First Retail Water-Cooled DDR2 Memory Tested 132
Twistedmelon writes "We've all heard of water cooling for processors and even graphics processors,
in today's high end PCs. However, a water cooled memory module is
something that hasn't been done until now. OCZ Technology recently
announced
their line of Flex XLC Water-Cooled RAM, with its integrated heat-spreaders
that can be connected to any standard water cooling system. The memory
operates much cooler under load with tight timings at DDR2-800 speeds. For
those with water-cooling setups,
these DIMMs could easily be tapped into an existing system allowing for
quiet and robust cooling for your system memory as well."
zap... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Amen brother! I also think putting water inside a pc is a bad idea... Water can do too much damage if it leaks, I know the chance is extremely small but I would prefer another material that will cause no damage if it ever leaks.
Not so (Score:4, Informative)
As long as you don't have free electrons, you won't be passing current.
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Not so, maybe... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not so (Score:4, Informative)
The key is to not using dissimalar alloys in your system. An aluminum block and a copper radaitor are going to cause problems, unless you use some of the products out there which combat. That's the real key. Pure water is even more corrosive than tap water. Ideally, you want your alloys to be as close as possible, simply for the fact there will be little electrochemical potential.
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Of course, the following lung trauma is fatal. Still, vorsprung durch technik...
Re:zap... (Score:5, Informative)
NeoThermic
(* ok, it still conducts, but it has a higher resistance, and in computers there's few items that'll make deionized water conduct if it leaks. Much safer than normal water)
Re:zap... (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that what really makes water start to conduct is the impurities dissolved in it. Have you looked inside you computer lately? I've got industrial grade air scrubbers running in my house (roommate with allergies) and I still get dust buildup inside the case. As soon as that deionized water hits that dust, I'm sure the resulting mud would be conductive enough to be devastating.
On the other hand, we are getting closer to the point where everything inside the case that needs cooling could be hooked up to the water system. If we can add power supply and hard drives, then it might be possible to hermetically seal the case, and just cool the water.
Water Cooled PS (Score:1)
The article is about building a plexi box, putting a waterblock in the box, then tossing the PS and some mineral oil in.
Just seems unsettling to have the PS in liquid.
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Your house, OTOH, has windows, doors, and cracks, as well as at least one occupant who probably enters and exits through one of those things periodically. Even if you're the stereotypical slashdotter, your mom probably goes out to buy food once in a while. People who live in biodomes excluded, ho
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But the situation we are talking about is precisely a broken water cooling system. If your water cooling system is, and stays, sealed, I agree, you don't have to worry. What most of us, who are unwilling to take the plunge to water cooling systems, worry about is the results when, not if, it breaks and leaks.
If you have a non-conducting medium, it may be a mess, but not a disaster. If you are using a conducting medium, like water, or one that becomes conducting when it leaks, like deionized water, you
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Well, you could look at it this way: build it well enough, and by the time it becomes likely to leak the computer is obsolete anyway. For example, having a 1% chance of leak within the first 5 years could be "good enough," even if the probability increased exponentially after that.
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Your flaked off skin has high concentrations of various salts in and on it. Back in the day, when they actually did experiments in high school chemistry class, I remember one where we used deionized water, a battery, and a light bulb to show that the water was non-conductive, then added salt and showed that it became a good conductor. That was the experiment I was thinking of when reading the GPs post.
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DI water won't remain nonconductive for long.... (Score:2)
Water cooling has been used for decades in high powered radio and TV transmitters, but such systems incorporate water conductivity monitors to check for dissolved impurities, and some means of removing them (distiller
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Ordinary distilled water is close enough to nonconductive, until it gets contaminated of course.
Deionized water is significant in that it is not only nonconductive, but it is noncorrosive. Water is corrosive because of ions known as hydronium and hydroxide (although as I am chem-bozo-man, I have no idea which is positive and which is negative.) Water will actually react with itself
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DI water will eat metals as it looks to get its ions back.
Distilled water is vastly superior in electronic cooling applications.
We have $500K testers that use distilled water and PG in a 50/50 blend. Use DI water and your warranty is void.
-nB
Re:zap... (Score:5, Informative)
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You will probably also encase the hard disks in sound insulated water blocks and put the pump inside accoustically damping foam.
Cooling is all a question of planning and know what you want to get out of it
Cool, quiet, cheap - pick two!
.....at stock voltages (Score:2)
For them (and me), RAM created heat is a problem.
However, I just hung an old-school ghetto CPU fan over them. I'm not sure I need them water cooled.
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But you're right, w/c might still have a place for people who are out for the latest extreme overclock.
Maybe I'm just boring. (Score:1)
And some people would prefer if we hug trees instead of pondering how to spend more power to remove the heat from all the power we're pumping into our gaming rigs.
Hmm... wonder how many comments we'll get with 'afraid of water' and 'liquid
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Re:zap... (Score:4, Funny)
It gives new meaning to the term "memory leak", no?
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Oilcomputer (Score:2)
Seymour Cray would have been proud. (Score:2)
Soon enough. (Score:4, Funny)
And then someone will get the smart idea to stick his whole tower in the freezer. Then nerds will become buff by moving around all their heavy equipment.
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Been done. There's a two-stage system on the market (I think the ad was in CPU Mag) that uses a Peltier device to cool the water.
rj
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This is one of the reasons that putting a PC in a freezer is not a good idea. Asside from the condensation you need a huge chest freezer to even have a hope of keeping an average PC cool, even then the pump will be running at max so you will have a lot of noise and its likely to fail sooner since those ones are not selected for continuous running.
There are much be
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Putting your whole tower in a consumer refrigerator or freezer wouldn't work too well, because of the moisture and condensation. However, there are computer refrigeration [guru3d.com] units available for -50 deg. C cooling.
But how much does it really improve things? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, there may be a small improvement on a benchmark, but those rarely translate into something that's noticeable to the end user.
Or is it really more about having the shiniest toys?
Re:But how much does it really improve things? (Score:4, Interesting)
As far as performance goes, I recently upgraded from RAM that had a CAS latency of 3 (Corsair XMS) to some that had more aggressive timings (OCZ performance ram) with a CAS latency of only 2. They were running at the same speeds (DDR 400 / PC3200), but at the faster timings the improvement was vastly greater than I had expected. After reading up on it some, a difference of 1ns can mean a lot when you're talking in terms of tens of millions of data cycles.
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The power supply is probably the hardest thing to get quiet, unless you're going with a passive one. But you can also get an efficient one with a good fan controller, like a Seasonic, for 75 bucks or so. Silent CPU coolers can be had for 25, and while most graphics cards these days
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That said, once you star
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Not at all. Just replace the stock 80mm fan with a better (thermally controlled) one. For $5, you've got a very quiet PSU. For those not proficient with soldering or splicing, a $1 fan extension cable to will be long enough to allow you to plug the fan into your motherboard, or a fan speed controller.
Hint: Avoid PSUs with 120mm fans. It's all gimmick. They're usually poorly designed, with horrible airflow, and much noisier than 80mm versions.
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Yes. That's hard. At least compared to just buying cheap, off the shelf quiet components.
As for the rest: the doctrine at Silent PC Review, probably the definitive resource on this kind of stuff, is that 2.5" disks overall are more quiet than 3.5" disks and that current 120mm PSUs are more quiet than 80mm or 2x 80mm PSUs. The current Seasonics (sorry about the price, I'm in Europe and didn't want to underestimage the US pri
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Not at all. If you're buying a PSU separately, you're competent enough to route all the wires, plug-in the ATX connectors properly, and remove and replace a dozen screws.
At that, throwing 8 more screws into the mix, and one more wire to plug-in isn't a big deal.
I'm not sure
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I know a whole lot of people who build their own computers, I only know a handful, myself included, who are willing to mod anything, and touching PSUs isn't my favorite pastime, either. If you think modding hardware is not a big deal to most people, you're a bit out of touch. A long time ago, when I built my first two computers, I was scared shitless - having saved up for the hardware and all; I wouldn't have dared o
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Yeah, my mistake. Just took a quick glance.
I find that very strange. It made all the difference with mine (WD 160GB).
It's strange, they list many things, but nothing about arm noise, spin-up/spin-down noise, etc. Also, the extra quiet 2.5" HDD @16dB is quite the exception,
Here's some stuff that's working well for me: (Score:2)
SilverStone SST-ST30NF 300W Fanless Power Supply (Wattage might be an issue for dual 8800's, but that wouldn't be very quiet, would it? Quality is more important than rated watts, anyway.)
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
Antec Solo Quiet Mini Tower Case ATX (no useless holes in the sides, some vibration-reducing material built-in, decent 120mm fan, no sill
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You can't even hear the pc when your right up next to it, water cooling is a waste of money.
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I concur, it's a Computer "ricer" territory (Score:3, Informative)
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You don't get a performance improvement from water cooling. You get it from overclocking.
The car analogy, which you probably won't understand because you obviously understand neither water cooling of computers nor much of anything about cars, is adding an oil coo
Chill out dude (Score:2)
As far a
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Then why did you make such an ignorant statement? Your specific examples of "useless" modifications were completely erroneous to say the least.
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There are also the people who do serious work who might notice a boost in productivity: they might be able to render movie frames faster, or compile a project with 10 million lines in an hour instead of 70 minutes. Of course peo
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Re:But how much does it really improve things? (Score:4, Informative)
No extra credit points for figuring out which answer we'll get this year.
However, I will say that the recent set of Dell workstations we got in technically use water cooling. The heat sinks use heat pipes to passively transfer the heat from the CPU up to the large copper radiator fins, and the heat pipes most likely use water as their internal cooling fluid.
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For Prescott systems ideal is water under a partial vacuum, I would imagine for a lower heat density app alcohol would be ok, but it has a much lower latent heat of vaporisation, so will not remove as much heat as good 'ol H2O.
-nB
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All I have to say about that is: powermac liquid cooling [google.com] (images search)
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Re:But how much does it really improve things? (Score:5, Funny)
Might be nessary soon. (Score:2)
Eventually, we will have to go with buffered DDR2, because you don't get as bad signal degrading after 4gigs. (Only systems I know of that support 64gigs of ram, without special riser
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Moo (Score:1)
What can i say, i'm a genius.
I love the smell of Slashvertisement in the mornin (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I love the smell of Slashvertisement in the mor (Score:2)
Been there done that (Score:1)
ocz == rice (Score:1, Funny)
Bullhockey (Score:1)
Now, do I still feel like a rice-boy for having urban camo RAM in my computer? Yea, but it helped me build a nice computer with a giant 22" monitor for 1500 bucks (Newegg Wishlist #4258847, search Palladiate if you are curious).
Before bragging about firsts... (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.koolance.com/shop/default.php?cPath=29_ 56&osCsid=28547a1202b3942d29d4a39bc4ed1984 [koolance.com]
rj
Not the only thing that needs chilling (Score:2)
Seems clear enough to me. If these guys said the next step is integrating the module and the cooler, you'd have a defensible claim.
Not that it looks like a very smart step...if either the cooling block or the memory module fails, you replace the entire unit.
rj
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Beg pardon? (Score:2, Informative)
Water-cooling RAM has always struck me as a lot of work for little to any performance return. Plus it's one more thing to go wrong. I never lost a component in 4 years of doing this but it was such a pain to install and maintain. I can onl
Comparing e-penises (Score:1)
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Are they hurting you in any way? No.
Are they driving the industry that makes computer products better and better? Yes.
Does having better products every year help you? Yes.
Seriously, just let them have their fun. Most of us can't afford to spend the mega-bucks on things that don't matter, but these people can, and they enjoy it. Let them have their fun while they inadvertently make the world a better place.
Besides, I'm sure you have some hobby that most people thin
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Welcome to Slashdot...
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65.7cm
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And I thought it quite reasonable, since many people that use water cooling do so for the sound, not performance increase, and if you eliminate case fans, the memory can easily overheat. This will make it easier and more reliable to make a quiet system with water cooling.
1U (Score:2)
Huh.... (Score:2)
WTF is a... (Score:1)
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1.4"? [sic] (Score:1)
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Pipe four of them in parallel to get the same total area (i.e., pi*(.5/2)^2 = 4*pi*(.25/2)^2). They'll still restrict the flow some (because the fluid has non-zero viscosity), but I'd guess it'd be pretty close.
This story is 4 months old (Score:1)
Easier Solution (Score:2)
Dunk the motherboard into a mineral oil bath and use a pump to move it around.
Coffee? (Score:2)
When will it be builtin? (Score:2)
I see a CPU that does not have a heat spreader. Instead it comes with two connectors for plumbing and the water channels are built inside the chip. Same goes for graphics and whatever else needs cooling.
Cases will have space in them for a cooling unit and pump. Plumbing lines will be as prevelent as power connectors. You will buy "Hyper-Gamma Computer Coolent(TM)" from your local geek shop. And it glows in the dark so you
Hopefully Never (Score:2)
We only started to need CPU fans with 486s and up.
They need to just prevent the waste in the first place like they are currently tying to do and the problem will go away, without liquid cooling.
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Unless you had an NEC, where CPU fans were taboo.
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What you refer to as "waste" is simply a by-product of adding more energy to the
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What you should concern yourself with is the overall MIPS/watt ratio. Which is definit
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That's what this is!
But seriously, I think it's coming soon. You buy retail CPUs with coolers. Why not with water blocks?
The best part about it of course will be that more solutions will be available so we'll find out quickly which connectors are the best type to use and so on.
DDR2 w/cooling? About time... (Score:2)
Water cooled Geeks (Score:2)
http://www.hardforum.com/archive/index.php/t-10915 28.html [hardforum.com]
Q: "What... Do you... do... that requires... watercooled underwear?"
A: "I dono... maybe its just me, but I dont like sweaty balls...:
That just about sums it up, unless someone want to insert a "Chef" quote.
oooooh! What A Development! Call the networks! (Score:2)
Seriously, Seymour Cray's cooling guy did this in 1962. The hot and fast RAM of that era was a 4K by 12 bit module, about the size and weight of three bricks, and costing about $15K each. These needed a 1/2 inch thick aluminum heat spreader, bolted to a thick aluminum frame with chilled freon running thru it.
Thermaltake (Score:2)