RS: [Beowulf] overclocking with liquids

[Alan Ward]

Hi.

Been there, done that. Bad results, since *all* the chips including the CPU overheated. It looked like there was not enough convection to make the oil circulate fast enough to evacuate heat. I didn't try with an immersed fan, however -- a fan that should be powerful enough to push the oil around.

Happy experimentation! Just don't do it with components you value. 
-Alan Ward





-----Missatge original-----
De: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org en nom de Peter St. John
Enviat el: dj. 20/09/2007 17:32
Per a: beowulf at beowulf.org
Tema: [Beowulf] overclocking with liquids
 
A fellow (concerned with oober gaming rigs) just mentioned to me immersing a
motherboard in something like vegetable oil, and overclocking the board. The
liquid has to insulate, and have more heat content than air (easy!), and not
too low a boiling point, and not be corrosive. No moving parts (such as
fans) can be immersed, so the disk drives have to be above it etc.
It made me wonder if you could then pour over a layer of something lighter,
but with higher vapor pressure, to float on top, and evaporate away heat,
like alcohol (maybe evaporate too fast).

I'm picturing stacking trays, like the cart at the cafeteria, for diskless
compute nodes, and maybe extend the life of older boards.

This may be nuts but I thought all you chemists and physicists would like it
:-)
Peter

P.S. also Intel (according to slashdot) intends to sell 3-core processors
(so they can sell quad cores that have a manufacturing defect; reminds me of
the 487 "SX" math coprocessor, an i486 with a defect in the CPU component).
Since that means more RAM on the motherboard per core, that might be very
economical for some types of applications.

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