but the word 'ion' to me, esp. in this crappy-font website sounds like marketing speak. I'm cynical. I guess if it looks like fluff, sounds like fluff, it is fluff...
recycle the heat with an oven (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Go to the junkyard instead (Score:5, Funny)
If you don't stop moddin' that Hot-Rod Lincoln!"
Nope, just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Re:Go to the junkyard instead (Score:2)
It looks like this guy did what I was thinking. I don't have much moeny to invest in my computer, especially since I just upgraded (first time in 4 years), so it would seem water cooling is out of the question. But after talking with some friends, we thought that it could be quite cheap since we have access to machining equipment. With a milling machine it should be pretty simple to make the water blocks from scrap blocks of copper. As a result, all I would need to purchase is a pump and possibly some
Re:Go to the junkyard instead (Score:3, Informative)
The guy did some great work, but the English wheel to make a simple curve was big time overkill. English wheels are used to make compound curves, usually.
As far as the 'last' great love affair with speed and power being the automobile, America's love for speedy and powerful autos is as strong as it ever was. Fast computers
This can be a good thing, if... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This can be a good thing, if... (Score:2)
Re:What I don't understand... (Score:2)
Air vs Water? (Score:3, Insightful)
Has there ever been a head to head with air-cooling vs water-cooling?
Water better be damn good to risk my system to the exposure of fluids.
Davak
Re:Air vs Water? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Air vs Water? (Score:2)
I think the future is going to be computers that generate less heat, but in the meantime we may see commercial water cooled systems for a while.
Heatsink and watercooling roundup (Score:3, Informative)
Overclockers.com maintains a nice database of the relative performance of various air and watercooling systems on a variety of platforms: The Heatsink and Watercooling Roundup [overclockers.com].
Re:Air vs Water? (Score:2)
Please, please... (Score:5, Interesting)
The back side can be one huge heat sink, with large cooling fins, just like nice audio amp gear. If need be, the entire backplane can be one extruded piece of alloy. You can even include water cooling "safely" as no piping needs to enter the case at all. The back-side is the outside of the case!
What is so hard about this idea?
+2
Mod up that excellant idea! (Score:2)
With one minor change: You don't want the actual outside of the case to be cooling material in direct contact with the case. Never mind frustrated developers smacking the box, what happens to that CPU core when you knock the box over on the wrong side, or your grounded-forever kids whack the side with some hurtling toy?
Re:Please, please... (Score:2)
Re:Air vs Water? (Score:2)
Hell, I risk my keyboard to that all the time!
Re:Air vs Water? (Score:2)
This being Slashdot and all, you might want to specify just what kind of fluids you're talking about. Ya know, for your own sake.
Watercoolers (Score:5, Funny)
Wow. (Score:2, Insightful)
OTOH, the media gave it a push lately, so what you are witnessing is probably a shortlived fad. Not that it isn't cool. (No pun intended.)
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, remember back when Gene Amdahl introduced the innovation of an air cooled computer back in the '70s? Up until then, they had always been water cooled... this ain't new technology, folks!
Re:Wow. (Score:2)
That's curious, because I remember lots of PDP-8's from the 60's and my own PDP-11 from 1970 that were air cooled, not water cooled.
Re:Wow. (Score:2)
Comparison? (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem I think... (Score:3, Interesting)
But which way does the fan blow? I think most people end up having it blow hot air out, which means you're not cooling the radiator as much as want to.
But if you have it blow the air in, then you're essentially pumping warm/hot air back into the case, which seems counterproductive.
I saw
Re:The problem I think... (Score:2)
The problem is, only people living next to rivers can properly water cool their computers. Every proper water cooler needs intake from the river and output a little farther downstream. This is complicated however, with the need for some kind of filtration system to keep fish and mollusks from entering your PC.
The soothing sounds of silence (Score:3, Insightful)
Creative Labs is also keen on marketing 'whisper quiet' cases so people can actually hear those ridiculous SNR values they claim.
Re:Comparison? (Score:3, Informative)
Water cooling obliterates air cooling. I used to run a thermaltake slk800 with a 120mm fan wired to it with an adapter. It pushed 80cfm and kept my seriously overclocked athlon tbred 1700+ running at 38c at idle, and never over 48c at full load. With water, I haven't seen 40c yet under extreme load. I idle at 33c. And I have a crappy thrown together setup right now. There are guys that have never seen 27c.
Re:Comparison? (Score:5, Insightful)
My processor runs at 35c pretty much constantly no matter what load I put on it. Room variations sometimes make that tick slightly upward. Removing the case cover the other day dropped it 2c.
I guess if you're going to overclock it, then you'd want it cooler. But if not, then all you really need to accomplish is keeping it below "lockup/meltdown" level.
--RJ
Re:Comparison? (Score:2)
Exactly. Being able to dissapate more heat faster means you can push the voltage higher on the cpu. The higher you can push the voltage setting, the more stable the processor is at high overclock. If you can keep it all running very cool, you can get some seriously astronomical overclocks. I'm destroying a stock athlon 3000+ with a 40 dollar chip and about 65 bucks worth of crap I threw together for watercooling. The 3000+ is 270 bucks. My
THG and Water (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Comparison? (Score:5, Informative)
Learn more, it is facinating. Look around the old articles on HardOCP and Overclockers.com and you can find out a ton. Just search google! Also, if you look at like the HardOCP forums under cooling, you can find tons of pics of people's Watercooled PCs.
Re:Comparison? (Score:2)
Highlighter ink works great for this, and you can get it in just about any color you want. I would suggest testing it under a blacklight before dumping it in the water, though - some highlighters work great and others are let-downs.
A college roommate and I had a nice setup of liquor bottles filled with highlighter ink in water (1 marker per bottle). When the blacklight was on, t
Re:Comparison? WHAT? (Score:2)
I can't hear you! You're fan is TOO LOUD!
Impact on Productivity (Score:3, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Prescott will actually dissipate around 130W (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Prescott will actually dissipate around 130W (Score:2)
Re:Prescott will actually dissipate around 130W (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Prescott will actually dissipate around 130W (Score:2)
Am I the only one... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Yes, I know the answer is that nobody actually needs these new CPUs, but you know Microsoft and Intel won't stand for that...)
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:2)
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:3, Informative)
Intel Prescott, the chip that's slated to set power dissipation records for mainstream CPUs, uses a new .09 micron process. Apparently Intel is seeing fewer benefits than they expected.
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, that's commonly believed, but wrong. There are lots of ways to reduce power consumption. Reducing gate widths (0.25um -> 0.13um -> 90nm) is commonly touted as a good way to reduce power, but in most cases that's more marketing pitch than reality.
First, there are two types of chip power to worry about (1) leakage, which happens all the time, just by being on, and which used to be always much much lower than (2) the switching power, or maximum dissipation when as many transistors as possible can switch at once (which, BTW, can never be all of them, and it's really, really hard to find the stimulus that makes maximum power happen. So, esitmates like the ones in the article for peak power are often made assuming a somewhat-arbitrary switching factor that may be low or high).
As gate sizes shrink, the effective capacitance of the gate shrinks, and voltage can be lowered (to a point). Capacitance varies with gate area and inversely with distance between "plates" of the gate (C = k*A / d). Reducing the gate width (space between the plates) actually increases capacitance, and this itself would increase power. But, you're also able to reduce the gate area (though not as much, but in 2-dimensions, so shrinking gates is usually a reduction in C). Most importantly, you can decrease voltage, since power varies with the square of voltage, this has much more impact on power than reducing gate capacitance (size). When we went from 0.25um (3.3V)to 0.13um (1.5V), we got a nice fat 1.8V drop in voltage. But 0.13um is 1.5V too, or 1.3V at best, and I've never heard of a 90nm (0.09um) process under 1.1V. The V isn't dropping as fast any more because the noise margins are getting too small.
Since p(switching) = 1/2*F*C*V^2 (F = clock freqyency, C = capacitance, and V = max voltage, lowering C (and moreso V which we can reduce some, but not much below 1.0V so far) will lower power a bit. Linearly with C. But unless we can reduce V, reducing C much more won't help a lot because we have more total C's (transistor gates) on the die, because they are smaller we can fit more.
But now, at 0.13um, and more at 90nm, it's not the switching power, but the leakage (always there) power that's getting worrisome. It used to be 1/20th of switching power or less, but now the gates are so small current of the same order of magnitude (almost) of switching leaks all the time.
So, the more you shrink, the more you have constant power, which is harder to deal with since you can't throttle it, and it's always cranking out. Worse yet, the more you shrink, the more gates you can fit on one tiny little die (the feasible mfg'able die size stays around 17-18mm max regardless of gate size once the process matures a bit, but bigger dice have ridiculous failure rates and thus silly high prices). And the gates shrink in 2 dimensions (L and W), so you get a squaring increase of the toal gate count, and only a linear decrease with C. Shrinking gates to save power doesn't work.
So, if we can't keep shrinking to save power, how can we? Lot's of ways. There are dozens of EDA companies [google.com] with power-minded RTL coding, synthesis, and even place and route tools ready to help you reduce your power if you have a few $100k/seat/year. Or, you could use a SSC (Spread-spectrum Clock, where each clock edge is off by a bit to reduce power, but it slows down the max clock rate a bit too, of course). You can also try to use beneficial clock skew to reduce power after timing closure, or gate the hell out of all the clocks and only enable what you need (a la mobile chips). Or switch to asynchronous, or self-clocked design (every thing has it's own clock, which sends a clock to the next thing, etc. -- it's HARD to design!). Anyway you look at it, it's a hard problem. And people who
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:2)
eg. Todays chips are actually quite cool, but only when you run them at yesterdays speeds.
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:2)
Solve colling with a new case Mod. (Score:5, Interesting)
I feel that heat is becoming a major problem with making faster processors. You guys in college should quit your Computer Science and Engineering and go into thermal physics. That is where the future is in.
Re:Solve colling with a new case Mod. (Score:3, Insightful)
The freezer you are speaking of is a heat pump. It moves heat from the air inside it to the coolant which then dissipates heat via coils on the back. What advantage do the coils have on the back that the blades on a heat sink don't have? Surface area? Maybe, but that could be changed with better heat sink designs. Besides, the heat sink has a fan to move the air, the freezer doesn't have air moving across those coils. The freezer may sound like a good idea but when you get
Re:Solve colling with a new case Mod. (Score:3, Informative)
But a standard little dorm fridge will not
Re:Solve colling with a new case Mod. (Score:2)
Also, what's important isn't the boiling point, but the specific heat of the coolant, which is the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature one unit mass of the substance by one degree Celsius. In other words, how much heat energy it takes to raise the temperature of the coolant.
Also nice would be a coolant that boils right around where things start to get dangerous to the processor, since the heat would go into causi
Nice try, but it won't work. (Score:2)
Personally, though, I'd love to see more people go into thermal engineering. A day hasn't gone by this summer when I haven't thought that there must be a better way to cool the subway cars in NYC than pumping hot air onto the platforms!
Gives new meaning to "watercooler conversation" (Score:2, Funny)
Water Cool Mainstream Questions? (Score:2)
1. Will the warranty cover water damage? If I buy a system that depends on a water-based system, then the pre-packing company better be willing to cover the dangers.
2. Will water introduce hotter running, shorter-lived systems? This, of course, would lead to
Heat limits already reached (Score:2)
No, it will just introduce systems that die even quicker (as in milliseconds instead of tenths of seconds) in the even of critical cooling failure.
Systems are already running about as hot as they can to avoid the transistors breaking down.
This will allow them to introduce systems that use more power, thereby hitting your electricity bill, but all
Peltier effect? (Score:2)
Re:Peltier effect? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Peltier effect? (Score:2)
I think I disagree with you on this. The Peltier junction will indeed get quite hot. You get the most heat transfer with the biggest thermal gradient, so that higher temperature should make any given airflow more effective at carrying away energy. Thus I'd expect that you could use a quieter fan if your CPU had a
Re:Peltier effect? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually with Peltiers your risk can be larger due to condensation. Peltiers can cool the chip down way below ambient temperature, so water can collect. This is why serious applications of Peltier coolers include rubber seals and other devices to manage the water problem.
A passive water cooling system won't lower the temperature below ambient, so condensation is not an issue..the water stays inside the tubing, not dripping from the bottom of your motherboard. (Now active water cooling is a different st
Re:Peltier effect? (Score:2)
Re:Peltier effect? (Score:2)
The Koolance EXOS [overclockers.com] system does this already. The water flows to an external radiator that has built in fans and other such lovely things. This could also be done with heat pipes. The problem is that most users don't want a heavy, bulky block sitting next to their computer. Additionally, you have hoses to worry about.
My dream setup (Score:4, Interesting)
Ultimate Pump [cooltechnica.com]
Ultimate Radiator [cooltechnica.com]
Two of these to cool the radiator at only 30db [performance-pcs.com]
Round it out with a Cool Reservoir [cooltechnica.com] and some tubing. Maybe toss in a GPU cooler. Plenty of pump to support it.
Re:My dream setup (Score:2)
Not really (Score:4, Insightful)
Less then sensible? Maybe you just need a better air cooling design. Since the G5 was brought up in the post, it seems reasonable to mention that Apple is really pushing the idea that the G5's are quiet*:
http://www.apple.com/powermac/design.html [apple.com]If a system is having trouble dissipating that kind of heat with air flow alone (or sounding like a jet engine), then you just have a poorly designed system. And maybe it's just me, but I have some qualms about putting water in a poorly designed system.
* of course, we haven't had independent reviews yet, so...
Liquid? (Score:2)
$100/L might be fine for Cray, but not for me.
I don't think many people with $600 cpus and $400 video cards want to watch things go up in smoke when a clamp fails.
Are there any tests that show how well a machine holds up if deionized water leaks from this type of system onto the motherboard and processor?
Power Supply (Score:3, Interesting)
After the CPU fan the hard drive is the loudest, but since the Seagate Barracuda IV - the best hard drive ever in the world, which is freakily quiet - hard drive makers have been using the fluid bearing system and I guess most new hard drives are now as quiet as the Barracuda IV.
That leaves case fans, which can be silent and graphics card fans, which apparently are getting quieter too (no fan on my Geforce2MX, so I wouldn't know).
So why didn't the article address the only component which can't be quietened cheaply and easily? 'Silent' PSUs cost a fortune (>$50 for something that most people expect to just be built in to their $30 case) and are far and away the biggest obstacle standing between sanity and tinnitus. I know they must be coming because manufacturers aren't dummies, but they have to realise by now that they are more of a priority that CPU fans, don't they?
Re:Power Supply (Score:2)
Re:Power Supply (Score:3, Interesting)
Decible Scale (Score:2, Informative)
The water cooling technology can significantly reduce the noise level. Equipped with a microprocessor whose heat dissipation is measured to reach 75W, the NEC desktop PC can suppress noise level to 33dB (A) owing to a water cooling module inside it. As its level was measured to be 43dB (A) with an air cooling system, the noise actually has gone down to one-tenth.
Do they not realize that the decible is measured on a logrithmic scale?
Re:Decible Scale (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Decible Scale (Score:2, Informative)
Water cooling dangers (Score:4, Insightful)
Happened to Real Mainframes too! (Score:2)
I think the machine was out for a month or so, but maybe that long outage was when they were having trouble
Some thoughts on water (Score:2)
Water has an extremely high specific heat compared to air so it can dissipate many more watts of energy from the processor. Acting much like an energy buffer. But what happens when you are running at high temps for a long time? (SETI, Games, Photoshop filters) At some point that water is going to get hot and then it is going to lose its effectiveness. That heat in the water is going to have to go somewhere and that somewhere is the air. It'
Re:Some thoughts on water (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Some thoughts on water (Score:2)
I have an idea (Score:4, Insightful)
G5s don't dissipate anywhere near that much (Score:4, Informative)
While it puts out a bit more heat than the G3s and G4s mac users are used to, the G5 is still nowhere near as bad as prescott.
The prescott puts out more than doubble the heat.
Tips to remember for water cooling (Score:5, Funny)
3 Tips for successful water cooling...
1: Never fill the water cooling system reservoir with boiling water from the kettle.
2: Coffee... as much as we all like it coffee _does not_ serve as an efficient coolant. (Tastes great though)
3: Dont run your water pump when there is no water passing through it. (that one is actually a serious one...)
Re:Tips to remember for water cooling (Score:2)
Easy-Bake processing (Score:3, Interesting)
Come on, ya won the speed war, now turn down the oven, PLEASE!
What about immersion (but not Freon) (Score:4, Interesting)
The high frequency EMF of the system caused some interesting color effects in the Freon, combined with the thermal gradients to make an interesting 'light show'.
Of course, we can't use Freon these days but what about other insulating oils (such as are used in transformers) & refrigerants? I haven't kept up - can modern chips handle being immersed in oil or in (for example) carbon tetrachloride? (yes, also a controlled, environmentally hazardous material)
Re:What about immersion (but not Freon) (Score:2, Informative)
In reality, it's not practical, or necessary. In fact, it's just plain messy. Most components work fine with air cooling. It's just a few hot spots (CPU, GPU, HDD etc) that can benefit.
Hot Water (Score:3, Funny)
What I want is a Beowulf cluster that uses water (Score:2, Funny)
Apple TiBook... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Apple TiBook... (Score:3, Informative)
Essentially, they're an evacuated pipe with some working fluid injected. This could be water, butane, ammonia or sodium (high temps). Because of the vacuumn, some of the liquid evaporates until equilibrium is reached.
So, we have a liquid/vapor environment. Add heat at one end and local equilibrium shifts, vaporising more liquid. Cool the other
Navy cooling method (Score:4, Interesting)
IBM planned on refrigeration -peltier?- (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/435/kato p is
The page is VERY long and this is near the bottom so I stole it outright for reading convience . . . really!
-quoth IBM-
the MCM technology provides us with the most dense configuration of chips in a two-dimensional arrangement, which facilitates refrigerated cooling. In fact,
Zalman invents fanless computer (TNN 500A) (Score:4, Interesting)
Zalman TNN 500A fanless computer [teschke.de]
Now, is this something most people would need or use? In terms of noise most definitely.I have an iMac in my living room with no fan (Score:2)
Side benefits (Score:2)
Good Convection works great! (Score:3, Interesting)
With that said, I'd still like to talk about cooling methods. I hate the current system as much as anybody, but it can work! Really! I swear!
First of all, I'd like to say that the ideal cooling system would be to make the top of the computer a huge heatsink, and conduct the heat from all internal components to it. That would remove the need for fans in residential computers all together.
Secondly, I have seen the light, and I now understand the benefits of convection.
With the above design, I would also sell a top that hooks on to the computer, and makes a covered space of 4" above the large system heat sink. What this would accomplish is to allow ducting (standard 4", dryer-sized) to be attached.
With my XP 2000+, here in the desert, things are so damn hot already that another 20 degrees from a computer pushes the temperature from incredible hot, to inhuman, and that just wasn't working out. What I did, was to duct the power supply fan through a duct leading outside, and venting through a one-way vent. With this system, not only is it 20 degrees cooler, but the system stays much much cooler, so much so that it doesn't need air conditioning anymore. It is now only drawing in cool air, and not it's own recirculated hot air, so things stay much cooler. It's much more tolerable for people as well. As an unanticipated benefit, the noise of the power supply fan is almost completely gone, because the noise is ducted outside as well.
The best thing about ducting hot air out, is that there is really no limit... If computer makers built air-tight, insulated cases, where you could control the air input and output, you could theoretically run millions of computers at incredibly hot temperatures, and not raise room temperature at all, because the heat is all going straight outside.
Additionally, fan noise is not a fact of life, but a byproduct of saving 2 cents on a fan. I replaced my power supply fan with a $10 one, which blows more than 3x as much air, but isn't as loud. On the CPU, I replaced the fan with a $5 unit that blows slightly more air, but is about 5x quieter. Finally, I replaced the junk on the heatsink with thermal grease, and that move ALONE dropped the CPU temperature by more than 10 degrees.
Now, why in the hell aren't computer manufacturers doing anything like this? Spending $1 more on fans would get them loads more customers, and spending a few cents on heatsink grease would get them a better reputation, higher maximum operating temperature, and less need for more powerful fans. Can anyone explain why the resort to expensive, complex, unreliable, crap like this, rather than just doing the current convection methods the right way?
Packard Bell have one... (Score:2)
Shuttle has had liquid cooling for years. (Score:3, Informative)
Pluggable liquid-cooled rack-mounted modules are not the way to go. Ask anyone who had a liquid-cooled IBM mainframe. It used to be said of the IBM 370/168 that it needed "six plumbers and a CE (customer engineer)."
Why water? (Score:3, Insightful)
Prescott is the beginning of the end (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's to whoever breaks the trend. Transmeta looked pretty dumb and slow a few years ago, but now the Efficeon looks to outdo the Pentium M by a large margin. But what we need now is a revolution, and not just another giant pseudo-RISC chip that trades a teensy bit more performance for over the top heat problems.
Re:Insert egg-frying joke here (Score:2)