MSI Wind U100, Overclocked With Liquid Nitrogen 95
james writes "What do you get when you combine a MSI Wind U100 notebook with liquid nitrogen?
The new Intel Atom frequency World Record ... and some
damn cool pictures!
A large copper pot is used, sitting on top of the GPU and chipset, and cold transfer through the original heatsink plate to the CPU. This was cooled down to about -20 C to achieve the new world mark. (Intel Atom N270 @ 2315mhz) For more information you can check out the original forum thread.
I'd like to see that go through airport security (Score:1)
Sort of throws out the "portability" marketing scheme
Bonus (Score:4, Funny)
+5 hack points for being completely impractical. I like...
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Plus an extra hack point for overclocking a low power CPU!
NevergetthatpasttheTSA (Score:1)
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The liquid nitrogen is in a closed system right? So the explosive sniffers shouldn't catch it, right? It's not like the TSA is going to know that the notebook has liquid nitrogen in it. They're not that bright and they're not that coordinated.
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they're liable to confiscate it (if you're within 100 miles of a border) or just steal it outright.
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Where's the ka-boom? (Score:3, Interesting)
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If the liquid nitrogen is in a closed system the apparatus would have to be either rather large or incredibly secured. Heat from the cpu would vaporize the nitrogen, that's a LOT of pressure. You don't want a closed system. Especially in a tiny netbook. Bright or not I'd imagine the TSA might suspect something if your laptop had a cloud of FOG around it...
In other nerdiness, liquid nitrogen is actually really easy to make and is inexpensive. The problem is storage. You need a really good (read expensive) re
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Liquid nitrogen (liquid density at the triple point is 0.707 g/mL) is the liquid produced industrially in large quantities by fractional distillation of liquid air
The cost of liquid nitrogen depends on the distance from related facilities and the price of energy; the actual cost tends to range between 0.10 and 0.50 USD/L.
both from wikipedia
The process of making liquid nitrogen consists of condensing atmospheric gases (principally nitrogen and oxygen), separating the liquefied gases, packaging and handling, and delivering the liquids. The most expensive part of this process is packaging and handling. This is reflected in the relative costs for "cylinder" and "bulk" gas prices. In the US, liquid nitrogen usually costs about $2/gallon when delivered in dewars and about $.50/gallon when delivered and pumped into a bulk storage tank. Prices tend to be higher the farther away from the condensing plant you are and outside the continental United States.
From Interesting Products [64.233.169.132]
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it's been a while since i've taken physics, so please excuse my ignorance. but how would the liquid nitrogen provide any additional cooling (compared to water) if it's in a closed system? i mean, doesn't the liquid nitrogen have to boil off/evaporate in order to provide cooling? so if it remains a pressurized liquid then isn't it just the same as a cooling pump or radiator? i mean, theoretically you could let the liquid nitrogen evaporate and then re-compress in a separate chamber, but i don't know how prac
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Exactly what part of liquid nitrogen do you think the explosive sniffers would alert on if it weren't in a closed system?
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Explosives sniffers often look for high concentration of nitrogen, since nitrogen is a key component in virtual all explosives. Perhaps you've heard of such things as Tri-Nitro-Toluene (TNT)? How about Composition C4? A key chemical component of cyclonite (C4 is cyclonite mixed with plasticizers) is nitric acid?
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Man oh man... (Score:5, Funny)
...and you thought it was bad when your laptop's battery started leaking into your lap. Just wait until its liquid nitrogen cooling system starts leaking.
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Well, the upside is you'd have no trouble getting it hard.
They say that happens to lots of computers.
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My mother always told me that nice computers never go down.
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The REALLY impressive thing... (Score:5, Funny)
The really impressive thing isn't that they overclocked a processor, it's that they cooled it to -20 K!
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WOOSH!
(hint: not the sound of liquid nitrogen being poured over you)
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Re:The REALLY impressive thing... (Score:4, Informative)
There's no such thing as -20 K
Not so [wikipedia.org], though it's a very strange thing indeed.
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It's a joke (Score:2)
You've probably gathered this by now, but it was a joke. When I'm around science geeks, it's always good for a cheap laugh. "Man, it's supposed to be really cold tonight! I heard it's going to be ten below absolute zero!" Kind of like, you know, "Mine goes to eleven!" Or "let's give it 110%."
I just thought I'd poke a little fun at the submitter for breaking the cardinal rule of always specifying units. There's quite a bit of difference between 20 degrees Celsius and 20 de
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There's no such thing as -20 K
Depending on who you talk to, that's not strictly true.
It is possible to have a negative Kelvin temperature, you can approach absolute zero asymptotically from either direction, you just can't reach 0 K.
The most common example is the laser. When the active layer is excited, there is a population inversion [gsu.edu] where there are more excited states than ground states (in this case electrons sitting on higher energy levels). This is reversed on the emission of coherent photons, which brings the electrons back do
All this shows is that Atom is clock limited (Score:5, Interesting)
All this shows is that Atom is clock limited by design. A 700MHz speed up - less than 50% in this case - from using liquid nitrogen? And all to get a CPU that's about as powerful as a 1.5GHz Pentium M or a 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo ...
Atom is reasonably neat, but I would have been more impressed with under-volting to half power consumption. Or designing a better chipset.
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its interesting that you didnt get all the factory defaults when you cleared CMOS though, that is strange
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underclocking/volting is a massively overlooked aspect.
on a chip like the atom with a high emphasis on dynamic clock gating, I would assume under-clocking the CPU would only make the system less power efficient. Under clocking a dynamic clock CPU would only limit it's peak performance, when your system is waiting on the CPU, but not affect the low/average power draw of the CPU at all. (I realize your likely under clocking the memory, and everything else so that would help some.)
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Well, Atom's market isn't in the high-performance desktop/laptop realm, it's in the netbook realm, where the primary goal (for the most part) is "c
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I say it's not cheap enough.
What does an Atom processor and board cost ? $75 or so ? What does the cheapest Core-2 processor and board cost ? $90
Somehow, I'm not impressed by those numbers. Bring the Atom kit down to $30 and we'll talk. Building it into $300 subnotes is not what I call impressive, they just scored because people are magpies and they like the cute little paperweights.
Not necessarily (Score:2)
The motherboard could be limiting the FSB, since it isn't designed for overclocking. You have no way of knowing that this is a processor limitation.
And these Atoms put a mere 4W at stock - while a Pentium M puts out 27W at load.
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just compare the atom n270 [intel.com] (in almost every netbook) to a comparable core duo [intel.com] or solo [intel.com]
now look at the stated Thermal Design Power - its 2.5watts vs. 34w vs. 31w respectively. that is more than a couple of magnitudes less. and the voltage is lower for the Atom than the Core Duo/Solo too. the fact that this chip is reaching these speeds while consuming relatively no power is the
Geez... (Score:4, Funny)
Better wear the insulated cod piece.
A "large copper put?" (Score:1)
Really?
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ob. Futurama reference... (Score:5, Funny)
first one, then t'other.
I miss my 486 (Score:1, Offtopic)
--
Looking for work? Keep one eye open on Craigslist.com http://www.bigattichouse.com/oneeyeopen.html [bigattichouse.com]
side-effects of mod cooling? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always wondered why things like this don't cause physical problems related to thermal expansion/contraction - why doesn't the processor package crack due to the temp differences? Or condensation form in bad places etc? There's gotta be a whole list of bad side effects to worry about when supercooling one part of your computer...?
Re:side-effects of mod cooling? (Score:5, Funny)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Which one?
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>>I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
>Which one?
Both. :-)
Re:side-effects of mod cooling? (Score:5, Informative)
You might think so, but silicon seems to deal with it OK. When I worked in astronomical instrumentation, we built LN2-cooled CCD cameras with the chips cooled to about -150 deg C (they had heaters in the cryostats to hold this temperature; they went down to about -200 if the heaters were turned off). These things were thermal-cycled many times a year and we rarely lost a chip. Astro CCDs are big chips, albeit very simple compared to CPUs.
Conversely, detectors cooled to liquid helium temperatures are likely to die if cycled up to room temperature a few times.
With the CCD cryostats, the chips were in a vacuum vessel, so condensation wasn't normally a problem; all the water had been sucked out before cooling. If moisture did get in, then they had to be warmed and re-evacuated.
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But you never see these modding setups in a vacuum. I wonder how they cope with condensation say, shorting out the pins on the cpu package/socket?
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A blob of Dielectric Grease. You cover the socket with it, before attaching the CPU so condensation doesn't form between the pins.
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We coat the boards with an insulating polymer, most commonly the "Spray-on electrical tape" stuff. You cover the whole board with several layers of that gunk, so condensation forms on the insulant and drips off. Some long-term installations use a drip pan, but most guys only run it for the benchmark, then go back to sane temps for regular operation.
Re:side-effects of mod cooling? (Score:5, Informative)
My guess as to why chips last so well when thermally cycled would be because they undergo very little contraction as they cool. Microchips are made from extremely pure single crystals of silicon (essentially) so they are already in a very low energy state. Cooling them down isn't going to change very much. I wouldn't be surprised if newer SOI chips break more often when thermally cycled as they are in a higher energy state to begin with. Anyway, I have no evidence of this, just a gut feel from studying materials at a wide range of temperatues.
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Thermal expansion coefficients are governed by the material - single crystal silicon has a very different thermal expansion coefficient to single crystal sapphire, for example. SOI silicon is also single crystal just on an insulator, so its thermal expansion is exactly the same as standard silicon. Perhaps you mean strained-silicon? Even then it's still single crystal and unlikely to have a thermal expansion coefficient that is much different from standard silicon. I'm not sure of exactly how much they chan
Re:side-effects of mod cooling? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really. you cant get condensation because there is no air with moisture anywhere near the motherboard. All that nitrogen is displacing the air faster than the air knows what to do. Same with overclocking with Co2.. No condensation.
Now supercool it, then yank it out of the cooling bath, yes it will grow frost faster than anything. I killed my first K6 processor by using a over sized peltier cooler. I cooled it faster than the processor could create heat... I frosted the motherboard for a 3 inch circle around the processor, something melted some of the frost and it shorted two power pins and it went POOF.
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There's been a long history of liquid nitrogen cooling. NCR was looking to do it for their mainframes back in the 80s.
Yes, there are problems with condensation (usually attacked with stainless steel connections to keep the heat flow down), and sometimes boards will crack, but rarely packages.
But the worst thing is that the life of your chip is vastly shortened. There are hot electron effects that shift the threshold voltage on the NMOS devices. Hot-e effect arise from the very high electric fields at the dr
There is a forum dedicated to LN2 cooling (Score:2)
Interestingly, the site owner did an overclocking demo for Intel [fudzilla.com]. I guess Intel can't say they are anti-overclocking anymore.
That forum will answer all of your questions. Frankly, LN2 suicide runs are fun, but I am more impressed with phase change systems [xtremesystems.org] that can run 24/7 like mine.
A better link for the pictures. (Score:4, Informative)
What the hell is a put? (Score:3, Funny)
Could have been done earlier.... (Score:3)
was cooled down to about -20 to achieve the new world mark.
They could have done this alot easier by performing the experiment in my back yard in January (I live in the upper Midwest).
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If they did it in my backyard in January I wonder if they'd get another couple hundred MHz? (I live around 55N in Canada)
The -20 makes it sound like the LN02 is a bit of a gimmick. You can achieve that temperature a lot more easily.
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I live in MN, and if I leave my Dell D820 in the car overnight between October and April, and then power it up in the morning, the fan will kick on and it will boot incredibly slow. I've always presumed this is some sort of preventative action to keep the processor from heating up too fast and snapping something... but nobod
Is overclocking still worth it (Score:2)
It was long ago but I remember good overclocking. My PII 350 MHz ran perfectly at 392 MHz (bus at 112 MHz instead of 100 MHz). It made some sense (since a 400 Mhz CPU was about $150 more expensive) actually. Since then I have not attempted overclocking anything (perhaps because I got an Apple computer).
Is overclocking still worth it? Does it make sense?
Or is it mostly a challenge for fun and glory today?
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Mostly because you can pay 150% the price and get the high-end chip
and overclock THAT one... err, yeah!
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Is overclocking still worth it? Does it make sense?
It's not worth as much, and it's not the same beast as it was ten years ago, but at least its gotten easier. There's a bigger selection of hardware and cooling equipment. Consequently, a small increase in speed (1-10%) doesn't amount to much for the average user, with all the other bottlenecks. A big monitor, good graphics card, high performance SSD and gigabit ethernet have more of a positive impact than overclocking, from the average geek's point of view.
Whether it's worth it to overclock a processor, alw
room temp CPUs catch up in a year (Score:2)
Cold transfer? (Score:1)
Should have been heat transfer from the CPU to the pot (or put if you prefer) of liquid Nitrogen.
Obligatory <Homer> "In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics."</Homer>
Windows Vista (Score:3, Funny)
Thus giving rise to the phrase... (Score:2)
A large copper put is used, sitting on top of the gpu and chipset, and cold transfer through the original heatsink plate to the CPU. ... Shift or get off the pot.
Reminds me of (Score:2)
Is LN2 really necessary? (Score:2)
I mean, unless the processor *needs* to be at LN2 temperature wouldn't it be more practical just to increase the flow rate of a water cooling system?
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I mean, unless the processor *needs* to be at LN2 temperature wouldn't it be more practical just to increase the flow rate of a water cooling system?
The processor is never going to be the same temperature as the liquid nitrogen (or any cooling median). As long as there is thermal resistance and/or heat being dissipated there will be some temperature difference.
You could just increase the flow rate of a water cooling system, but that is not without issues either. For example, pumping power increases exponentially with flow rate and heatsink geometry is typically optimal for a given flow rate.
Using the liquid nitrogen is just an easy way to get a high
Beowulf (Score:1)
-20 F? why bother with LN2? (Score:2)
Surely you can get it colder than -20 F (~244 K) using LN2 which is at a temperature of 77 K??
copper pot (Score:1)
"... and some damn cool pictures" (Score:1)