Someone mentioned using car parts to cool off a computer the other day then I came across this in a magazine.
What a load of crap. Get a Pelltier cooling chip, a good DC power supply for it, a heatsink and a big fan. That's all you need. They use them to cool CCDs to prevent dark current build up and they can easily cool a PC or a CPU.
-Rich
Agreed, with air cooling alone you can only get it to room temperature at the absolute best. A good peltier coupled with a big-ass heatsink like the Alpha PAL8045 and a good fan or decent water cooling setup would be much more efficient, not to mention much queter and more practical.
Cory
Plus you've got to ask yourself why? So you can overclock your chip by 20% instead of paying $30 more for a faster chip.
Going from a 2.08 GHz Athlon XP to a 2.16 GHz chip is a $61 jump... Going from a 2.16 GHz chip to a 2.2 GHz is $117.
Now compare that to the price of the best heatsink available... $35 for an Alpha PAL8045 Let's also assume you don't care about noise and go with a 80 CFM Delta 5700 RPM fan for $15. If you care about noise you could go with a cheaper Panaflow 40 CFM fan at $7.
So $50 for the best air cooled setup you can get... Immediately drop $12 off that as you would need a heatsink anyway and the cheapo POS things that come with the 'processor in a box' are ~$12. So $38 for the absolute best cooling, $30 for excellent cooling that is still quiet and won't let you down.
It's much more cost effective to overclock when you get up to the higher end chips. Also, you can't just keep going up the ladder of CPUs saying 'Well this one is only $15 or $30 more so I may as well upgrade' as before you know it you've spent $100+ more on a CPU than you originally intended to. You gotta draw the line somewhere.
When I got my CPU and motherboard the CPU was the fastest one available at the time. I won my 1.533 GHz Palomino and MSI motherboard at the AMD Extreme Performance Project in Philly. There were no faster CPUs being made, so I _had_ to overclock to get any faster.
Also, whenever I build computers for myself I will go with the biggest, best heatsink I can find (which at this point in time for Socket A is the Alpha PAL8045). I do this so I have potential to overclock if I should so desire, but mainly for the noise issue. If the heatsink is bigger, that's that much less RPM I need out of my fan. I'm running my 68 CFM 80mm Delta at 5v and it's just above a whisper. It makes about as much noise as my 2 7200 RPM drives in RAID 0.
For customers computers I always build them with better than stock cooling, simply because the stock cooling is, in my mind, inadequate. It barely gets the job done and the CPU can run at quite high temperatures if case ventilation is poor for whatever reason or the ambient temperature is high due to either the time of year or location of the computer near a heat source. Unless the system is really for a tight budget I'll build it with decent cooling and aim to make it quiet as no one enjoys a PC that sounds like a jet engine winding up for takeoff.
Cory
Actually look here
MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.