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To: Tony Viola who wrote (135141)	5/15/2001 4:42:33 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Tony, What kind of thermal shock do you have in mind? Also, I am not sure what you mean by lowering and rising temperatures between the extremes. I don't think Tim is talking about refrigiration, with a compressor, just a normal liquid cooling, with a pump to move the liquid and radiators (possibly with fans) attached to them. The liquid itself acts to dampen the extremes, since it takes much higher amount of energy to heat the liquid than a tiny heatsink. Joe

To: Tony Viola who wrote (135141)	5/15/2001 5:01:50 PM
From: tcmay	Respond to of 186894

Misc. on thermal shock issues Tony writes: "One of the persistent arguments against liquid cooling is, what do you do in the event of a problem? How long does it take to bring the computer back to room temp, " When I said "liquid cooling," I didn't necessarily mean the bath would be below room temperature. It's enough for the bath just to keep the CPU case temperature near room temperature, which is the best a heatsink/fan combo ever tries to do anyway, after all. Instead of "liquid cooling" one could call it "liquid heat dissipation," though this is clumsier than the standard usage. "... and what about thermal shock, anyway, lowering or raising between the extremes that kind of liquid brings. How do you keep the thermal shock from destroying the whole thing?" Cooling the bath below room temperature introduces other problems, like condensation. And thermal shock and the "time to reach temperature" problems you mention. Thermal shock would likely be overrated as a problem unless hot boards were plunged into very cold baths. The thermal shock tests I used to do were from extremes like 125 C to - 55 C. That would likely crack some PCBs! Going from 25 C to 20 C, for example, would be a walk in the park. "In any event, except for onesy twosie special applications, you have to wonder if exotic cooling is worth it. Cray, the old CDC and some spinoffs of them have tried it but it never catches on. I think the increase in clock speed at room is pretty phenomenal anyway." I fully agree that liquid cooling (liquid heat dissipation) is more exotic than heatsinks and fans. But not necessarily more exotic than some of the Peltier effect microcoolers, especially if multiple chips in a system need to be cooled (i.e., kept at near room temperature). Am I predicting such a system anytime soon? No. But if it makes economic sense to do something like this, some vendor likely will. If a system with 16 or 32 Athlons or Pentium IVs can be more inexpensively and reliably handled at high densities with this kind of cooling, expect it to be tried. --Tim May