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For The Overclocking Junkie
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Fri Jun 30, 2000 11:46 AM
from the now-this-is-just-plain-sick dept.
from the now-this-is-just-plain-sick dept.
wilderf writes: "Check out this site. A group of crazy overclockers decided to fully submerge a motherboard in a liquid nitrogen cooled fluorinert? bath (Fluorinert? is an electronic testing fluid manufactured by 3M? -- $500/gallon), to see how much they could overclock the CPU. Crazy." The site is pretty impressive too, if you're the sort of sadist who loves torturing hardware.
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For the Overclocking Junkie
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In the words of Stan Marsh... (Score:3)
Why is it that alcohol is always involved in such insane experiments??? I mean, Mary Shelly never said that Dr. Frankenstein was blitzed when we was working on the monster... Got to be a techie thing.
Re:In the words of Stan Marsh... (Score:5)
Yeah, but Mary Shelley was pretty fucked up when she wrote that, so she probably forgot.
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Brittleness (Score:3)
Today, people have found out that if you submerge an object in liquid nitrogen or liquid O2 then let it heat up to room temperature over the span of ~week that it actually increases the strength of the material, at least it works for metals. (Over_simplification)This occures due to the material aligning itself into a stronger crystal lattice, which will remain if the heating process is not so sudden as cause enough immediate energy to break the bonds. When the material finishes reaching room temp, if it was heated slowly enough, the stronger crystal lattice will remain, ergo making the object stronger.(
From what I have heard, disposable razors that have had this done to them will keep their edge for months.
I doubt that they waited a long enough time for that to happen. And of course, if they heated it up too quickly then the material would expand too quickly and it would shatter.
Hope that was helpful.
Reversal of the process (Score:5)
There are other subtle effects. The light slows down since it has to travel through liquid before hitting the retina. Finger movements slow down, as do mouse movements.
Water is also cheaper than liquid nitrogen, and easily available in swimming pools and oceans. Why not try this intriguing method today and see if it works for you? Oh, and you won't believe what it feels like when you're swimming underwater in Quake III. Very realistic.
w/m.
Re:Short out? (Score:5)
I think that Cray had 3m develop this stuff from scratch back in the day when they sold 9 out of 10 machines to the government.
They use basically the same stuff in medical situations (to keep your blood pressure up if no blood's on hand) and it can be oxygenated and breathed - as in The Abyss. What they didn't mention in the movie though was that it's so dense, you're not really going to be doing a hell of a lot while you breath it. Breathing it is hard work, it's so thick.
Unfortunately it runs about $500 a gallon. These guys blew a grand just on their Fluorinert. Stirring fans might help a little, but it does gel up a lot between IIRC -50 to -100 C. Perhaps they'll just immerse the whole board into liquid Helium next time
(Of course, I remember hearing about one guy once who cooled his system with some kind of motor oil)
Re:Why o/c? (Score:3)
It's likely illegal for the store to void the warranty on the computer if you open it, even if you agreed to it when purchasing it. Consumer protection laws usually prevent the warranty from being voided by self repairs on hardware that contains user-servicable parts. That's why a lot of hardware (air conditioners, VCRs, etc) are labelled as not containing any user-servicable parts.
So if they try to void the warranty because you opened the case, tell them you'll take it to a competitor to be fixed and bill them, and back the bill up with small claims court if they get fussy. It'll stick and you'll have made a stand against the assholes of the world.
(This has nothing to do with overclocking. Running a CPU past its rated speed, regardless of if it will do it, will void the warranty on the CPU and mobo, unless it's a mobo from an OC-friendly company like ASUS or ABit who serve the hardware hacker community.)
For the record, my new 600E is a happy 800EB with an Alpha PEP66T cooler. A $35 cooler, but one I can keep for years. A good investment versus spending $250 more for the faster CPU. And my ASUS P3V4X is an overclocker's dream.
All that work to get a 650MHz Celeron? (Score:5)
Running electronics immersed in Fluorinert [electronics-cooling.com] is an old idea. The Cray 2 [microsoft.com] was cooled that way. This was more trouble than it was worth, and no later supercomputer used that approach. But Cray built one of the coolest looking computers of all time. The cabinet had windows and the liquid coolant was illuminated. Even the Cray 2 heat exchanger was beautiful.
Re:Why o/c? (Score:4)
What? I have been running overclocked machines for years now, and I never spend ANY additional money. I simply bought a GOOD fan the first time out (a good idea even if you DON'T overclock) and I use a good motherboard.
I ran a P-II 333 at 416 for over a year. Now I run a Celeron 366 at 450. The Celeron cost me LESS than the P-II. I use an Asus P2B motherboard and a SIIG fan.
The whole POINT to overclocking is to NOT spend extra money. Buy a chip in your price range, and oc it. If it doesn't run at a higher speed, fine, run it the rated speed.
Oh, and as for your comments about instability, if you are experiencing instability, you should reduce your clock speed. Not all chips overclock well. (Which is why I run my 366 at 450, and not 500)
(was I just trolled?)-CZ
Re:From one weblog to another... (Score:3)
At K5 [kuro5hin.org] you don't see noise like this. The signal/noise ratio is almost perfect...
From a code [kuro5hin.org] standpoint, it is much more stable than slashcode IMHO, and it has been open from the beginning. People are activly developing it.
-Davidu
Re:Cray and Flourinert (Score:3)
The Cray-2 fully immersed all components in the nert, which flowed cold into the bottom of the tank and was taken hot out of the top. You could watch the bubbles flow upwards and it was extremely cool. It was fun to watch operators top off the nert reservoir occasionally by glugging a gallon into the inlet.
Later machines (Y-MP, C-90, T3D, T3E) ran the nert through channels in the modules, and some had air-cooled versions for smaller configurations. The "LC" or "AC" in a T3E machine designation refers to "liquid cooled" or "air cooled".
On the Cray-3, we ran the nert through a fuel-injector-like nozzle to spray it as a vapor on to the chips. A bunch of other schemes were tried.
Disclaimer: I'm a software guy, not a mechanical engineer.
Re:cray (Score:3)
The Cray 1 was freon cooled, Cray 2 was fluorinert, C90 was air (I think), XMP/YMP were air...
Then the T90 [cray.com]s, introduced in ~1994, used a big ol' fluorinert tank. Highend, high density Cray boxen (T90 [cray.com]) use this cooling, smaller machines (J90 [cray.com], SV1 [cray.com]) are air cooled in temperature controlled environments, and some, like the T3E [cray.com] can be water cooled or air cooled, depending on the configuration.
Re:Extreme caution: SAFETY WARNING (Score:5)
It is not enough for the Fluorinert to catch on fire or be next to a fire. What one does have to worry about is thermal decomposition; this will require extreme heat (according to the Material Safety Data Sheets, on the order of 1400 degrees). For comparison, a paper/wood fire burns at most about 700 degrees even with a significant fuel source and a CPU (the "Cray" that you allude to in your garbage anecdote) will not even be able to function with junction temperatures even close to a thousand degrees. You will not achieve thermal decomposition short of heating the Fluorinert on a laboratory burner or sticking molten metal into a beaker of the stuff. You must really misuse and torture the stuff to get anywhere near that point.
Moreover, what you really have to worry about is perfluoroisobutylene instead of hydrogen fluoride vapor. HF's thresehold long term tolerability is about 3ppm and it's LD50 is a lot higher than this. It will take more than 1 breath at any conceivably acheivable concentration to kill you. In any case, even a lethal dose will take more than 30 second to take effect upon intial contact or exposure (I've seen toxicity figures of about 10 minutes for exposure to hydrocyanic acid vapor, significantly more lethal than HF). Perfluoroisobutylene, on the other hand, will inhibit oxygen uptake by selectively binding with the -heme analogues in red blood cells much more efficiently.
Basic summary: Signal 11 is talking out of his ass again. You can mostly ignore his dramatics (but please consult your materials handling and safety staff if you plan to use Fluorinert) if you exercise reasonable prudence and care in using Fluorinert. "EXTREME CAUTION" is not neccesary, in the sense if one were handling certain organic mercury compounds or some other fluorine/chlorine compounds. Oh, and the oxygen masks: they're there so that any person unfortunate to be stuck in the machine room and who cannot reach the hold-off switch will not sufficate from oxygen displacement, not for poisoning (which would require a directed positive pressure system, instead of a mere supplementary oxygen mask).
Re:Why o/c? (Score:4)
Why develop switches and 1GHz Ethernet?
Why even bother having computers in the first place?
Okay, so maybe liquid nitro overclocking isn't very revolutionary, but it falls under the same umbrella that the above topics do. Curiousity + [moderate] intelligence + interesting subject. "What would happen if..." You know?
As far as "why overclocking" in general... well, I just bought a Celeron-II 566 for $80, put it on an Abit SlotKET !!! and a Golden Orb, flipped a switch and BINGO an (albiet crippled) 850MHz Coppermine for about $100, $110. That's more than 8MHz on the dollar. Compared to a Pentium III 700 (which has about the same performance) for $250 or $260 (again, including slotket and cooling fan). With the money I saved I bought a GeForce.
Morals... I'm a happy owner of an 8088, an 80486SX, and a Pentium MMX, so I have plenty to get Intel back for.
As an aside: The BX chipset overclocked to 133MHz FSB (it officially only supports 66 and 100) is still the top-performing platform out of the Apollo Pro 133A, the Intel i815, and the Intel i840 w/ Rambus. Overclocking helps here, too.
Nerds buy the newest components so they have a fast machine. If they can have a fast machine on the cheap, so much the better. If they have some extra cash to spend and they want the fastest machine in the world, they buy flourinert and LN2. What can I say? It's cool.
Alakaboo
Had they simply RTFM . . . (Score:3)
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Re:Short out? (Score:4)
I can see it now... (Score:3)
Wow.. (Score:4)
* For doing this in the first place
* For getting such an image-intensive, long site linked to Slashdot
Mirrors, anyone?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
Re:Extreme caution: SAFETY WARNING (Score:3)
Re:cray (Score:3)
The Cray 2 was cooled by immersing it into a big vat 'o flourinert which was circulated through a heat exchanger with water to keep it at around 55 (or 65?) degrees.
Y-MP has a flourinert pocket between cicuit boards so it is cooled that way. That (apparently) solved the cooling problems they had with the Cray 1/Cray X-MP.
C90, T3D and T3E were cooled much like the Y-MP. No Cray uses water cooling since water is a conductor. They have heat exchangers to cool circulating flourinert with water.
There was a deskside version of the Y-MP and that along with J90, low end T3E's, and SV1 are all air cooled.
Price on Flourinert (Score:3)
Why o/c? (Score:5)
BUT I DON'T THINK SO!
In my own case, I'm running a Dual Celery 400 o/c-ed at 500... I know it's no big deal, or anything, but in order to achieve that speed, I had to spend a _lot_ of money for new CPU and case fans, thermal grease, etc. I also have to make sure my room doesn't get too hot. And all sorts of other problems.
Soon after I did this, I wanted to push the CPU's even higher. But I realized that I'm spending so much money it wasn't even worth it. All the stuff I bought for o/c-ing cost me much more than the difference in price between my 400s and the 500s.
That's when I realized that I'm doing something silly. I'm spending a lot of money so that I can have an unstable, warranty-voided, pretty fast computer, when I could have a stable, still-under-warranty, just as fast computer, for the same price. So that's when I decided that o/c-ing is not worth the trouble.
But hey, for those who can afford it, it's certainly cool!