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DEL.ICIO.USNext - water-cooled PCs
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This isn’t exactly news of the weird but it will tell you a lot about how far we are stretching today’s technology when it comes to PCs.
There’s a serious effort to sell a cooling device for the processor in your PC - it uses circulating water to pull the heat away from the processing chip.
The need and possible market for such a device - it’s supposed to be a Do-it-Yourself installation - shows what a big deal heat build-up is for home computers. As manufacturers have pushed for high and higher speeds, the temperature of the processor has zoomed up close to practical limits. Right now most processor chips are cooled with a fan but - as the ad at this link says correctly - water does a much better job. (Think of the cooling differences for air cooled and water cooled car engines).
While a notion like this may seem bizarre to some of you, it wouldn’t to ‘overclockers’ - folks who, often as a hobby, try to force existing chips to run faster than their rated speed. Doing this at real extremes has caused hobbyists to turn to all sorts of methods - including liquid cooling - to keep the chip from french frying.
My thought? Nah. While it’s an innovative sort of product it isn’t one for the mass market. The real hope for mass market home PCs is the use of multiple chips - or single chips with multiple processors - as is being done right now. That way you can run the processors at lower speeds for lower temperatures - but use the multiple processors to get better performance. It’s old hat technology, something mainframe computers have done for a long long time and a technique that PC makers are beginning to adopt.
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By who cares
March 22, 2007 12:34 PM | Link to this
Technotubby? What is that? Technology for Teletubbies? Pretty cool! Robo tubbies! A high powered Tinky Winky! Super LaLa, the Bionic Poe and Wonder Dipsy. Will they take over the evil BooBahs? Tuen in next time-same Tubbycustard time, same Tubbycustard channel.
By wabrooke
March 22, 2007 4:03 PM | Link to this
Bill, these water cooled systems have been around for years. I don’t think they’ve ever been really prevelant in the Intel market, but for AMD users, they have been something used widely for overclockers and heavy gamers. My rule of thumb is, I only buy the processor speed I can afford (I usually go for the fastest mid-range before the high price jumps), and I never try to overclock. And when I build a system, I stick to Retail Box processors from “mom & pop” computer stores. They are usually only a few dollars more than the oem version, and they include a heatsink & fan rated by the manufacturer to withstand the output. So if it fails and overheats, you usually have a 3 year replacement warranty on the cpu.
By Bo Simmons
March 27, 2007 4:43 PM | Link to this
Bill,
I run a web design and development company. I thought your comments on water cooled CPU’s was interesting. We did a site for Overdrive PC located here in Atlanta. If you don’t know them you might like to check them out more - Mario the brain ofthe operations has been super cooling and overclocking stuff for years. they claim better cooling that water and have when we did the site over a year ago - see http://www.overdrivepc.com/coolbluei/edge/
Best Regards Bo Simmons CoolBlueInteractive.com
By David
March 29, 2007 12:11 AM | Link to this
Bill,
You are way out of the enthuisist league here. Water Cooling high end and mid-range CPU’s is very commonplace amongst us computer enthusiasts and overclockers. Water Cooling is nothing new at all. It has been around for a long time. Now what you should write about next time is phase change cooling… but you probably don’t know what that it is, do you? They do make pre-assembled water cooling kits- check out Koolance’s Exos, Corsair’s offerings, Thermaltake’s Big Water, etc. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to install these things… water Cooling is MUCH more efficient that air cooling with often times much less noise…I lvoe it when you “tech guys” talk about things and really have no idea what it really is lol