Silent Pump for Water-Cooled PCs 267
Wycliffe writes "New Scientist has an article about a silent pump for water-cooled PCs.
The system, developed by a Californian start-up company, aims to silently solve the problem that the faster chips get, the hotter they become."
How about recovering the heat? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've often wondered whether we couldn't attach a Stirling engine [howstuffworks.com] directly
to the surface of the processor and recover some of the energy being lost
as heat and turn it into electricity. If we could do that then I could have
a cooler laptop that has a longer lasting battery since processor heat is
being used to power the processor.
Anything that stops my laptop burning my private parts and makes the
battery last longer would be very nice. If at the same time it makes
no noise (especially compared to the lawnmower like noise my Dell laptop's
two fans make) it would be even better.
John.
Re:How about recovering the heat? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How about recovering the heat? (Score:2)
Not the right answer (Score:2, Informative)
To work, a Stirling engine needs a temperature differential - a "hot" side and a "cold" side. Doesn't matter which is where, but you need that differential or there won't be any expansion or contraction to work with.
So, what you'd be doing is using the Stirling engine as a heat transfer device - going from the inside of the case to the outside. Easier and cheaper to just cut a hole in the case & let it go out by itself, or bump the fan up a bit.
Re:Not the right answer (Score:5, Informative)
1)The processor is hot, the environment is cold.
2)This differential could be usd to produce energy.
3)Recovering some wasted energy may increase battery life.
Re:Not the right answer (Score:2)
Re:Not the right answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Using a stiring engine for heat recovery would likely be counter productive as your cold sink is too small to help drive the engine, this is the cooling problem you are trying to solve in the first place with the chip not cooling enough.
The drawback is to get the efficiency at that small of a scale, the cost will be fairly high. The engines can be made small enough, but for a price probably far too high for the general market. Say about $2,500 each. Then you have to shield the rest of the computer from the NeFeB linear motor/oscillator magnets used to drive the engine in reverse. Another thing is the drawback that thay are probably shock sensitive. So a good whack could cost a fortune to the average pocket book.
Once you comprimise the efficiency to the point of about say 8%, you might as well just give up on the stirling idea and go with a Peltier device since they are solid state and fairly cheap (20$~100$) and already off the shelf.
The high efficiency capabilities of the stirling engine are about the only reason you would want to use one in the first place, so the option is really not available it would seem for a cost effective and mass produced market.
Re:Not the right answer (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not the right answer (Score:2)
If you hook a Peltier cooler up to a power supply and turn it on without attaching it to anything, within 15 seconds you'll notice condensation on the ceramic part. Within another 15 seconds that condensation will start to freeze. I had a friend who used a Peltier on his AMD K6 CPU years ago. He wasn't much into
Temperature differential and intersteller invasion (Score:5, Funny)
On a related note I have a story. It was a late night bull session at a science fiction conference about fifteen years ago. I was in a group consisting of two authors, an editor and a couple of fellow fen in an otherwise empty con suite. The con suite staff tried to close down the bar, but ended up just giving me the keys because we weren't about to leave (I was known to the concom).
We went for hours carrying on a typical SF bull session, ranging across a variety of subjects, when we got onto the subject of whether intersteller war was worth the energy expenditures. After all, the amount of energy required to boost to, say, 1/3 C and then decellerate a good sized spacecraft is itself enough to char a good sized planet. In fact you would be better off to use that energy directly to create whatever it is that the other solar system has that you want. Economically it makes no sense. There just aren't many resources worth the effort to transport, much less sending a conquering fleet as well.
There was some agreement that someone might launch an invasion fleet for religious reasons, but a couple of people disagreed saying that, even then, the cost could not be justified to a taxpaying populace. But then one person, Raul Reyes, made an interesting suggestion for a resource that could not be created easily: Truly large heat sinks.
It works like this; if you are doing enormous (godlike enormous) industrial works you are going to need equally enormous heat sinks. How big? Well, comets in the Keiper belt and Oort cloud would work, but rounding up enough would require so much energy that it isn't worth the effort. Uranus and Neptune are about right. Saturn would work as well, but it is really too hot to be very efficient.
So final agreement was reached about the time the sun was coming up and the wine was running out: Intersteller invasion is worth the cost if you need to use someone else's trans-Jovian planets as heat sinks. And we figured this out years before the Athlon was even a glint in AMD's eye.
Re:Temperature differential and intersteller invas (Score:2)
How long until we see something new in the market? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Even if all the technical details are ironed out, I think it will be five years at least before fans are replaced. They are still the cheapest option."
Seems to be a way off. I wonder if in 5 years we will have different processors, where this will not be effective. Think little bacteria or DNA or something organic as a CPU.
Re:How long until we see something new in the mark (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder if in 5 years we will have different processors, where this will not be effective. Think little bacteria or DNA or something organic as a CPU.
Don't you think it's a little early to be quite this drunk?
BFL
Re:How about recovering the heat? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How about recovering the heat? (Score:3, Interesting)
a) very hot CPU
and
b) big heatsink on outside
which is what you're trying to get away from. Also, I suspect the Sterling engine will act as thermal insulation, but don't remember quite enough thermodynamics to be sure. (My rule of thumb, when I can't remember my thermo, is to assume that nature hates engineers.)
Re:How about recovering the heat? (Score:5, Informative)
(Hot Temp - Cold Temp)/(Hot Temp)
with all temperatures in Kelvin.
So if you're at room temperature and your chip isn't melting, the maximum efficiency will be about 20%, unlikely to be enough to bother about.
Re:How about recovering the heat? (Score:2)
Re:How about recovering the heat? (Score:2)
Re:How about recovering the heat? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How about recovering the heat? (Score:3, Informative)
( Tin - Tout) / ( Tin - Tzero)
but everybody uses kelvin where Tzero=0 instead of -273 or whatever the heck absolute zero is in centigrade.
Whoops, Thermodynamics Strikes again. (Score:3, Informative)
A sterling engine wouldn't help cool the chip unless you ran it backwards (as a heat pump) by aplying power to the shaft.
Sterling engines impede the transfer of heat much more than heat sinks
Re:How about recovering the heat? (Score:3, Funny)
It can be a very serious problem! [theregister.co.uk]
Re:How about recovering the heat? (Score:2)
The only real problem I can think of is making sure the CPU is cool enough. With the stirling engine on the CPU, I don't see how you could also fit a heatsink/fan, and I'm not sure how much heat the engine would remove.
There's also another device, not a sterling engine (I Don't think) that I saw in a physics lab
Imagine the looks! (Score:2)
Word Usage (Score:4, Insightful)
I know what you mean but... they aren't solving the problem. They are developing a way around the problem. Solving the problem would be to break the laws of thermodynamics and develop a chip that gets cooler as a function of time.
here come the karma whores (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Word Usage (Score:3, Insightful)
"Housed in VIA's low profile EBGA package that reduces thermal density, the VIA Eden ESP7000 consumes a mere 6 watts of Maximum Thermal Design Power and nearly 1 watt of typical power when running at a clock speed of 733MHz."
This is where people always get confused (Score:5, Insightful)
The Eden chip runs extremely cool because it doesn't DO ANYTHING. It is a brute-force, simple yet inefficient processor design.
It has no branch prediction, no out-of-order-execution, no register renaming, and a half-speed FPU. These are the exact same specs the Winchip had when Via bought it, they have simply shrunk the die to
This means you have to wait forever in CPU time to get anything done, which means you get real-world performance in the PII 300 range. Sure, each cycle wastes a tiny bit of power, but when you take 3x as long to do something, you use 3x as much real-time power.
This is what I am referring to when I say it's an inefficnent design. Sure, it's low-power, but you have to compare it to OTHER architectures to get a feel for how good it really is.
Consider that an Intel Pentium III Tualatin LV clocked at 733MHz would have only %50 higher max thermal power than the Eden chip, and you start to get the point. You could clock the Tualatain at 500MHz and match the Eden's max thermal power, and have significantly higher performance.
Consider that an 800MHz Pentium M would have ONLY 2 WATTS higher max thermal power, and it smacks you upside the forehead. Here we have a chip with roughly 2.5x the efficiency of the Eden ( processing power to power consumption ratio ), thanks to the fact that it has been DESIGNED FROM THE START to be efficient.
The Eden is only "low power" because it is inefficient, and it didn't sell well when it was sold as a normal desktop processor. The whole small form-factor ITX is the only thing the platform has going for it, and as soon as small systems with low-clocked Pentium Ms come into play, VIA's market will evaporate.
You could make the most inefficient core in the world run extremely cool, even say a Pentium IV, so long as you throttled the clock speed and shrunk the process. This is all VIA has done with the Winchip core used for Eden.
Incidentally, VIA finally released a new Winchip core, the Nemiah, with 6th-generation features like OOOE, branch-prediction, full-speed FPU.
GUESS WHAT? It performs better, but the power consumption is up too. Sadly, even Nemiah wasn't designed as efficiently as CPUs already out there.
EFFICIENT != LOW POWER.
Re:Word Usage (Score:2)
I thought that was how you were suppose to fix things, at least according to Microsoft and their software philosophies...
Re:Word Usage (Score:3, Funny)
This isn't just a law of thermodynamics, but a law of marketing as well.
Remember when 486 chips were really cool? Now they're not at all cool. Time does that to things.According to my kids, time has done that to me, too. I can remember when I was really cool, back in the day...
Re:To put things in perspective... (Score:4, Interesting)
What I was trying to say is the most efficient processors we have today are much more efficient than a 486 ( partially attributable to die shrinks, but also due to advances like pipelining, branch prediction and OOOE to reduce wasted cycles, and dynamic power across the die on moden chips like the Pentium M ). If manufacturers could actually sell on efficiency instead of pure power, we'd see more of these architectures. Unfortunately, "cheap performance" rules an early market.
Think about it this way: back in the early 1900s Ford sought to give everyone a car with the Model T. Eventually, they saturated the market and nobody wanted the rough but cheap Model T anymore. People wanted stylish cars, more areodynamic cars, larget engines, more efficiency etc...
I believe the market is only beginning to realize that the desktop market is saturated, and is now replacement-only. The only reason we havn't seen a wide pickup of purchases for more efficient computers or more stylish computers is because manufacturers are ignoring the desktop market saturation and bleeding production over to laptops.
Once the laptop market crashes in a few years, I expect manufacturers to finally 'get it' just nlike car makers in the 1920s did, and offer a wider range than just "cheap performance".
Re:Word Usage (Score:2)
Such a chip would be a problem by itself: you would have to heat it up to keep working in the proper temperature interval.
The ideal solution of the problem would to create the chip that doesn't change the temparature at all. In theory. Practically we need a chip that would keep its temperature in the proper interval. In more practical words, it would create a heat with a speed not m
Silent? (Score:4, Funny)
Watercooling for Vid Cards? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Watercooling for Vid Cards? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Watercooling for Vid Cards? (Score:2)
one manufacturer already offers such a bundle for gf-fx, and gpu-waterblocks have been on the market for years for other cards.
and as far as the pump sound goes it's really silly to state that the normal centrifugal pumps make too much noise(they don't, unless you happen to buy some really crappy ones and run metal shards with the water). the more important thing about this could be the size of it(and the real reason the company is developing it in the fir
The Cray, ultimate "water" cooling (Score:4, Interesting)
They've been doing that for a while. They also do chipsets. Now you're also starting to see watercooled hard drives.
But I still remember back when I was in college and I got to take a tour of Cray headquaters. I can still remember seeing one of the first Cray-2's there, in its clear shell. It was about 3 feet tall and 3 or 4 feet in diameter, and the whole computer sat inside completely submerged in fluid (not water). You could see little bubbles rising up through the densely packed circuit boards and wires. And nearby was a really cool lighted fountain. So cool. Of course the engineer there said it created so much heat that there was an entire building out back which was just the heat exchanger for the fluid.
Re:Watercooling for Vid Cards? (Score:2)
This problem will never be solved by watercooling, though. Eventually we'll be back up to the old dedicated cooling systems and eyepopping electricity bills. The fact is, every bit state change costs a certain, discrete amount of energy. We keep switching more and more bits, faster and faster. What we need to do is continue reducing the
Have something like that (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately they don't support the very high end CPUs. When I bought mine the max was 1GHz PIII, which is still ample fast for most apps.
Re:Have something like that (Score:2, Funny)
How much power? (Score:5, Insightful)
If this new pump requires 75W or more, then you're unlikely to win in the long run - you'll just need a bigger PSU (and bigger, noisier fan in it) to get the job done.
Anyone have any more detailed links?
Re:How much power? (Score:2)
You could water cool the PSU and run the hot water to an external radiator. Of course, I'm not sure that I want coolant water flowing through the high voltage parts of my case.
Re:RTFA -- this system has NO pump. -nt- (Score:3, Funny)
It is a pump. A pump with no moving parts, which uses electrostatic forces as the "pump".
Re:How much power? (Score:2)
Since the PSU is 300-400W these days, that's possibly 4 pumps that would be needed... and if each pump draws 75W, then you have a problem.
Basically, if it can't push the water to cool X watts without using more than 10% of X, I think it won't work for a 100% fanless system.
I read through the PDF, too - 200V? I don't recall a 200V output on my PSU.
Re:How much power? (Score:2)
They could, but the flowrate doesn't look great - they say it'll suffice for ~120-150W constant power dissapation.
Since the PSU is 300-400W these days, that's possibly 4 pumps that would be needed... and if each pump draws 75W, then you have a problem.
WTF are you talking about? It can radiate 120W of *HEAT* per square centimetre.
I don't know about you but my power supply has more than 0% efficiency.
just don't drop it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:just don't drop it (Score:2)
Also, modern liquid cooled cars don't seem to have too much trouble containg their coolant in an environment much nastier than the inside of your pc. (Yes, I know someone has a story about the radiator in their AMC Pacer blowing up).
MODS: parent not insightful (Score:3, Informative)
Pure water is a very poor conductor of electricity (worse than air, I believe).
And computers hardly last a lifetime. At BEST they have about a 5 year lifetime, and by then they're way out of date.
Bacteria clogging the pores? (Score:2)
if you left your computer off and the population got large emough then when you switched it on the pump would clog. the pore size is 1 micron. which means a lot of bugs will get wedged in the pores.
viruses would pass through the filter. so maybe the way to keep the bacterial pop
Re:just don't drop it (Score:2)
Doesn't solve stated *problem,* solves *symptom*! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but the point is... (Score:4, Insightful)
However, that's not the point with the
Re:Yeah, but the point is... (Score:2)
Not for me, it isn't. I'm blessed with an office with a G4 tower, Dell laptop and HP LaserJet within 2-4 feet of my ears. I'm ready to buy some extra long keyboard/monitor cables to get some relief from the noise.
I suppose Paul Lee won't work with a Nuke plant. (Score:5, Insightful)
I really got a kick out of this statement. This is an example of how insecure people are and how most people view change as a bad thing. If Paul embraced the technology, perhaps his company would win the OEM contract with Intel. Imagine the money! But not with that thinking.
I think it's clearly about time that computers move into the liquid cooled stage. Look at what it did for automobiles. Anyone here own an old air cooled porche is a big city?
Re:I suppose Paul Lee won't work with a Nuke plant (Score:4, Insightful)
Translation:
However, others would like the idea to go away. "Let me think up a reason to discourage this," says Paul Lee, at QuietPC in North Yorkshire, England, a company whose business model depends on PCs being noisy.
Re:I suppose Paul Lee won't work with a Nuke plant (Score:2)
I do own an air-cooled VW in the city, and it's fun driving past people who have overheated due to a limited amount of cooling volume. The problem isn't that air is inefficient, just noisy. I think fans will always be the low end option, but water has been a high end option that is now becoming much easier to buy.
Re:I suppose Paul Lee won't work with a Nuke plant (Score:2)
I'm fairly sure that this is a case of not maintaining the vehicle and making sure the coolant level is topped off, than an actual design failure of the cooling system. This may have been what you meant by "limited amount of cooling volume".
I don't know about insecure. (Score:2)
Yeah, but I don't park my car in the living room for one. Second, in a car, the water is kept well away from the electronics, typically. Third, I don't want to worry about replacing liquid, maintaining levels, etc. Fourth, it'll always be more expensive than a cheap case fan.
Admittedly, there's a trememdous upside as well, but I don't think there's any reason to belittle concerns with c
Crays cooled by blood plasma (Score:2)
Re:Crays cooled by blood plasma (Score:2)
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/Shustek/ShustekT o ur -03.html
Cray's next machine, uncreatively called the "Cray-2," Photo by Michael Dubinsky solved the cooling/plumbing problem another way: the boards themselves were swimming in a non-conducting liquid called "Fluorinert," a blood plasma substitute used in surgery that happens to have the right thermal, mechanical, and electrical properties. Changing out a defective board within the 3
How quiet is it?! (Score:5, Funny)
Skip: It's a cpu cooling system...like a jet engine for the water. Only there are no moving parts, so it's very very quiet.
Ryan: Like how quiet?
Skip: Doubtful another computer user would even pick it up. Even if they did, it would sound like...whales humping...or a seismic anomoly. Anything but a cpu cooling system. We fooled with this a couple years ago, but couldn't get it to work. *Pauses* This isn't a mock-up, is it? They really built this thing?
Adopted from Tom Clancy's The Hunt For Red October [imdb.com] . Thank you.
follow up... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:follow up... (Score:2)
Re:How quiet is it?! (Score:2)
Skip:...They really built this thing?
Ryan: She was put out to sea in Coolingy this morning.
Skip Tyler: When I was twelve, I helped my daddy build a sound shelter in our basement because some fool parked a dozen noisy Athlons 90 miles off the coast of Florida
Now that is paranoid! (Score:5, Funny)
However, others are cautious about the idea. "I don't like mixing water and electricity," says Paul Lee, at QuietPC in North Yorkshire, England, a company that specialises in PC noise elimination. "Even if all the technical details are ironed out, I think it will be five years at least before fans are replaced. They are still the cheapest option."
Poor Paul Lee. He doesn't like mixing water and electricity.
He must take cold showers, because heating water generally requires a device called a "hot water heater", in which an electrically-operated device is actually submerged in water! Horrors!
Actually, he probably takes his baths in the spring out back, since water from a centralized system at some point was pumped by electric motors, and some of that electricity might still be in the water.
If he's not lucky enough to have a spring on his property, his kids probably wake up every morning and hoist the bucket up from the well [waltonfeed.com].
And we don't even want to think about his other bathroom facilities [waltonfeed.com]...
Re:Now that is paranoid! (Score:2)
!!!? WTF? Haven't you ever heard of gas powere water heaters? They're safer, more effiecient and MUCH cheaper to operate. Anyone who is using an electric water heater in this day and age is a buffoon. The only experience I ever had with an electic water heater was when I was in college in off-campus housing. It suck
Re:Now that is paranoid! (Score:2, Informative)
If you computer shorts, you potentially loose a lot of very expensive data and a lot of very expensive hardware. Yeah, there should be backups, but when was the last time you backed up you system at home, and even if you have done so recently, there tends to be quite a bit of time involved in recovering the "lost" data. Somebody has to pay for the time it take to recover, and it c
Re:Now that is paranoid! (Score:2, Funny)
Very good point. On the other hand, why would one heat "f***ing" water, either?
How *would* water f***, anyway?
[thinks entirely too hard about it...]
Aha! That's what happens in cities like St. Louis, when the Missouri and Mississippi rivers come together. The rivers aren't merging, they're *mating*. The baby rivers emerge from their combined parents a little south of New Orleans in what we (silly us) call th
Re:Now that is paranoid! (Score:2)
Because if it's cold it takes the mood right out of you, you dolt!
Cool solution, but fixed the wrong problem (Score:5, Interesting)
We Need Cooler Chips. We need CPUs and GPUs that consume maybe 10W instead of 80+W, and then we can go back to heatsinks perhaps with small fans. Looking back on my first x86 machine (a 486), I discover that it was the last processor Intel certified for use without a heat sink (or maybe without a fan--something like that). Now we have BIG copper heatsinks, monster CPU fans as well as extra case fans and dual-fan power supplies, and the companies are starting to look at liquid cooling as a mainstream "solution."
When will it end? At this rate, we'll actually be maxing out 500W power supplies in a few years. Half a kilowatt is too much power to be drawing for a computer! (and consider that it doesn't even include the monitor or peripherals.)
Let's start leaning on Intel and AMD, and get them to reduce the power consumption rather than giving us meaningless MHz increments.
Re:Cool solution, but fixed the wrong problem (Score:2)
If you run that 3 Ghz Celeron at 500Mhz, you'll cut the power and heat by over 90%.
Re:Cool solution, but fixed the wrong problem (Score:3, Insightful)
"But that extra 2.5GHz doesn't really make a difference. Our chip will be saving you money on your cooling bill!"
Sorry, but MHz/GHz sell CPUs. That's not going to change anytime soon.
Re:Cool solution, but fixed the wrong problem (Score:2)
Re:Cool solution, but fixed the wrong problem (Score:2)
If we're really bound and determined to burn up the worlds oil and energy supply running these things, the thing to do is to have freon connects for hooking up to your home AC lines and eliminate the middle man, your AC cooling air which then cools the PC. Plus your fan is now outside where it won't annoy you bec
Re:Cool solution, but fixed the wrong problem (Score:3, Informative)
-CPU either 1. a AMD Barton clocked down to 1 GHz or 2. A AMD Opteron 1.8GHz (242) clocked down to 1 GHZ. Both these will run cool with only a heatsink and without a fan. Asus MB
A 1.8GHz Opteron use max 55W. At 1 or 1.2GHz it will use appr
Re:Cool solution, but fixed the wrong problem (Score:2)
Re:Cool solution, but fixed the wrong problem (Score:2)
The reason I singled out the Opeteron is because its available now (she wanted to have the system ready for semester start two weeks ago, but I forgot about it) And she does some power hungry simulations, 4th year on med. school, "some bio-stuff" that they used Dual Pentium 3 at school for. Originaly I wanted to buy her a Du
heat doubles?? (Score:2)
Forget the pump... (Score:5, Funny)
need silent (-96db) PC for audio (Score:4, Informative)
The alternative is to put the PC in the control room, which means long cables, or else an enclosure, which will also be expensive.
I could mitigate the problem by putting the PC in a rack case, but 1-u rack cases tend to be too deep for the typical musician's rack, and again, it's an expensive solution.
Re:need silent (-96db) PC for audio (Score:2)
1 GHz processor, mini-itx, fanless.
Re:need silent (-96db) PC for audio (Score:3, Interesting)
The processor in a Nehemiah board performs about like a K6-300, in my experience with them. It does have the silent factor solved. I've already tried the mini-itx approach and have been thorougly disappointed with the performance of the C3 processors.
what did he say? (Score:2, Funny)
YOU GIRLY WUSS MAN!!
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
I'm up to here with this (Score:5, Insightful)
I am very tired of idiots who post about being worried about water near electricity, rust, you name it. I think it shows how basic science education is being neglected. So I would like to make a few points.
Pure water is a poor conductor of electricity. That's why ordinary condensation caused by the lowering temperature of humid air rarely causes problems with electrical equipment. The conductivity of good quality DI or distilled water is actually not high enough to affect most digital systems. It wouldn't be good if it got into rotating components, but in the low-resistance 5-12VDC environment, a little damp is not a problem.
Furthermore, in the absence of dissolved air, water does not promote rust. Generations of science teachers have shown kids that iron nails in distilled water stay bright while those in aerated tap water rapidly rust.
The biggest problem I am aware of with water cooled electronics - and I have been involved on and off with liquid handling since 1980 - is inappropriate choice of materials. The common polyamide (nylon) pipe is water absorbent, as are some other widely used polymers. Cast metals are also often prone to porosity, pinholes and slag inclusions, which can be major sources of leaks. Pressure testing is a good idea.
Another problem with water cooling for electronics is inappropriate design of connections, resulting in too much mechanical load either on the connection itself, sealing faces of pumps, or the attachment of the cooling plate to the substrate.
Unlike automotive cooling, vibration is not usually a major problem.
This isn't a howto essay, but here are a few pointers.
DO NOT EVER use automotive components. They are designed for robustness and can handle high levels of sludge, and in any case are designed for use with glycol mixtures.
DO NOT create high pressures. The object should be to have wide flow paths working at low pressure differentials with minimum turbulence. I'm amazed when I read descriptions of heat removers describing them has having internal passages designed to promote turbulence - because turbulence is bad. You want, ideally, laminar flow across the hotspot so that it is in contact with a constantly changing flow of cold water.
Platinum cured silicone tubing is very good. It contains no cure residues that could make the water acid and it is very flexible. It needs to be carefully routed to prevent kinking but it puts low stresss on joints.
Flow back to header tanks should avoid bubbling to prevent aeration, and header tanks should be covered except for a minute hole (filtered) for pressure compensation. If you can keep spores and bugs out of the water, you will not grow algae.
Ideally all metal parts should be the same metal or at least metals of similar electrochemical potential.
Use lab grade DI water.
Use compression joints rather than just relying on the elasticity of the pipe.
NEC has said they are working on a system designed to eliminate leaks - their curious reference to "resin" being, I suspect, a reference to epoxy or nylon components that are prone to leak slowly. The automotive industry has done it: liquid cooled auto engines now require hardly any maintenance of the cooling system. I'm sure that once the serious manufacturers get on the case and the amateurs start to fade into the background, liquid cooling for personal computers should come on rapidly, for all the same reason as automotives (more power in smaller space, more accurate temperature control, able to reach less accessible places, smaller block mass needed for heat exchangers). The technologies are all there, the need is obvious.
Amateurs (us) versus Professionals (them) (Score:5, Interesting)
I see the geek reaction to water cooling as very similar to the hobbyist reaction to everything useful in recent history. Let me elaborate.
Think back about 100 years to the start of aviation. The really dedicated aeronauts built their own planes - in fact, the Wright brothers were basically hobbyists compared to Mr. Langley, who was well-financed, especially by the government. What was the reaction among the hobbyist crowd to mass-produced planes?
Think back about 120 years to the start of the practical automobile. The really dedicated enthusiasts built their own cars. What was the reaction among that crowd to the Model T? "Junk. Never sell well. Impractical." Let's take that one a step further. "Computer controlled ignition and fuel injection systems? Preposterous. How can I tweak it?" Well, where are we today? When's the last time you drove a car with real points or a carburetor?
Think back about 50 years to the early days of home audio. The really dedicated geeks built their own systems - remember the Heathkit stuff (or am I too old for this crowd)? Build your own TV, you could. Same thing for stereos, etc. What was the typical audiophile reaction to the idea of a mass-produced stereo? "It'll be junk. Never work. Sounds lousy. No control over the details." Sorry to mess with that world view, but walk into any WalMart and you can take home a stereo system that sounds far better than many of those hobbyist's systems, and costs about 1/10 as much.
Think back about 20 years to when PCs were solely the domain of either the goverment/high-end research facilities, or hobbyists. What was the reaction to mass-produced PCs? Remember IBM's reaction to Bill Gates? Even more to the point, how about the hobbyist reaction to Bill Gates?
What I'm getting at is this: the folks who do the most whining and complaining about anything going mainstream is the hobbyist crowd. Why? I believe it's because the hobbyist perceives it as a threat to his control over his hobby. It's inconceivable to him that something could be mainstreamed successfully. Certainly, here on
Okay, but what's the reality of the situation? Simply put, does your grandma care how her PC works, if she even uses one? No, she simply cares that she can turn it on, use it, and turn it off again. The chance that she'll EVER see the guts of a home PC approaches zero. Same thing with a stereo, or a car, or a plane. Most non-geeks not only don't KNOW how most things work, they emphatically don't WANT to know.
So I see water cooling the same way. It WILL work, it WILL be accepted, and it WILL be part of many systems soon, regardless of how many hobbyists think it's a mistake. Because OUR desire for control over the innards of the PC is completely irrelevant to the mass market. PCs are simply not built for us anymore - they are built for Joe Sixpack and your grandma.
As proof of this, take the average notebook PC. They're accepted widely, but almost completely impossible to upgrade, or hack, or tweak. Well, water cooling is going the same way. The manufacturers don't care if water cooling is good for the computer hobbyist, as long as they can make it work in a mainstream, sealed-box PC. And that's where the average home PC is headed - a sealed PC that is effectively non-upgradable.
Only postpones the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Water cooling only improves the heat dissipation by some constant factor, keeping the chips from melting down until they get yet faster and smaller. Next year, I guess we'll be hearing about liquid sodium cooling systems.
But note that exotic cooling systems don't actually make the the heat go away, they just move it to a different part of the room. This does nothing to solve the closet-full-of-computers problem. Your home is still going to get hotter than you want in summer. In fact, cooling systems themselves generate heat so any cooling that isn't actually needed to keep the processor from melting down actually makes the heat problem worse.
It's always nice when noise goes away though.
Back to the heat question, this kind of thing is great for pushing forward the frontier of single-cpu systems. But single cpu systems aren't where the action is, it's in SMP and clusters. For that reason, I'm a lot more interested in systems that generate fewer calories per mip in the first place.
The Wrong Approach (Score:2, Insightful)
Would increasing he size of the chip die help with heat dissipation? The die itself is about what, 1/2" square (approximately, and using an AMD Athlon as a reference)..
If we were to increase the die itself to the size of the `skirt' around it (that which holds all the pins)... perhaps a vented or flow-through design on the die also. I don't forsee that this would cause any major repercussions as far as motherboard size increase.
My other thought...
Aren't processors fast enoug
What about medical pumps? (Score:5, Interesting)
The closest reference I could find is at http://www.appraisalmedical.com/PagBgn/ProductPag
There should be a way to manufacture a similar pump for far cheaper, since you wouldn't need as accurate a pressure control, or have to excessive monitoring.
The benefits are:
(1) Virtually silent, no impeller noise.
(2) Pump/Motor are completely isolated from the coolant fluid, leading to a lower chance of failure due to pump contamination/oxidation/short circuits.
(3) The pump speed and thus the fluid moved can be controlled with a potentiometer. As such, with a bit of creative work, you could conceivably design a failsafe mechanism to increase coolant flow when temperatures appear critical.
(4) Replacement parts *should* be cheaper, you can replace a roller, the hose the rollers ride over, or the motor individually, rather than the entire unit.
Re:What about medical pumps? (Score:2)
A peristaltic pump ought to work well in a water cooling rig.
But the ultimate quiet water cooling system would be to locate your PC over an artesian well & just dump the water after it flows through the system once. Might even run a nice lawn sprinkler system with the effluent.
Re:What about medical pumps? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www2.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&
Crunch Crunch Crunch (Score:3, Funny)
Energy Costs? (Score:2, Interesting)
Links to currently available water-cooling kits (Score:2, Interesting)
This product sounds fantastic, but it's not currently available on the market. How about some links to water-cooling kits that are available for purchase now? Which ones are recommended? Which ones not?
As a bit of backstory, we have a couple of new AMD Athlon computers here in the office with excessively loud fans. They're so loud that most of us (myself included) choose to do our work on old laptops, only using the desk computers when we need to calculate tabulations for our r
How about an ionic airflow system? (Score:2)
These generate a pretty decent airflow with ionic (electrostatic) propulsion. No idea, however, about the many claims of cleaning the air, improving one's health, killing germs, et cetra, et cetra, et cetra.
I have one (received as a gift from the friend-of-friend) in my house. If I leave the bedroom door/windows closed during the day, I can definitely smell th
Water pump noise is a problem? (Score:4, Informative)
Lower voltage is the answer. (Score:3, Funny)
don't forget to cool the water (Score:3, Interesting)
Historically water cooling has been used more for overclocking than for quiet PCs. There have been some experiments in passive, convection based, water cooling. One experiment was particularly interesting, but I can't find the link. One trick is to use very large diameter tubing. The larger the diameter of the tube the slower the water can move and still cool the CPU.
Unless you attempt some kind of open system that gets water directly from the house plumbing or groundwater, you still need a radiator and fan to cool the water. The advantage is that you can go to a larger fan or even two or more fans and a much larger heatsink (radiator) than is possible directly on the CPU.
With an open system, you could put that waste heat to work as a water heater with the addition of some kind of storage tank.
Mod parent down. (Score:2)
Re:Big deal (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no screw. (except as a backup.)
If you've ever seen pictures of the levitating frog (being held up by magnetic fields), it is the same principle.