PC-Engine said:
That really is the key, isn't it- how much heatsink componentry is exposed in the "wind tunnel"? The more heat you have to get rid of, the more heatsinking you need to expose, and the more turbulence helps you eek out the most efficiency in the heatsink.
Are you saying the sky is blue? Yes the heatsink is doing it's job and so is the fan.
...for a limited power output. That's the key. Now if you are alluding to the idea that Revolution will consume no more power than GC, then by all means, your idea has merit (anybody know what the power consumption is on a GC, anyway?). If it will be dealing with 200/300/400+ watts, that little "quiet-blow" tunnel is not going to work. At the least, it will become a "loud-blow" tunnel, and more likely will need to be a larger tunnel altogether (including larger heatsinks within, naturally).
Yes Nintendo designed it that way and it's quiet and fits into a tiny confined box too.
That's
one of the reasons why it was brought up in the first place.
You need to quantify how much power it is dissipating. Are we talking about 40 W, 60 W, 200 W??? In one case, it is completely understandable how it does the cooling in a quiet little package. In the other, your bringing it up becomes utterly irrelevant wrt the requirements that Revolution will present.
The second reason is the fact it came out at the same time as Xbox and its processing power is slighty less than Xbox. Do you get the hint yet?
PPC chips typically use far less power than their x86 counterparts (back in "the day", at least). So your "timing of the hardware" argument is questionable with respect to the "
nature of the hardware". Also consider the GPU is a (relatively) tiny little ArtX job, not quite on the same scale as whatever behemoths ATI was building at the time for the PC space (this referring to die size and sheer power consumption, not feature set). So there you have it right there- the build-up of GC included a very conscious effort to use thermal power-miserly type of components. The windtunnel cooling feature is quiet because the thermal load (which will dictate the design) isn't particularly tremendous in anyway. The Xbox is seemingly on the opposite extreme from this (not to say it's power consumption was out of line, however). So you see, the thermal power considerations between an Xbox and a GC are not exactly equivalent.
How about the third reason of shooting down your "drag" argument by using a realworld example in the form of a GCN? Confined space does not equal more drag since there is very little drag to speak of in the GCN's method of cooling.
...unless the heat dissipation demands rise considerably, then confined space becomes a
crucial factor. Now if we could get some feedback on what sort of power consumption will be associated with Rev, the logistics of the thermal management will be more clear. Lacking this info, are we to assume that you imply Rev will use no more power than a GC (within 10-20 watts, to be open about it)?
Heck the heatsink in the GCN doesn't even have that many fins which means the surface area isn't even that great which means there's even more room for improvement in this simple HSF combination let alone a liquid metal cooling one.
That is building my point that the heat dissipation requirements where not particularly tremendous in the first place. Naturally, it can be a quiet affair.
You suggest there is room for more fins. I don't doubt that, at all. Guess what happens to "drag" as fin surface area goes up? drag ==> pressure loss ==> need more "fan blowage" ==> highly likely more noise
Alternately, you could just keep the same fin surface area and increase flow rate/air velocity. Very much the same outcome will result- more drag ==> pressure loss ==> more fan blowage ==> highly likely more noise
Liquid metal cooling is beside the point when discussing pure heat dissipation at the endpoint. You can't even argue that much that it keeps the processor particularly "cool" if it has to literally reach a temperature to
melt metal (albeit, a low-melting point metal, but certainly not "cool" by any stroke of imagination) for the whole thing to work. This is still a
heat relocation measure, not a heat dissipation measure. It doesn't much matter if you have to dissipate 100 W locally right off the processor or 4" away on a remote heatsink. You still have to dissipate 100 W. Ideally, you have good air flow management implemented in either case, so there is no great disadvantage or advantage whether it is local or remote dissipation. It's still 100 W you have to worry about.
If Nintendo could build the GCN to be within the processing capability of Xbox in a smaller form factor using a simple HSF and released at the same time, why would Nintendo have any trouble doing the same with Revolution?
This is a bobo premise, altogether, because you ignore the
nature of the hardware (PPC750 vs. Celeron at almost twice the clockrate, ArtX GPU vs. nVidia's finest, HD, etc...), . Now if Nintendo had managed to put all the Xbox hardware in a GC case, and made it work...that would indeed be an enviable feat. Beyond that, "timing" is utterly meritless.
Isn't the Xbox 360 smaller than Xbox? Heh, I haven't even factored in the 1 year difference between Revolution and Xbox 360, but you know what? I don't even need to. If Nintendo goes with that liquid metal cooling solution I posted earlier, they could mount the HSF away from the main source of heat which are the processors. The HSF can be located near the exhaust port so that you don't need a lot of airflow pushing hot air throughout the whole case just like jvd said since there no hot air being dumped into the case.
You may not need a lot of airflow going throughout the case, but you will at the primary heatsink, regardless of its location. 100 W of dissipation remains as 100 W, 200 W is still 200 W, 300 W is still 300 W. Thermal heat doesn't magically disappear just because you relocate it through a conduit. To top it off, you still have one very hot processor inside your case, if you expect it to melt metal to make the liquid metal component work in the first place. So you end up needing a case fan to evacuate incidental heat inside the case, anyway, in addition to the one blowing on the remote heatsink.
Heck this was what I explained earlier before jvd expanded on that concept further. It's kinda strange that you say you agree with jvd yet he's just saying the same thing I said when I brought up that liquid metal cooling system. For some reason you don't want to admit I was right and you were wrong. That drag example got shot down pretty quick didn't it?
Ref'ing your own disputes is comical, to say the least. You've shot down nothing other than revealing to us your complete inability to discern between heat
distribution and heat
dissipation. Potentially jvd has a similar lack of understanding, hence his peculiarly cryptic manner of backstepping out of this "argument".
Both jvd and I already explained how it could be done from a smart engineering perspective many posts ago. If you'd rather take the nonsmart route then yeah it wouldn't be possible. Fortunately we have some pretty smart people designing the cooling system for Nintendo's console.
What is the "unsmart" way you refer to? ...to haphazardly blow air indiscriminately inside a case? You have revealed your strawman argument then, because
no one was advocating that here in the first place. I believe I remarked specifically on that in one of my posts that a good airflow management should be "standard design" (whether it be in a windtunnel or point-to-point-to-point inside a case or whatever the configuration may be). Any way you go, you want cool "fresh" air to hit your heatsinks (whether local or remote), exhaust air to be expelled asap, and as little mixing of the 2 as possible). This is NOT exclusive to windtunnels, at all, and doesn't change the fact that if you have x watts to dissipate from the processor, you can count on needing to dissipate x watts on the heatsink (remote or not).
Now if it was your (you and jvd) intent to make some comparison between the "worst intake/exhaust fan slapped onto a case" design you can think of to the best discrete windtunnel or remote heatsink design you can think of (completely ignoring ultimate thermal targets, as well), then that was a pretty bloody pointless point to make in the first place. Compare "best of" to "best of", if you have an ounce of sportsmanship in you- naturally, that means an appropriate and effective airflow management system will be in place for either example, period.
Finally your assumption is flawed too. You're assuming the size will be THE limiting factor which is plain wrong. Sure if you're talking about friggen Gigawatts of dissipation then yeah the size would likely be the limiting factor, but how do you know how many watts a certain size case can handle?
How many watts of dissipation do you honestly think a GC-sized case can accomodate and still be "quiet"? 60 W? 100 W? 250 W? This will be interesting to get you on record here... If you want to get silly with a range, consider the continuum of a 1500 W hair dryer (fairly skimpy on net case volume), but damn noisy vs. a 100 W Xbox (my guess, feel free to substitute a more appropriate value) which is indisputedly larger and quieter. Where do you think a GC lies? How about Rev? (Yeah, the hair dryer is a pretty extreme example for the upper bounds, but gets the point across that it's pretty easy to get noisy pretty quick when case size goes down and heat dissipation goes up- get this...it's also a pretty darn good example of a "windtunnel", just not a quiet one
)
It's nothing new to anybody who knows anything about computers. Tunnels and ducts have been used for years to keep heat from being recycled back into the case.
Once again, you have confused air flow management with final heat dissipation. This
is apparent to "anybody" who knows anything about computers. One day, you may join them, but for now...back to the books for you!
I think you've ran out of excuses and resorting to straw collecting. Hemholtz chambers? Riiiight.
You really don't see the association, do you? This severely demonstrates your inadequacy on the matter- seriously.
With a certain CFM rating you can move air through a small case many times more than a larger one.
Ah...no. The size of the case is irrelevant. You are moving air at the rate of
CFM. By the wording you chose, it is the same.
Now air
velocities inside a small case vs. a large case may be different...
Think of an aquarium. If you have a small 10 gallon fish tank hooked up to a 100 GPH water pump you can cycle the tank volume 10 times in an hour. With a 100 gallon tank, you can only cycle the tank volume once per hour.
Is this one of those "sky is blue" comments? Big deal! You also have the option to use a much bigger pump on the 100 gallon tank w/o turning it into a geyser, too. Horses for courses...
