Thread: Coolin' yer processor

Cool beans...

This Fanless Heatsink Is The Next Generation In CPU Cooling
Tuesday, June 26th, 2012 CPU fans have a certain steampunkian quality to them. They’re loud, annoying, and collect all sorts of debris as they run, whirring endlessly and eventually failing. This new heatsink – more like an impeller coupled with a brushless motor – is the latest in heatsink technology and promises quiet and efficient heatsinkery in the future.

Built by Sandia, this cooling system could cool CPUs or even lighting. Because it consists of only three pieces – the fins, the base, and a motor – the headsink could offer maintenance free cooling for years. It actually blows dust out of its own crevices as it spins and with the right calculations you could make this bigger or smaller for various implementations.



The model shown here is 30 times more efficient than current coolers and 10% smaller.

Source

Related:

The Sandia Cooler
Technology Summary

Sandia researchers have developed a radically new architecture for air-cooled heat exchangers. In conventional “fan-plus-finned-heat-sink” air-cooled heat exchangers, the primary physical limitation to performance (i.e. achieving low thermal resistance) is the boundary layer of motionless air that adheres to and envelops all surfaces of the heat exchanger. Within this boundary layer region of “dead air”, diffusive transport is the dominant mechanism for heat transfer. The resulting thermal bottleneck largely determines the thermal resistance of the heat exchanger. Another longstanding problem is inevitable fouling of the heat exchanger surface over time by particulate matter and other airborne contaminants. Heat sink fouling is especially important in applications where little or no preventative maintenance is typically practiced. The third major obstacle concerns inadequate airflow to heat exchanger resulting from restrictions on fan noise. Small and medium-sized fans have relatively poor mechanical efficiency; unproductive expenditure of mechanical work on the surrounding air results in high noise levels.

The “Sandia Cooler” architecture simultaneously eliminates all three of the drawbacks of conventional air-cooled heat exchanger technology. The “Sandia Cooler” provides a several-fold reduction in boundary layer thickness, intrinsic immunity to heat sink fouling, and drastic reductions in noise. It is also expected to be very practical from the standpoint of cost, complexity, ruggedness, etc.

Description
In this new device architecture, heat is efficiently transferred from a stationary base plate to a rotating (counterclockwise) structure that combines the functionality of cooling fins with a centrifugal impeller. Dead air enveloping the cooling fins is subjected to a powerful centrifugal pumping effect, providing a 10x reduction in boundary layer thickness at a speed of a few thousand rpm. Additionally, high-speed rotation completely eliminates the problem of heat exchanger fouling. The "direct drive advantage", in which relative motion between the cooling fins and ambient air is created by rotating the heat exchanger, provides a drastic improvement in aerodynamic efficiency. This translates to an extremely quiet operation. The benefits have been quantified on a proof-of-concept prototype.

Patent Applications

Sagging market demand threatens AMD viability...

Advanced Micro Devices to slash 2,340 jobs: source
Sun, Oct 14, 2012 - DEEP CUTS: In the face of sagging demand for its processors, AMD is looking to trim costs and sources reckon that 30 percent of its workforce could be cut

Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD), the second-largest maker of processors for personal computers, plans to cut as many as 2,340 jobs, or about 20 percent of its workforce, a source said. The cuts are expected to be announced as early as next week, said the source, who asked not to be named because the plans have not been made public. According to the source, at least 10 percent of AMD’s staff of about 11,700 will be affected.

AMD is striving to trim expenses to help it cope with sagging demand for personal computers that rely on its processors. Sales in the third quarter will decline about 10 percent from the previous period, a bigger drop than previously forecast, the Sunnyvale, California-based company said on Oct. 11. “With PC demand being so weak, we don’t think the company has any choice but to do some considerable cost-cutting measures,” said Betsy Van Hees, an analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc in San Francisco.

Cuts of 10 percent to 20 percent are “aligned with what we were hearing from our industry checks as well,” said Van Hees, who declined to name her sources. The technology site CNET reported earlier yesterday that AMD plans to cut as much as 30 percent of its workforce. The technology blog AllThingsD said the measure would affect workers in engineering and sales.

Chief Executive Officer Rory Read has already reduced headcount since he was appointed in August last year. AMD slashed 10 percent of its workforce in a round of job cuts announced last November. In the third quarter of this year, total global PC shipments fell 8.3 percent from a year earlier to 87.5 million, market-research firm Gartner Inc said earlier this week. Applied Materials Inc, the largest producer of chip-making equipment, said last week it would cut as much as 9 percent of its workforce.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/.../14/2003545116

...an unfortunate sign of the times, I suppose.

Interesting/informative article, thanks Waltky.

If you are into overclocking your cpu then watercooling is the way to go. I recommend this:

h100_rad_v2.jpg

Originally Posted by ZippyThePinhead

If you are into overclocking your cpu then watercooling is the way to go. I recommend this:

h100_rad_v2.jpg

/me nerds up:

The corsair is an enclosed system. One of the main problems with that is that you are going to need a hacksaw to put your "no work" cooling system in (and out of) the box... because you can't take it apart, and the radiator don't go inside. You will also need fans on the radiator, and that block is gigantic (not fitting a lot of things) because it has a pump inside it. I would argue that "the way to go" if you are going liquid, is with waterblocks, a pump and a radiator... I have never used a radiator really. I took apart a walmart 30 dollar personal water cooler, and used the compressor, and a low flow recirculating fish pump (magnetic drive very quiet).

If I was going to go that way in the future, I would use immersion

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fea...corepc_reactor

Of course I don't do windowsy things, so building linux clusters is easier and cheaper than burning up hw trying to push it hard. Still a fun hobby.

The biggest breakthrough in electronics efficiency for computers will come about when physicists are able to devise resistors that do not have resistive losses. Resistors are only there to do one thing: limit the ammount of electric current that can pass through. Yet they also waste some of the energy in the form of heat as an unintended byproduct. All this heat has to be removed away from the chips somehow to prevent overheating.

Originally Posted by Ctrl

/me nerds up:

The corsair is an enclosed system. One of the main problems with that is that you are going to need a hacksaw to put your "no work" cooling system in (and out of) the box... because you can't take it apart, and the radiator don't go inside. You will also need fans on the radiator, and that block is gigantic (not fitting a lot of things) because it has a pump inside it. I would argue that "the way to go" if you are going liquid, is with waterblocks, a pump and a radiator... I have never used a radiator really. I took apart a walmart 30 dollar personal water cooler, and used the compressor, and a low flow recirculating fish pump (magnetic drive very quiet).

If I was going to go that way in the future, I would use immersion

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fea...corepc_reactor

Of course I don't do windowsy things, so building linux clusters is easier and cheaper than burning up hw trying to push it hard. Still a fun hobby.

I disagree.

IMG_20121109_010100.jpg

Of course, you won't be putting the H100 in a computer you buy at Walmart or Bestbuy. You could always go with one of the smaller water coolers. Their radiators will go just about anywhere. My last build (different case) had an H60 and I put the radiator on the back panel...in place of the exhaust fan. Worked great. The block will fit on any Intel or AMD cpu and takes up less room than a stock cooler.

Anyway, people who overclock generally build their own systems so they know what they have room for.

btw, in all my cpu, gpu and memory overclocking I've never burnt a single piece of hardware.

Oil immersion is cool...but expensive. shrug...

What is your board temp?

Keeping the radiator indoors just doesn't seem wise to me. I see you have a lot of ventilation... I am sure it is fine... just seems counter-intuitive to me, and loud. What I meant by not fitting a lot of things, was that quite often the RAM etc is physically in the way of the block, not that it would not adapt to different chipsets.

I do whole house automation... the way our system works is you have one server, and everything else pxe boots, and anything can control anything. Part of that is of course media, so silence is my thing... that is why I would go liquid. Of course now I am running a headless server which lives in a closet, so I am less concerned with noise atm... regardless, I am babbling.

You get to disagree, and even be right.

I wouldn't put a radiator INSIDE a build... that's all.

Originally Posted by Ctrl

What is your board temp?

Keeping the radiator indoors just doesn't seem wise to me. I see you have a lot of ventilation... I am sure it is fine... just seems counter-intuitive to me, and loud. What I meant by not fitting a lot of things, was that quite often the RAM etc is physically in the way of the block, not that it would not adapt to different chipsets.

I do whole house automation... the way our system works is you have one server, and everything else pxe boots, and anything can control anything. Part of that is of course media, so silence is my thing... that is why I would go liquid. Of course now I am running a headless server which lives in a closet, so I am less concerned with noise atm... regardless, I am babbling.

You get to disagree, and even be right.

I wouldn't put a radiator INSIDE a build... that's all.

My six cpu cores run about 35c -38c at idle...around the mid to high 50c area under load.

My system is very quiet. I have the fan speeds set on auto and they never ramp up. I should mention, though, that I'm not overclocking right now.

As you can see in the picture of my system, the block doesn't get in the way of anything...ram, chipsets...nothing. Some big aftermarket air coolers have a problem with getting in the way of high profile ram, caps or the gpu, but not this watercooler block.

Originally Posted by ZippyThePinhead

My six cpu cores run about 35c -38c at idle...around the mid to high 50c area under load.

My system is very quiet. I have the fan speeds set on auto and they never ramp up. I should mention, though, that I'm not overclocking right now.

As you can see in the picture of my system, the block doesn't get in the way of anything...ram, chipsets...nothing. Some big aftermarket air coolers have a problem with getting in the way of high profile ram, caps or the gpu, but not this watercooler block.

Board temp, not cpu... looking for ambiant temp.

Yes... I see that yours doesn't. I can pull one out of the closet and show you that on another board it does. I ran one for a while... then my needs shifted.