Cooling How long before Water Cooling becomes mainstream?

There's no denying that CPUs are getting hotter and hotter and while people try to reduce power consumption there's still been an increase in heat produced. Heatsinks are massive centre points of a computer now and silent machines above 1Ghz are pretty hard to find. I noticed this when I installed 20 machines in one small room a while ago and could really not hear them much at all compared to my PC here at home. I think they were between 500 and 800 Mhz. So how long do you think it will be before companies such as Alienware will intorduce a water cooling kit as an option for those unwilling to bear with the noise? Do you think they will be too hard to maintain for the average user? What about transporting the machine. I guess you have to drain the system before moving it anywhere right? Any other problems you guys can think of?

 

I think it'll get more and more mainstream... it seems that the Dixons / PC World group will be making an entry into pre modded / modding bits before long. Maplins do water cooling kits already IRC (although they do look crap ). It won't be too long before kits are more readily available, and are even pre installed in systems...

But as you say there will always be some maintenance involved with water cooling, and the fact that water and electricity are involved is going to cause pc resellers a nightmare with warrenties...

I think it's going to remain confined to the relm of the hard core computer users for some time, at least until the necessity for any user involvement in operating the system is removed.

 

I can't find the article right now but I've read something about liquid cooling channels sandwiched between layers of the PCBs for high-heat items.
From what I understand, the coolant is not circulated through all PCBs but rather each one has it's own supply which is self-contained within the board.

These boards still used fans but the size of the fan was greatly reduced from what would have been required to cool the board without the coolant channels.

 

The amount of little rich oys with dady's money who want a cool looking computer out there, water cooling SHOULD NOT become mainstream. There are too many people who do not know how to maintain a computer. I know some people who wont leran things about the hardware in their computer because they say they'll break it. No matter how much you tell them they just want something done for them. They would never maintain a watercooled rig properly. I had people tell me they saw a watercooled computer and it was soo cool. There was air bubled going through the tubes too, they say. I thought air aws VERY bad for a water cooling system. This shows that some peopole can afford it, but not set it up or maintain it properly. I get a little depressed everytime I see a gimmicky premade watercooling setup on an online retailer's website. I know that some poor fool will buy it and know nothing about it, possibly damaging their system. If watercooling becomes mainstream the quality of products WILL decrease. People will go for looks or cost and be confused by technical stuff. With a smaller community of water coolers, we can communicate and the garbage products are easily (sometimes) sifted out and the people in the know will buy what works the best.


I'm getting tired of typing, and I think thats long enough.

 

This is an interesting comment, and I can see how this can go both ways. I think alot of people would agree that watercooling is pretty expensive compare to the alternative (hsf). If you bring something into the mainstream then more innovation comes out of it and prices drop. Competition is what drives the market and is better for the consumer.

On the other hand...initially you will have alot of crap watercooling gear out there. Alot of whats out there now is crap and there alot of confusion on whats "good". At its current state watercooling will never be mainstream, only a hobbiest type thing.

I couldnt imagine my mom in the future filling/bleeding her 5.8GHZ watercooled amdtel machine

 

Too much work to keep it up...Koolance is great and all but it doesnt compare to a real watercooling system.....Unless theres need for it on newer chips id like to see most people going to passive coolers myself

 

didnt intel say it would cap heat output at 100 watts to prevent manufacturers from having to do this?

 

Yea, hence why they keep lowering the manuf. process to keep the heat down. Hence why 3.2ghz P4s are the last you will see cause they kick out 85W+ of heat, as did the old 1.4Tbirds AMD made. I doubt itll become too mainstream cause itll cost them too much to repair and replace stuff when people spill water over the insides of their PCs.

 

I must disagree. Cast your mind back to say, 1996. Modding was in its infancy. You would have been hard pressed to find a nice black or alu case (anything non-beige, in fact). Now, thanks to modding becoming more popular, we have excellent cases from the likes of Coolermaster and Lian-Li. In fact, more and moe modding stuff is coming out. A lot of it is crap, but quite a bit of it is quality also (think Matrix Orbital or CrystalFontz. Think better fans and heatsinks).

Same with other hardware; GPUs for instance certainly have not suffered from PCs generally becoming mainstream machines (I remember when PC graphics and sound were pitiful in comparison to an Atari 5200 or Amiga).

"Mainstream" indicates market demand. This indicates that if you make cool stuff, there will be buyers for it. Moreover, there will be buyers who want even cooler stuff to differentiate themselves from the mainstream. I say, bring it on!

 

DeX wrote:

The July issue of MaximumPC shows a VooDoo PC F-510 Stealth which has the CPU and video card water cooled. Their is one little problem. This system costs $6.918.00 .

 

Makes my project look very reasonable...

 

There are a couple of alternatives, and remember much of the
planet has been tearing out mainframe chilled-water systems.

o Heatpipe solutions
---- not necessarily to static heatsinks forming case structure

o Dual-Single-CPU - 2 CPU work alternately as 1 CPU to outside
---- so heat-per-mm^2 density is solved
---- one runs whilst the other cools

o Actual enclosure design
---- remember 300cfm will cool 1500W
---- the issue is getting air to where it is needed & away from it

An example of the latter is a Dell Dual-CPU machine:
o You have a dual CPU system = 2 fans
---- density/size restrictions require small form factor fans
---- small form factor = higher rpm = more noise
o You have a high heat content = 1 case fan
---- to prevent CPU-cooler recirculation of heat requiring more rpm
---- where more rpm = more noise

Instead Dell used a highly lateral solution, quite literally: Duct.
An minor improvement on previous PC solutions of Duct Tape,
it does actually work - one large rear fan & just CPU heatsinks.

Thus you get the cfm required for the wattage to be cooled,
and that cfm is achieved by pulling it over the heatsinks and
straight to the exterior of the case to improve (or not) your
thermal environment. A future question will be cooling people

So there are many solutions.
The problem remains and is very real:
o We can shrink die-size & chip voltage fast
o We are elevating clock frequency & CPU size even faster

At present, following Moore's law, by 2010-2012 we will have
10,000W per CPU. Clearly something must give, and that is
likely to be cooling - with then a problem for the IT cycle. The
engine behind the IT cycle has long been CPU speed/bits.

The transition from 16-bit to 32-bit took ~6-7yrs for software
to fully fuel uptake from early to mass-adopters, as in the case
of 286 to 386 & 68xxx to PPC. The same is likely to be true for
64-bit, or will it - the Opteron is 64-bit at a price-point of Xeon.

That is likely to see Intel rush thro more clock frequency hikes,
although they have 2 clock frequency parameters to play with.
o Keep control of the headline overall clock frequency
o Play around with the front-side bus clock frequency

Intels job is to increase back to pre-1995 the innovation to
product cycle lag, from present "minimal pricing/profit power".
AMDs job is to force Intel to cut prices

Hopefully our job isn't eventually to wear earplugs or sit butt
naked in front of the computer, or cook & heat homes by it

Water cooling is the mass transfer of heat by a circulatory
system which is quieter than normal air-means. Heatpipes are
a consumer-maintenance-free alternative, although I still wonder
about internal deposition of contaminates on the "boiling" surface
which plagued IBM mainframe cooling modules as I recall.

Rapidly we are hitting the problems that mainframes hit.
--
Dorothy Bradbury
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/dorothy.bradbury/panaflo.htm (Free 1st-Class Shipping)

 

I don't think watercooling will never go mainstream, for the time that more powerfull cpus will be manufactured, other cooling solutions (not liquid) will be adopted.

 

There is, of course, the option of making heatsinks in a more thermally conductive material: pure carbon, for instance (since diamond will still lie a tiny bit outside the realistic price range ). Some prototypes already exist. Then there are all those trick artificial ceramics...

Perhaps there will be a sharp look at CPU construction again. Integrated heat dissipation in the actual die, for instance --there are some experiments on etching itty-bitty tiny heatpipe matrices in the silicon die.

Laser cooling? Works only on molecular level so far, but hey, who knows...

Meanwhile, forget CFCs. Global warming is due to PCs!