No, that would involve too much additional couch time with the psychoanalyst.

Nor does it involve particle acceleration or cold fusion (have to save a few hat tricks for the curtain call).

2010 - Something wonderful......

You finally harnessed Plutonium to power your cpu and gpus, I knew it.

You're always mucking up my surprises, Chuck! Grrrr. I'll do a 'reveal' this coming Wednesday. Nothing terribly exciting; just a little twist. Until then, you'll have to patiently wait for the cake to finish baking along with the rest of the OC kiddies. I need a few surprises here and there to maintain interest level. Right?

Monday I'll have my hands full installing the second VGA wblock and vid card. It's going to be close quarters -- very big cards!

God help me. Please don't encourage him; he is alredy asking me about where to procure Dewar flasks and appropriate jacketed conduit for liquid nitrogen.

Next thing I know, we'll get the kitchen/bathroom renovations we've been wanting, except not for us, for the computers: Cooling units in the floors, thermal exchangers with convertors to spinning turbine motors, powering solar enabled batteries. Gives new meaning to "Going Green."

It's not that expensive, actually ... a copper LN2 pot is $300 - $400 (unless you have a friend with a lathe, like Paul, who can make you one for you out of $100 of copper) - and a 10L 45-day dewar is $500ish. The LN2 itself is a lot cheaper than DICE, which would set you back $20 or $30 each time. 10L of LN2, which is enough for several hours of benching, costs a few bucks.

You'll be happy to know, Marion, (I think) that the killer for Jason, though, with going the LN2 or DICE route is that you can't run it in a case (even a masterpiece like Jason's), because the m-board has to be horizontal ... and, unless the watercooling is via a portable unit, you can't use watercooling with it. You actually don't need additional cooling on the NB or chipsets. They're cooled by the LN2 pot. But, you need some fans blowing cold air on the video cards.

A 24/7 LN2 system - boy - that would take monster bucks to build: special tubing, a constant LN2 source, a sealed, but vented pot, case & upright MB, etc. Not sure we'll see that. But, who knows what the engineers might come up with.

Jason... Have you considered a Phase Change unit? It can be run with the board in the case and for longer periods of time than LN2 or DICE... I'm looking at getting one myself for FW. Sorry Marion.. I'll be quiet now...

I prefer The Macallan.

R&D at IBM is playing around with something along those lines. The materials engineer I spoke with at Tygon's parent company, Saint Gobain, said that the new technology teams are keeping Tygon busy making custom, multi-layered tubing insulated with aluminum wrap. He said the average life of Tygon is 10 years and that some of these systems are closed loops systems that need to run for 10+ years without servicing the loop.

I realize LN2 would freeze and shatter conventional Tygon, but they must have come up with some specialized polymer -- or they're not using LN2, but another less harsh coolant. It's not distilled water or conventional coolants.

Back to work. I'll be posting some new photos in my other blog showing installation of the new AlphaCool reservoir, couplers and PSU (decided to use the new PC Power & Cooling 860W PSU in the single GPU/8800GTX/Q6600 box and keep the 1KW where it is).

Ln2 becomes problematic in that you cant really supply the 'CPU' with a constant flow of it... One CPU may cold bug at -80C whereas another may go -160C... You'd need a thermo controller of some sort to regulate the flow as the CPU demands or only give the CPU small, regulated doses of LN2, or it will just freeze in windows...If youre going to do that you may as well just get a phase change unit that should keep your quad at sub-zero temperatures.. A 1/2 horsepower compressor should be able to keep your QX9650 at around -25C under load. A Phase Change with those sort of specs should only set you back about $750-800...It'll only cool the CPU tho thats the only problem..

I'm looking at one myself for the wolfdale, so I can bench sub zero 7 days a week..

I considered phase change last year before building the second H20 rig. It's probably the most 'practical' of the extreme cooling solutions. Size, weight, condensation issues and -- above all -- noise were the disincentives. I hear they are pretty loud -- like sitting next to your fridge. I could see it for use on a second or third home computer limited to benchmarks -- one in an anechoic chamber. I'm not sold on them for daily use.

Yeah they are pretty loud... I forget about day use computers sometimes lol.. All those heavy metal concerts and drag race meets have made me a little deaf so it wont bother me as much I wouldnt use one 24/7, especially in a country like Australia with the high heat/humidity.