From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Mon Nov 18 2002 - 05:19:16 MST
On Sat, 16 Nov 2002, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
> On Sat, 16 Nov 2002, Eugen Leitl wrote:
>
> > But ideally we need deadly quiet, liquid cooled fully solid state
> > machines, yes. We'll be getting them eventually, as power dissipation
> > fluxes go to high to get rid with conventional heat sinks.
There are some (expensive) machines which use aluminum profile cases as
heat sinks. It is possible to dissipate a lot of heat that way, especially
if we go CV diamond->Ag/Cu->heat pipe->large passively cooled Al profile
> Air cooling will work fine for now if you use high quality heat sinks to
> transfer the heat. See:
>
> http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/other/silent_pc/1.php
>From the site you cited:
#One issue you may come across with the 6000A is the fact that it is
#absolutely HUGE, and may not fit on your board. Things were VERY snug on
#the D850EMV2 we're using for this rig, but with some coaxing (and slight
#bending) I was able to get it in (actually it helped to reverse the
#installation, so the bolts were on the other side). Zalman has since
#released a "6500B" version that uses the regular P4 retention clip, and
#most issues should be resolved. The new one is slightly smaller, but
#looks to perform just as well as the one we're using here.
Purely passive heatsinks are _heavy_. They require extra engineering to
not break your motherboard by mechanical streee, or even need a redesign
where the CPU hat a heat junction to the case wall. Also, I don't like
huge boxes around, so this means high air flux, which is synonymous to
high-frequency noise. The problem is even worse with high-density
rackmount devices: the noise of a full rack is infernal, and within a year
costs for juice and air conditioning completely dwarf the hardware costs
of large clusters. Cluster people have started looking for MFlops/W ratio,
and it doesn't look very good there so far.
> Its only if you get into very heavy duty speach recognition, or
> MPEG-4 compression or running Folding@Home at max throughput
> that you need to run 2-3 GHz processors at their full throughput
> (and therefore heat production that might require liquid cooling).
I have a liquid floor/ceiling heating. Once PCs dissipate kW, one can
certainly contemplate using their output for heating.
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