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Hardware Technology

Doomsday PC-Cooling With Dual-Cascade Coolers 311

Posted by timothy from the preserves-salmon-too dept.
An anonymous reader submits "Four (4) compressors cooling one PC! Yes, it's big, yes it's heavy, yes it's loud and yes it does get your CPU and GPU cold, very cold. Is -100C cold enough for you? Cascade cooling is yet another chapter in a Finnish overclocker's neverending quest for optimal PC performance. Those things go down to -80 to -100C and can maintain the temperature. See here for the whole article with the pictures of the project."
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Doomsday PC-Cooling With Dual-Cascade Coolers More

Doomsday PC-Cooling With Dual-Cascade Coolers

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  • In Finland... (Score:5, Funny)

    by inteller ( 599544 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:30PM (#7741262)
    ....wouldn't they just put their computers outside to get this kind of cooling?

    • Re:In Finland... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by msmikkol ( 155023 )
      But its the damn Gulf stream in the Atlantic that keeps (at least) southern Finland relatively warm, considering the geographic location...

    • Re:In Finland... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Soporific ( 595477 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:38PM (#7741333)
      I know that's what we do here in Minnesota. Of course we only can overclock for what seems like 11 months out of the year, but you do have to get out every now and then to soak up some vitamin D. ~S

    • Re:In Finland... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Shut the fuck up! ( 572058 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:40PM (#7741342)
      ....wouldn't they just put their computers outside to get this kind of cooling?

      No, you got it all wrong. He is overclocking to stay warm. All those compressors must generate a lot of heat.

    • Re:In Finland... (Score:3, Informative)

      by apharov ( 598871 )
      Sorry to disappoint you with this, but it really doesn't work that way... While the temperatures would be quite about the same as in this refrigerator the terrible weather would kill any computer in a few seconds ;)

      Seriously though, often in winter when I have had to melt my freezer / refrigerator I've just put the foodstuffs in a box on the windowsill and opened the ventilation window. Everything stays frozen for at least long enough to to get the extra ice out of the freezer. I'm saying this as a Finn of

    • Re:In Finland... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Pieroxy ( 222434 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:58PM (#7741461) Homepage
      While putting the computer outside is a stupid idea, I can think of a very simple system over there. Just drill two 1-inch wide holes in the wall next to your computer, attach two tubes to it and link them at the CPU fan level. This way the fan will get fresh air from outside to the CPU, and then throw it out. After all, that's what the compressor is all about: Getting something cold. The air outside should do it.

      Of course, you need to drill holes in your house...
    • I need the heat to heat up my room damnit! I don't have any extra heat to waste.

      -

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:31PM (#7741264)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:minimum temperature (Score:5, Informative)

      by frdmfghtr ( 603968 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:45PM (#7741377)
      when you have an accident with liquid nitrogen you lose a finger. when you have an accident with liquid helium, you lose parts of the neighborhood.

      You're thinking of liquid hydrogen, not helium. Liquid helium is damn cold, yes, but it won't explode.

    • Re:minimum temperature (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Zeinfeld ( 263942 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @10:00PM (#7741472) Homepage
      with these loonys getting their temps down so low, i wonder what the limit is. i believe at around -200 the silicon seperates from the housing, destroying the chip.

      I can't remember how low we went with the Transputers but they ran damn fast dunked in liquid helium. The processors did not reach the level of the helium because it was constantly evaporating.

      The limit to overclocking is highly processor dependent. Some designs will simply end up in a race condition because some parts of the chip will work much faster than others and you end up missing the right edge of a pulse. Basically you give yourself a whole new region to discover timing errors in the design.

      I don't think that the physical process is going to be a fixed limit, clearly this will be very dependent on the physical packaging. Chips are sent into space to face some pretty unpleasant temperature ranges.

      Depending on your material there is a point when your band gap goes all wonky and things start breaking down. Most times what you are worried about is the effect in the high temperature region, but there are equally wierd things in the low temperature region.

      This is definitely not something that is recommended for most applications. There are a couple of oddball ones, like cryptanalysis where it is really hard to get a result but once you get one it is trivial to check. I would not be surprised if GCHQ has a swimingpool sized machine for brute force key cracking dunked in some type of cooling liquid. The NSA would just chuck money at the problem.

  • Not Quite (Score:5, Funny)

    by qewl ( 671495 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:31PM (#7741269)
    It's not cold enough unless it can offset global warming. AND refrigerate my beer.

    • Re:Not Quite (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Any cooling device creates more heat then it removes, due to some law ot theromdynamics.
      • the second.

      • Re:Not Quite (Score:3, Funny)

        by notyou2 ( 202944 )
        "Lisa, in this house... --[fuck it, nevermind]--

      • Re:Not Quite (Score:2, Insightful)

        by ottffssent ( 18387 )
        Not quite, yourself.

        Consider a heatsink. It removes lots of heat from a CPU, but generates no heat at all. That said, any devices which cools something beyond ambient temperature will generate heat of its own, which is nearly what you said.
        • Again, not quite.

          If the cooling device is active (i.e. requires energy other than the heat it is moving to operate), it generates some waste heat.

          Sorry to be a pedant, but your model leaves out active cooling devices that try valiantly to cool their subject below ambient temperature, but can't quite keep up.
    • It's not cold enough unless it can offset global warming.

      No, it's not cold enough unless it can withstand a slashdotting without bursting into flames.

      I think they should have spent more time cooling their webserver, cause that puppy's crisp. Or mysql melted down...ba da dum dum dum, another mysql bites the dust...

    • Re:Not Quite (Score:5, Informative)

      by viniosity ( 592905 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:58PM (#7741464) Homepage Journal
      Impossible due to the first law of thermodynamics which states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Here's a good link to brush up on your thermo101:

      http://www.geog.ouc.bc.ca/physgeog/contents/6e.h tm l
    • Oh well, I guess one out of two ain't bad.

      Tough luck on the beer.

  • IMAGINE.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheDarkener ( 198348 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:31PM (#7741271) Homepage
    A Beowulf cluster of compressors on a Beowulf cluster of computers!

    Umm.....

  • Billy Bob? (Score:3, Funny)

    by pegr ( 46683 ) * on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:31PM (#7741273) Homepage Journal
    Billy Bob, don't cha think ya got a little too much time on your hands?

  • Cold feet (Score:4, Funny)

    by Capt'n Hector ( 650760 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:32PM (#7741275)
    Wouldn't your legs and feet get cold sitting next to that thing?

    • Forget cold feet... (Score:4, Informative)

      by WIAKywbfatw ( 307557 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:57PM (#7741454) Journal
      Summary: Four (4) compressors cooling one PC! Yes its big, yes its heavy, yes its loud and YES IT DOES GET YOUR CPU AND GPU COLD - VERY COLD - EVEN DAMN COLD! Is -100C cold enough for you?

      Forget the cold feet, it's going deaf from the noise all that cooling generates that is your real problem. What's the point of having a PC that's so loud that you need to wear ear mufflers to be able to use it or else risk losing your hearing?

      Being able to hear yourself think while you work or hear the in-game audio while you play is a good thing.

  • Practical application? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Aviancer ( 645528 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:32PM (#7741279) Homepage Journal
    Perhaps they should consider applying this research to their webserver, which appears to be having dififculties keeping up with requests ATM...

  • Nice. (Score:4, Funny)

    by i_am_syco ( 694486 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:33PM (#7741280)
    Looks like Intel might license this for their new P4s at 4 GHz. After cooling it down, the chip is almost cool enough to run!

  • neverending quest? (Score:5, Funny)

    by toddhunter ( 659837 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:33PM (#7741281)
    Keep playing around with stuff at -100 and the quest is going to end one way or another

  • big and heavy? (Score:5, Funny)

    by civilengineer ( 669209 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:33PM (#7741287) Homepage Journal
    Yes, it's big, yes it's heavy, yes it's loud and yes it does get your CPU and GPU cold, very cold.
    You talking about my wife?

  • absolute zero? (Score:5, Funny)

    by psoriac ( 81188 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:34PM (#7741294)
    How close to absolute zero would we have to cool a processor so that we could overclock it enough to handle a good slashdotting?

  • Doesn't it defeat the purpose of overclocking?

    I thought you did that to get more out of your CPU than what you paid for.

    If you are spending more on the cooling than on the computer, then why not get a faster one, or a second one (or dual, or whatever)?

    Heh, I guess there's the whole hobby "I do it because it's fun!" thing that explains it...

  • Damaging to the machines? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Alphanos ( 596595 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:36PM (#7741314)
    I don't know much about this kind of cooling, but if the compressors are being used to cool the air going through these machines, wouldn't they be worried about physically damaging the machines by cracking them? Keeping a computer cool is all well and good, but at a certain temperature the physical elements composing the hardware are bound to contract different amounts, causing damage. Maybe this only happens at -250 degrees, and not -100, but presumably there is a reason that hardware manufacturers state a minimum operating temperature for their components.
    • Minimum operating temperature is specified only because they test them to that temperature.

      They have no idea at all how much lower they can go before they fail.

      Same with maxima.
    • Even glass doesn't crack unless you heat (or cool) it unevenly and rapidly. Most if not all of the materials used in a computer will be more tolerant of temperature differentials across them than glass will, except in the cases where they utilize glass (in some laptop hard drives.)

  • The finnish ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by KRYnosemg33 ( 709857 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:37PM (#7741323)
    What's the finnish word for ... compensating?

  • counterproductive (Score:3, Funny)

    by mkavanagh ( 641055 ) <`matthew' `at' `redwood.eclipse.co.uk'> on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:39PM (#7741336) Journal
    looks like someone is ignoring the fact that overcooling your processor will lead to early failure.

  • Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pla ( 258480 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:41PM (#7741347) Journal
    Just that - Why?

    Hey, I can appreciate water cooling. Keep the chip at basically room temperature, it increases its life and the OC'ers can push it a bit. But -100? WHY??? What possible use can this serve?

    It doesn't even seem "cool" at this point (beyond the obvious pun). Wasting hundreds of watts, taking up way too much room (extra-large form-factor, anyone?), needing a fork-lift to move it... How does any of that benefit the PC or user?

    Some things have an upper limit to what still constitutes "bigger/better/faster/harder". This definitely crosses that line with regard to chip cooling techniques.

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by wackybrit ( 321117 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:48PM (#7741398) Homepage Journal
      Because the colder you make a processor, the further you can push it.

      If you can keep a chip at 0 celsius (as you can with many PC cooling units out there), you can get at least another 1GHz out of your chip, meaning your 3GHz PC is now a 4GHz power house.

      And so it goes with the lower you go. At -100C you could probably keep your 3GHz PC up at around the 14GHz area, which is way faster than anything on the market. Isn't it worth the money on cooling to experience a slice of tomorrow?

      • Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Idarubicin ( 579475 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @10:14PM (#7741554) Journal
        And so it goes with the lower you go. At -100C you could probably keep your 3GHz PC up at around the 14GHz area, which is way faster than anything on the market. Isn't it worth the money on cooling to experience a slice of tomorrow?

        This works to a point...but there are physical limits to how fast a present-day chip can be overclocked. Aside from potential limits on how fast gates can switch inside the chips, you start running into concerns about things like the speed of light.

        At a hypothetical 15 GHz, light will travel 2 centimetres (about 0.8 inches) per clock cycle. The Pentium 4 die is about 1.7 cm on a side, with a 2.1 cm diagonal. If one corner of the chip needs to talk to the other corner of the chip, it will take a minimum of two clock cycles just for the signal to travel there and back--and that neglects the fact that electrons move slower than light. You can bet that Intel's designers didn't anticipate those kinds of timing issues.

        So you might be able to clock a 3 GHz chip to 4 or 4.5 GHz with this setup, and do so much more stably with less wear and tear on the chip--but you're not going to be able to scale the chip's speed to 10 or 15 GHz.

        • Of course theres few direct paths like that across the die. Because of design considerations, signals take a somewhat circuitous route (pun completely intended). Because of this, they build flip-flops in wire to buffer the signals between clock ticks.

          If your clock is running high enough that the longest distance between buffer flip-flops is too far for the signal to reach, you'll have unreliable stability, obviously.

          And since intel, amd et al. never intended this particular class of chips to reach 15 gh

        • Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)

          by barawn ( 25691 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @11:29PM (#7741975) Homepage
          You can bet that Intel's designers didn't anticipate those kinds of timing issues.

          Actually, just to nitpick: they did.

          There are two (maybe three? I can't remember off the top of my head) pipeline stages in the P4 which are "drive" stages - stages where the pipeline does nothing except wait for data to travel from one side of the chip to another.

          It was part of Intel's design to allow the clockspeed of the chips to reach ~ 10 GHz.

          Now, that being said, that's the fundamental design, not the current design. Almost definitely a modern chip can't run even twice as fast as its rated clock speed. The chance of the margins being that large are just zero.

        • Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by ChaoticLimbs ( 597275 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @11:32PM (#7741993) Journal
          And this limitation is why in the future, all computers will have multiple processors. Think about it- your computer ALREADY DOES! It has a CPU, several controllers and a Graphics processor. Your sound card has a microprocessor, and your various port controllers all do some work as well. Some of the work in the future will have to be subdivided. We'll have speech synthesis on our audio boards, and full raytracing on the video card. Maybe one processor will handle user input such as speech recognition. I don't think one single processor is going to get much faster than 8GHz anytime soon. They're already having serious trouble getting incremental speed increases to make a serious difference in useable processing.

          • Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)

            by drinkypoo ( 153816 )
            The really sad thing is that programmers don't seem to like threads, but they're going to have to learn to like them if we're all using SMP machines. Presumably SMP will take off sometime around 4GHz, because then you approach the frequencies used in Microwave ovens. Yes, it is possible to use shielding, but the shielding will heat up, and heat is already a major problem. Of course, if we came up with some method to decrease the power consumption of CPUs significantly that would also solve this problem, but

    • Why Not? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SkArcher ( 676201 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:56PM (#7741447) Journal
      Lets face it, there are far more destructive ways to waste money than by attempting to make the fastest Home PC on the Planet.

      Why climb the mountain? Because it is there.

      Doing it just for the sake of having done it is enough, if that is what you want to do.
    • Simple, they are enthusiasts and love what they do. Sure they could go buy a faster cpu for the money they spent on doing it, but the idea when you goto such extreme cooling isnt enlarging your "e-peen" it's pushing the envelope to the next level.

      Example: A rig with a barton 2500 (pre the multiplier locking bs AMD pulled) comes stock at 1.83 ghz.. with a good hsf you could probably get 2.5ghz but not much more than that becuase the power you need to pump into it, if you can get that processor running at
    • One can just buy a dual Athlon MP, dual Xeon or even Opteron and have it work stably and without trouble. It is amusing to play with all this but I'd say there is a diminishing return where things are pointlessly overkill.

      I'm not sure what the point of going so frigid as most life, power and frequency derating curves start at 25 degrees C. Temperatures below that usually get little benefit of going higher because of limits other than temperature.
    • It doesn't even seem "cool" at this point (beyond the obvious pun). Wasting hundreds of watts, taking up way too much room (extra-large form-factor, anyone?), needing a fork-lift to move it... How does any of that benefit the PC or user?

      Some things have an upper limit to what still constitutes "bigger/better/faster/harder". This definitely crosses that line with regard to chip cooling techniques.

      It's the fun of it - not just because anyone can go grab a refrigerator, pay for the price of running it, and

  • What about cracking? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by atrader42 ( 687933 )
    This seems all well and good while the machine is running. What happens when you boot it up or shut it down, though? In the summer, you could be dropping or increasing 130 degrees C. Even if the cooler can normally regulate this, what happens if the machine loses power? (no, I couldn't rtfa, it's slashdotted)
  • In my book, 'optimal PC performance' involves consistant operation over a long period of time. This ignores the fact that the processor may be capable of more speed because of the nature of MHz ratings, but in the long run, this is 'optimal'.

    This is interesting, and impressive, and admirable as an engineering exercise, but not exactly in persuit of mainstream 'optimal' performance characteristics. (Unless I RTFA and find that the processor does indeed last a good long time, and not burn bright and die out
  • Cascade cooling is yet another chapter in a Finnish overclocker's neverending quest for optimal PC performance

    I don't suppose he considered, oh, say, a dual/quad xeon/amd-64?

    AMD 64 bit dual rackmount boxes are about $2.5k these days with low-end disk, and they'd probably kick the crap out of whatever he's got.

    Or he could go for some really big iron.

    I personally can't wait until he gets his electric bill- refrigeration units are VERY power hungry.

    • which would be 2.5k$ more(the refrigators seem to have been free for him) and much less fun(it's quite obvious that macci isn't doing this for profit, if you don't count advertising - he seems to be affiliated with a finnish pc shop).

      depending on what he heats his house with the bill might be ridiculous though, though i'm guessing the use for this rig will mainly be for short oc record runs(and as such might save a bundle as he doesn't need to get dry ice or liquid nitrogen for those attempts anymore).

      suc
  • someone will be able to play doom 3 on doomsday
  • And when you're done overclocking for the day, you can line up the old women in the neighborhood and freeze off their old warts for a modest sum. And they said military gear had dual-uses!

  • Stage 1 is -40C (Score:3, Funny)

    by karlandtanya ( 601084 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @10:06PM (#7741498)
    But what is that in F?

  • 4.4 ghz (Score:2, Informative)

    by cmacmanus ( 713176 )
    So, he was able to obtain somewhere around 4.4 GHZ on a 3GHZ Pentium setup, with XP to boot [blegh]. Not bad, but give me a year and I'll have the same thing at not such an inane temp. and size. Admirable project, nonetheless.

  • Article Text (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @10:11PM (#7741537)

    Summary: Four (4) compressors cooling one PC! Yes its big, yes its heavy, yes its loud and YES IT DOES GET YOUR CPU AND GPU COLD - VERY COLD - EVEN DAMN COLD! Is -100C cold enough for you?

    Intro

    If you are an overclocker you know that keeping things cool is the key for big clockspeeds. The cooler that comes with the CPU ain't going to get you very far. It must be replaced with better cooling if you want to get really high clocks out of your hardware. But what is good enough? Even the biggest and baddest heatsinks won't get your temps much colder - in other words they wont give you much extra in terms of MHz. Watercooling is a nice option cos it has huge cooling capacity but does it really give you a big gain in CPU speed? Usually no because it can't get colder than the air cooling the water. So what can you do if you really need to get more speed out of your system??

    Vaporphase cooling is the answer here. Vaporphase cooling is what keeps your freezer and ice cream cold. Vaporphase cooling is what 'all the xtreme-overclockers' are using nowadays. Several people have noticed that going from +40C to -40C makes quite a difference in CPU overclocking potential (talking about 200-600MHz here). There are even commercial solutions that go all the way down to -40C and even a bit colder. If you feel that you must get one of these just go to nVentiv website, check who is your local reseller and get one

    But what if you are a real speedfreak and -40C ain't cold enough for you?? Well there is always dryice (-79C) or Liquid Nitrogen (-196C) or even liquid Helium (-268.6 C) for you but the problem is that its not really possible to get constant CPU cooling with these. LN2 and helium are actually too cold for your little CPU - it just wont operate properly at such low temps.

    But you know those low-temp freezers they use in labs? Those that go down to like -80..-100C and can maintain the temperature. Good temps for CPU cooling eh?
    These are cascade vaporphase coolers. They are called cascades because of multiple cooling stages (normally two). First stage uses 'normal' refrigerant like R404 or R507 and cools down to around -40C. The second stage uses a special low temp refrigerant like R23 or SUVA95 or R1150 and can get the temperature down to -100C level. The first stage evaporator is cooling down the condenser of the 2nd stage - this makes it possible to use a refrigerant with very low boiling point in the 2nd stage. Normal cascade design uses two compressors - one per stage. This also means that it is not a very compact cooler.

    Here is a picture of such a freezer (the door has been ripped off):

    Cascade cooling is yet another chapter in my neverending quest for optimal PC performance. I've tried quite a few cooling solutions already (waterchillers, peltiers, R404 vaporphase, dryice, ln2 etc.) but cascade vaporphase was something new to me.
    This time I was lucky enough to locate not only one but TWO cryofreezers - both were supposed to be broken - so I got them for free.
    The first one (the one in the picture on page 1) had problems with the system fan and because of that the owners decided to send it to the junkyard. True, there really was a problem with the fan. It didn't blow any air at all - but then again no power was coming to the fan powerconnector. I made external power input for the fan and it started to work nicely. With the freezer door closed it would get the inside temp down to -91C.
    Obviously it would do nothing for PC cooling in its original form so I had to convert it to a CPU cooler.

    Testing cascade stage 1 - its charged with R404 refrigerant and it went down to -40C.

    2nd stage parts installed - CPU cooler is ready for a test run.

    Its working! First test run got it down to almost -100C with no heatload. Pretty good with R23 refrigerant (boiling point @1bar = -82C).

    Here is a picture of the evaporator installed on P4 motherboard. I was using a 3GHz P4 CPU here and it would clock to around 3.6-3.7GHz with good heatsink. W

  • Space/time/money (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stienman ( 51024 ) <adavis&ubasics,com> on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @10:13PM (#7741551) Homepage Journal
    For all those wailing "Like, WTF?" and "This isn't worth it!" I'll say this once:

    Well duh. Do you think we don't understand the value of time, space, and money and can't do an investment/return calculation?

    This is cool because they can do it. It's on Slashdot because lots of us think it's nifty to turn a 2.2GHz processor into a 4+GHz processor.

    Yes, it does cost more, take more space, and more time to set up than two 3GHz machines, or even a dual processor 3GHz.

    But it's like my high school instructor telling me 10 years ago that making a microcontroller controlled light dimmer [ubasics.com] is non-trivial. I did it then, and it requires fewer than 25 lines of assembly code [ubasics.com] on a simple microcontoller. Was I geeked when I finished? You bet.

    People are constantly trying to break records, and this is no exception. The higher the record is set, the more effort and resources must be put in to beat it.

    -Adam

    Why is it becoming harder to post on slashdot? 4/5 of the time I get an incomplete page when I press submit or preview.
  • The manufacturer specs on my machine clearly indicate a minimum operating temperature of 0 degrees C. IAMNAHG (I am not a hardware guy), but the CPU is only one part of a computer system, and it won't do much good to overclock the CPU if another vital system component freezes to death.

  • Mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by evn ( 686927 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @10:19PM (#7741590)
    The site is a little slow so I've mirrored the low resolution (~640x480) images and text right here [members.shaw.ca]

    Go easy on her, it's on my ISPs web space. Wait a minute, I'm still upset about not have truely unlimited access so on second thought: bag on it! ;)

  • and they still can't wring out enough power to avoid being slashdotted...

  • Freezer? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't use my freezer a whole lot except for ice, So, I made a partition in it and fit a miniitx into approximately half of the freezer box (the network cable comes out of a hole in the freezer lid). Nothing fancy there, I did it just so the whole thing can run fanless. And also because it's something neat to show off to classmates (the dean said I was nuts, but that's the same thing he said about when I said I wanted to build a solar powered boat)

  • too complicated (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @10:40PM (#7741695) Homepage Journal
    The first thing I thought is this is too complicated. A single LN2 compressor, some insulating tubes running into the box, and a heat exchange instead of a heat sink, you could easily chill that baby to 150K. The compressor would not even have to be in the same room. You would even have to charge it often if you kept the N2 clean.

  • Jeez... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Cyno01 ( 573917 ) <Cyno01@hotmail.com> on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @10:45PM (#7741712) Homepage
    With all that was spent on the cooling he could have bought a new processor instead of overclocking his 386 to 4Ghz.

  • Useful! (Score:2, Funny)

    by grmb1 ( 732949 )
    If they can make PC case big and put a door in it, it can be used for long-term food storage. 'Internet connected refrigirator' anyone? :) On the other side, with freezing turned off, you can cook food on CPU, which qualifies it for 'Internet connected owen'. Useful thingie. And a computer too!
  • But slashdot just fried their server.

  • Condensation? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JUSTONEMORELATTE ( 584508 ) on Wednesday December 17, 2003 @12:56AM (#7742488) Homepage
    Ok, I know I'm a late post to the story, but I did RTFA, and he didn't say a word about condensation.
    When he temp-tested the main die, it was covered in frost. Now obviously, this setup was only done to set records, so he's not running it for more than a few minutes.
    What do other sub-freezing cooling systems do about the frost?

    --

  • Whats the point when he can just wait a year... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Wednesday December 17, 2003 @06:17AM (#7743599) Homepage
    ... and AMD/Intel will bring out a processor with that clock speed anyway! And he'll look a bit stupid when his friends have their 4 Ghz desktops and
    he's got his 4Ghz , err , industrial freezer!

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