You'll be needing a 1KW PSU next

BigEejit

Saw a review of the new Pentium EE 840 .... under full load the chip consumes 300watts ... on its own .. now add motherboard chips, 2 graphics cards, a sound card and a couple of drives .... holy electric bill batman, this is going to hurt...

Not to mention being a bitch to cool no doubt

BabyEater

That is Total System Power consumption not just the chip. Although the chip does consume a lot of power .

magick

and to think, they called me mad when i made that Nuclear PSU !

Capt'n Midnight

magick wrote:

and to think, they called me mad when i made that Nuclear PSU !

http://www.atomicinsights.com/sep96/Apollo.html, you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble and bought a second hand SNAP-27 radioisotope thermal generator (RTG)

It would make a great laptop battery - 20 years and still ain't flat !
BTW. you would need serious cooling - for ever 75W of electrical power it gave out 1.25KW of heat.

Interestingly enough Apollo 13 had one on board that they couldn't use when they really needed power.

mp3guy

1kW psu, thats stupid... Why not recycle fan energy? I.E stick a small electromagnet motor onto the fans, to dump remaining power back into the system...

Richard Dower

PC Power & Cooling have an awesome 850W PSU on sale...$450!!

duridian

Link to the 850Watter that Richard mentioned.

Inspector Gadget

The EE840's thermal design power (i.e. how much heat it's expected to punch out at 'full tilt') is about 130W, which is scary enough, but the additional power consumption over and above the heat it generates (which I understand is basically switching losses in the transistors themselves, plus some capacitive effects) will be fairly small (again, so I'm led to believe).

By the way, mp3guy, your idea is, well, a little impractical. I'm guessing you're basing it on the regenerative braking systems that feature on today's electric cars, but you're a bit wide of the mark.

The biggest problem is that bolting a generator onto the fan will make it harder for the fan to turn (due to additional inertia, friction and electromagnetic loading caused by the generator's magnets intersecting its windings), which will increase its power consumption notably. Of course, like any real-world machine, a generator isn't 100% efficient, which means that it can't convert all of the mechanical power that goes in (from the fan motor) to electrical power that comes out, which means that it's in fact more efficient not to spend the electrical power driving the fan in the first place... if it was 100% efficient, you'd have a perpetual motion machine, which'd be nice

Gadget

Capt'n Midnight

mp3guy wrote:

1kW psu, thats stupid... Why not recycle fan energy? I.E stick a small electromagnet motor onto the fans, to dump remaining power back into the system...

would have thought it would be better to put the PC in a fridge/freezer so you would be cooling it with cold air rather than room temp.

* note putting a PC in a fridge is a big job with lots of healthy and safety stuff and cables drives hanging outside - probably have to use usb hubs and things.

DemonOfTheFall

Yeah, mp3guy your idea is missing out on understanding the laws of physics, lol. Unless it was a joke, in that case good one!

mp3guy

Yeah... a joke, thats it. I know the law of perpetual motion and all that, but if the fan takes 3w, it could toss maybe even 0.5w back in through an electromagnetic motor.

Capt'n Midnight

mp3guy wrote:

Yeah... a joke, thats it. I know the law of perpetual motion and all that, but if the fan takes 3w, it could toss maybe even 0.5w back in through an electromagnetic motor.

The dynamo would slow down the fan and/or the airflow. As Scotty would say ye canna break the laws of physics.

Big slow fans are quiter and more efficient. You could put a chimney on your PC the hot air rising would create a cooling draught, no fan needed do it properly. And you could have a generator in the "power tower" if it was high enough.

Also using cold air from out side the house instead of room temp air would mean you need a smaller fan too.

Dundhoone

oh a chimney, yesssss
then maybe the processor could generate some steam , get a little turbine in there, maybe a coal burner to supplement the processor heat ....... eh voila a new era of steam/electric powered pc........I can see myself spending the millions already

Lump

The could turn heat into power tbh.... Steam powered Processors!

John

SouperComputer

Lump wrote:

The could turn heat into power tbh.... Steam powered Processors!

John

now you're suckin diesel!

BadCharlie

Dundhoone wrote:

oh a chimney, yesssss
then maybe the processor could generate some steam , get a little turbine in there, maybe a coal burner to supplement the processor heat ....... eh voila a new era of steam/electric powered pc........I can see myself spending the millions already

LoL

po0k

How about just scaling back the clock speed and voltage, and instead horizontally scaling - like the Cell and SMP. Neural nets, lots and lots of small, low power simple processors working together like an orchestra.