![\"\"](\"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/octocore1-img1.png\" "\\"octocore1-img1\\"")
Background<\/strong><\/h2>\nIt was the 2010 Texas Class 5A Division 1 High School Football Championship that set me on this road.<\/p>\n
BOY! WHAT A GAME!<\/em><\/p>\nMy son and I flew to Dallas to attend, and I\u02bcd set my computer to record it while we were gone (in HD, of course).<\/p>\n
43,000 attended the 2010 Texas High School Football Championship at Cowboy\u2019s Stadium, Arlington, Texas<\/p>\n
BOY! WHAT A GAME!<\/em><\/p>\nDid I already say that?<\/p>\n
Me and Bubba couldn\u02bct stop talking about it, discussing and picking apart every little detail over and over. Even the wife, not usually excited by this kinda stuff, got into it. So I decided to take my legally acquired copy of the game on my computer and \u201ctime\/place-shift\u201d my copy so the whole family could watch it on my 5 foot Panny<\/a> Plasma together, legally, as provided for by the US Supreme court.<\/p>\nOff I went into my office and got to work on this three hour long HD file. Cutting and slashing things like commercial breaks and talking heads, I put chapter markers on each play. Two versions, one for the Panny, and one for the iPad\/iPhone.<\/p>\n
It was a big project and the new version of iMovie<\/a>, unlike it\u02bcs predecessor (or even Adobe Premier<\/a>, which I learned on), is kinda counter-intuitive. El Gato, in their EyeTV package<\/a>, had a nice piece of editing software as well as a hardware encoder (the turbo.264HD<\/a>), but it also fell short (but nonetheless is quite impressive!).<\/p>\nSo I defaulted to QuickTime Pro<\/a>. Simple and powerful, you could place chapter markers, subtitles, transitions, ect., and it kept audio and voice-overs in perfect sync.<\/p>\nBut I was already kind of tired from the time I spent experimenting with the new iMovie and other products and felt the time encoding was just taking too long. Not only that, but my MacPro (MacPro1,1), with 2 Intel 5160 processors, was kinda slow & was throwing off tons of heat.<\/p>\n
So I had two problems; Speed, and Heat. Now, I\u02bcve always had heat issues. My home office is an add-on and with me, the MacPro, two 30 inch Apple Cinema Displays<\/a> (themselves 150 watts per), a scanner, printer, and a multifunction\u2014well, that\u02bcs a lot of heat in there. Worse, as you get older and fatter the heat bothers you more. I also don\u02bct think the neighbor kids like seeing an old fat guy in his underwear at a computer. Much less when he\u02bcs sweating like a pig and wiping his face and underarms with a shop towel. Hell, I <\/em>wouldn\u02bct want to see that (but on the upside, they don\u02bct come around as often).<\/p>\nBut one thing atta time…<\/p>\n
The the folks in Cupertino had already thought up a solution to the Speed issue. You see, built into the core of OS X is an app called X-grid that allows parallelization with other computers, and some other fine folks at a group called Dauger Research, Inc. made a neat little app called \u201cPooch<\/a>\u201d to work with QuickTime that let me share the encoding load amongst our household computers.<\/p>\nSo things were really looking up for me for a while until the wife unhooked her MacBook Pro from the grid to go outside, and Bubba shut down his iMac to go to sleep.<\/p>\n
Can\u2019t we all just leave my grid alone?<\/em><\/p>\nNah, really, it woulda worked well if everyone had just been away for a weekend.<\/p>\n
So nothing left to do but upgrade. I was a bit unhappy with this. You see, I\u02bcve owned Mac\u02bcs since 1990 (first being a PowerBook 100) and have real issues with buying a new Mac before the six year minimum. But I\u02bcd read about the \u201cCloverfield\u201d upgrades people were doing & it seemed a reasonable solution.<\/p>\n
So off to eBay I went looking for a pair of the magical quad core 5365\u02bcs, only to find that though they could be purchased, the seller\u02bcs were requiring an exorbitant price and un-natural acts from the buyers. And this was bad because besides being cheap, I, uhh…, I don\u02bct go there.<\/p>\n
But Lo and Behold, after a bit more searching \u201cIntel pair\u201d, I found for sale \u201ca pair of Intel 5350 engineering samples\u201d. From what I\u02bcd read, this was a completely different kind of Magic from the PC Worlds beyond this Universe. You see, with a clock of 2.66Ghz and a FSB of 1033, you could cast the BSEL charm on them, so not only were they powerful in their own right, but say the right spell while drawing with a circuit pen and it\u02bcs like an un-ending supply of Adrenaline pills in UT2K4<\/a>. Oh yeah baby, we had us a \u201cBuy Now\u201d moment.<\/p>\nSo I swapped my new 5350\u02bcs for the 5160\u02bcs and finished the project.<\/p>\n
The End<\/p>\n
Boy, I wish<\/em> I could say that…<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/octocore1-img2.png\" "\\"octocore1-img2\\"")
BSEL \u201ctape\u201d mod (upper left hand corner tape covering a pin)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nYou know that story Jerry Clower tells<\/a> about coon hunting, and his friend John is stuck up in the tree doing battle with a lynx? I think I know how John felt now.<\/p>\nSo because I\u02bcm a masochistic retard, I went ahead with the BSEL mod. Over and over I tried, but it just wouldn\u02bct work. It would chime (POST) but immediately choke like Cass Elliot on a ham sandwich.<\/p>\n
Google, Google, Google.<\/em><\/p>\nRead, Read, Read.<\/em><\/p>\nYou see, to get a 5350 to run at 3.3 Ghz you gotta do the volt mod too.<\/p>\n
Wait? Whu\u2019d he say\u201d<\/p>\n
A whut mod an a whut mod?<\/p>\n
(Hold ya hosses boys, I\u2019ll be gettin\u2019 there…)<\/em><\/p>\nAnd whuudya know… it worked!<\/p>\n
Sun-E-Beaches, I got me a 3.3GHz Octo-core MacPro! WooHoo! Let\u02bcs do some video!<\/p>\n
Begin Encode…
\nPanic.<\/em><\/p>\nHmmmmm…<\/p>\n
Restart, Begin Encode…
\nPanic.<\/em><\/p>\nRestart, Begin Encode…
\nPanic.<\/em><\/p>\nRestart, Begin Encode…
\nPanic.<\/em><\/p>\nArrrrrrgghhh!<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\nIt was the heat. Within minutes, Handbrake<\/a> would drive the CPUs over 70\u00baC and the computer would auger-in like it was carrying Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens to a show.<\/p>\nI know I should have undone everything then & there and thought myself the better for it. But remember how your Dad used to look at you incredulously and ask, \u201cDammit Boy, ain\u02bct you got no sense at all\u201d? Yeah? Well me too, so \u201cOnward thru the fog\u201d I went.<\/p>\n
Well, the short form is this: If I waited until 3 am, opened the windows to the outside until the ambient room temperature was 35\u00baF, took the silly cardboard and duct tape contraption I made that directed the air from my shop fan into the front of the case, AND set smcFanControl<\/a> to run all my fans at 3,000 RPM…<\/p>\n\u201cWhat in God\u2019s name…!? it\u2019s sounds like a 737 in here!\u201d<\/em> (What can I say? I married a\u00a0Flight Attendant)<\/p>\n\u201cGo back to bed, babe\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s 3:30 in the morning! What on earth are you doing?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\u201cProving Dad wrong, babe. Now go back to bed\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\u201cHoney, your father has been gone now 5 years…\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\u201cAnd he\u2019s the one that always said \u2018better late than never\u2019. Go back to bed, babe\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nand I almost<\/em> finished the entire encode.<\/p>\nI gotta find a better way to cool these pups…<\/p>\n
Google, Google, Google.<\/em><\/p>\nRead, Read, Read.<\/em><\/p>\nYup, so this is where the water cooling comes in.<\/p>\n
You see, it was simply amazing<\/em> how fast these these CPU\u02bcs would heat up. If they didn\u02bct literally start in a frozen state, you had no chance with the OEM Apple supplied copper-to- aluminum heatsinks. (Now, thru the retrospectoscope, I think a very large all copper conventional air-type heatsink may have had enough heat capacity and diffusion ability to handle it from a near frozen state, but how much fun would that have been, huh?)<\/p>\nPhysics tells us if you can\u02bct get rid of it, you\u02bcre gonna have to hold it and, my friends, nothing holds heat as good as water. (Just ask anyone who has ever seen a hurricane up close and personal, they\u02bcll tell ya\u02bc.)<\/p>\n
Water cooling it is. Sooooooo….<\/p>\n
Google, Google, Google.<\/em><\/p>\nRead, Read, Read.<\/em><\/p>\nI got a little educated. I learned things like laminar flow, turbulence, and \u201cDelta-Tea\u201d (I think it\u02bcs kinda like a Mint Julep, except for folks from Mississippi), and went out to spend some money. And boy howdy, did I.<\/p>\n
Materials and Methods Part 1- The Why\u02bcs<\/strong><\/h2>\nThis was painful. All that I initially wanted was something that could rapidly absorb enough heat to keep the the thing running, and I thought I\u02bcd found the answer. You see, I\u02bcm not the first person to water cool an over-clocked MacPro\u2014some guy named Zack Fanning at Asetek had already done it<\/a>, so all I needed to do was copy him. But Zack had his own pet engineer from the company to do him a complete custom job (and like all administrators, had no freakin\u02bc clue how it was done). Worse yet, that engineer had gone and found himself a new owner. (I heard NASCAR<\/a>. That may be sour grapes though.)<\/p>\nBut you\u02bcd think that with Intel selling 20 billion or so 5000X type servers that there\u02bcd been a few folks that put water cooling systems on them. Yeah well, Homey don\u02bct think so. I mean who in their right mind would water cool a rack mounted server?<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, Hell… I\u02bcd just add more air conditioning…\u201d<\/em> I was told by the Computer\/IT Engineers (their facial expression I interpreted as them thinking that I had too many- or too few- base pairs to play in their sandbox).<\/p>\nBy now it was obvious from every engineer that I talked to they weren\u02bct going to help, so I grabbed my helmet, crayons, and went back out to the corner to wait for that short yellow bus to take me home.<\/p>\n
The problem was finding a way to mount a water block to the motherboard. See, not too many aftermarket water blocks have mounts for the LGA (Land Grid Array) 771 socket which is what the MacPro1,1 uses.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/octocore1-img3.png\" "\\"octocore1-img3\\"")
Koolance CPU-340 with mount<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBut I did find <\/em>one. Finally.<\/p>\nThe discontinued Koolance<\/a> \u201cCPU-340\u201d had a mount that could be used on a 771. And although it was big and heavy, should be mountable on a 5000X type server with the accompanying mount. But notice your dear MacPro isn\u02bct a rack mounted server. And please take special notice of the memory cage used to support the DIMMS and provide the laminar airflow that you wouldn\u02bct need to if it was a 1U server. In other words, Dorothy, you\u02bcre not just gonna slap a pocketwatch in the Tin Man\u02bcs chest an have it work. This thing is doable, but I was going to have to find a way to get a square peg into a round hole. Good thing I\u02bcm an ER Doctor, huh? We eat problems like this for lunch everyday. You give me a big enough hammer and I\u02bcll drive the Empire State Building through the smallest round hole you can think of.<\/p>\nNext, remember how I told you that heat bothers us fat people? You do? Good, because my office is still going to be hotter than it was before this little brain surgery was done. You see, each original 5160 in the MacPro has a TDP (Thermal Dynamic Power) of 80 watts, but a 5365 has a TDP of 150 watts (but twice the number of cores!). And for arguments sake, let\u02bcs say the top thermal power of a 5365 would get to is 120 watts at full load, OK? Well, a 5365 is runs at 3 Ghz- I\u02bcm at 3.3 GHZ- and assuming (rightly so) power is proportional to frequency then my chips should draw 132 watts (3.3\/3=1.1, or 110%).<\/p>\n
Like the math, huh? (Always makes the guy writing the article look like he knows what he\u02bcs talking about.) Then here\u02bcs a little more for you.<\/p>\n
P=v\u00b2\/R. It means the power is proportional to the square of the voltage. And that\u02bcs what the VID mod does to the core voltage. So is an estimation of 132+ watts per chip reasonable? Yeah. Probably even a bit conservative.<\/p>\n
What does all this mean? Imagine of adding two 100 watt incandescent bulbs inside your Mac and then shut the side panel. Now hold that thought in your head for a minute. OK? Good. Then as soon as you\u02bcre done sitting there screwing off with that stupid look on your face you can go wring out my shop towel \u02bbcause things are gonna get hot!<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/octocore1-img4.png\" "\\"octocore1-img4\\"")
basic water flow diagram<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nNext, all that a water block does is transport the CPU\u02bcs heat somewhere else. Most \u201cOver Clockers\u201d will have the water pumped to a radiator with fans attached to dump the heat into their room. The cool water, having lost its heat to the room, loops back to the CPU\u02bcs to start the process all over again. They even have to back off their overclocks in the summer due to the heat dumped into their rooms. You see the problem here, right?<\/p>\n
(Sigh…)<\/em><\/p>\nOK. One more time: Fat guy, hot room, summer coming. Got it?<\/p>\n
Hmmm. I should remind you again that I\u02bcm a cheap bastard. But you probably shoulda figured that one on your own since I didn\u02bct just buy an air conditioner.<\/p>\n
So you see, it isn\u02bct just that I needed to cool the processors, I needed to get their heat out of my office. The rub is that I don\u02bct wanna pay for it. Heat as it turns out, flows down hill, from hot to cold, for free. That\u02bcs what makes the ice in your tea melt. But in Texas, when its 90\u00ba outside, the heat is going to have to flow uphill to get out of my office and that, my friends, is the what that makes the guys at the STNP<\/a> smile.<\/p>\nA radiator with fans blowing hot air over it just heats the water more. I needed a free cold \u201csink\u201d for my heat to go to. I looked all around me, over and over, but no real sink could I find. The it occurred to me- don\u02bct look \u201caround\u201d, look \u201cup and down.\u201d<\/p>\n
Up. Space. The universe. Now that\u02bcs cold! Like only several degrees Kelvin cold. Just look up some night. That blackness is essentially the absence of any heat at all. A \u201cdownhill\u201d flow\u201d? It\u02bcs a bloody downhill plummet. And believe it or not, it\u02bcs a doable technology too, but just not with the \u201cspace\u201d I had available to me.<\/p>\n
So then I looked down, and guess what? There was a big \u02bbole heatsink right at my feet!<\/p>\n
Google, Google, Google.<\/em><\/p>\nRead, Read, Read.<\/em><\/p>\nThe idea of a geothermal heatsink again isn\u02bct original, but isn\u02bct common either\u2014at least for computer people. Fortunately, the guys that did do it published their experiences on the Web to help the rest of us out.<\/p>\n
And there\u02bcs more than a couple of ways to do things, depending on such things as where you live, the type of home, and your budget.<\/p>\n
Not only that, I didn\u02bct need much space to make this thing work\u2014after all, it was to be buried. Buried where you ask? Well, it\u02bcs buried in the only logical place I had to bury it.<\/p>\n
Right outside my office window.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/octocore1-img5.png\" "\\"octocore1-img5\\"")
<\/p>\n
In the wife\u02bcs flower bed.<\/p>\n
Now, for you married gents out there, I\u02bcm sure you see the problem I faced here. The solution however, beautiful for its grand scale and elegance, really is beyond the scope of this article. Actually, statistically speaking, it\u02bcs beyond the scope of 97% of you fellas reading this. But to that last 3% remember that story that goes, \u201cthe way to a man\u02bcs heart is through his stomach?\u201d Well, the way to a woman\u02bcs heart takes a slightly<\/em> different route.<\/p>\nThere. It is decided. I\u02bcm gonna have me a 3.3 Ghz GeoThermally Water-Cooled OctoCore MacPro1,1! Whoop!<\/em> (a \u201cWhoop\u201d is an Aggie<\/a> thing. You wouldn\u02bct understand.)<\/p>\n
My son and I flew to Dallas to attend, and I\u02bcd set my computer to record it while we were gone (in HD, of course).<\/p>\n
43,000 attended the 2010 Texas High School Football Championship at Cowboy\u2019s Stadium, Arlington, Texas<\/p>\n
BOY! WHAT A GAME!<\/em><\/p>\n Did I already say that?<\/p>\n Me and Bubba couldn\u02bct stop talking about it, discussing and picking apart every little detail over and over. Even the wife, not usually excited by this kinda stuff, got into it. So I decided to take my legally acquired copy of the game on my computer and \u201ctime\/place-shift\u201d my copy so the whole family could watch it on my 5 foot Panny<\/a> Plasma together, legally, as provided for by the US Supreme court.<\/p>\n Off I went into my office and got to work on this three hour long HD file. Cutting and slashing things like commercial breaks and talking heads, I put chapter markers on each play. Two versions, one for the Panny, and one for the iPad\/iPhone.<\/p>\n It was a big project and the new version of iMovie<\/a>, unlike it\u02bcs predecessor (or even Adobe Premier<\/a>, which I learned on), is kinda counter-intuitive. El Gato, in their EyeTV package<\/a>, had a nice piece of editing software as well as a hardware encoder (the turbo.264HD<\/a>), but it also fell short (but nonetheless is quite impressive!).<\/p>\n So I defaulted to QuickTime Pro<\/a>. Simple and powerful, you could place chapter markers, subtitles, transitions, ect., and it kept audio and voice-overs in perfect sync.<\/p>\n But I was already kind of tired from the time I spent experimenting with the new iMovie and other products and felt the time encoding was just taking too long. Not only that, but my MacPro (MacPro1,1), with 2 Intel 5160 processors, was kinda slow & was throwing off tons of heat.<\/p>\n So I had two problems; Speed, and Heat. Now, I\u02bcve always had heat issues. My home office is an add-on and with me, the MacPro, two 30 inch Apple Cinema Displays<\/a> (themselves 150 watts per), a scanner, printer, and a multifunction\u2014well, that\u02bcs a lot of heat in there. Worse, as you get older and fatter the heat bothers you more. I also don\u02bct think the neighbor kids like seeing an old fat guy in his underwear at a computer. Much less when he\u02bcs sweating like a pig and wiping his face and underarms with a shop towel. Hell, I <\/em>wouldn\u02bct want to see that (but on the upside, they don\u02bct come around as often).<\/p>\n But one thing atta time…<\/p>\n The the folks in Cupertino had already thought up a solution to the Speed issue. You see, built into the core of OS X is an app called X-grid that allows parallelization with other computers, and some other fine folks at a group called Dauger Research, Inc. made a neat little app called \u201cPooch<\/a>\u201d to work with QuickTime that let me share the encoding load amongst our household computers.<\/p>\n So things were really looking up for me for a while until the wife unhooked her MacBook Pro from the grid to go outside, and Bubba shut down his iMac to go to sleep.<\/p>\n Can\u2019t we all just leave my grid alone?<\/em><\/p>\n Nah, really, it woulda worked well if everyone had just been away for a weekend.<\/p>\n So nothing left to do but upgrade. I was a bit unhappy with this. You see, I\u02bcve owned Mac\u02bcs since 1990 (first being a PowerBook 100) and have real issues with buying a new Mac before the six year minimum. But I\u02bcd read about the \u201cCloverfield\u201d upgrades people were doing & it seemed a reasonable solution.<\/p>\n So off to eBay I went looking for a pair of the magical quad core 5365\u02bcs, only to find that though they could be purchased, the seller\u02bcs were requiring an exorbitant price and un-natural acts from the buyers. And this was bad because besides being cheap, I, uhh…, I don\u02bct go there.<\/p>\n But Lo and Behold, after a bit more searching \u201cIntel pair\u201d, I found for sale \u201ca pair of Intel 5350 engineering samples\u201d. From what I\u02bcd read, this was a completely different kind of Magic from the PC Worlds beyond this Universe. You see, with a clock of 2.66Ghz and a FSB of 1033, you could cast the BSEL charm on them, so not only were they powerful in their own right, but say the right spell while drawing with a circuit pen and it\u02bcs like an un-ending supply of Adrenaline pills in UT2K4<\/a>. Oh yeah baby, we had us a \u201cBuy Now\u201d moment.<\/p>\n So I swapped my new 5350\u02bcs for the 5160\u02bcs and finished the project.<\/p>\n The End<\/p>\n Boy, I wish<\/em> I could say that…<\/p>\n You know that story Jerry Clower tells<\/a> about coon hunting, and his friend John is stuck up in the tree doing battle with a lynx? I think I know how John felt now.<\/p>\n So because I\u02bcm a masochistic retard, I went ahead with the BSEL mod. Over and over I tried, but it just wouldn\u02bct work. It would chime (POST) but immediately choke like Cass Elliot on a ham sandwich.<\/p>\n Google, Google, Google.<\/em><\/p>\n Read, Read, Read.<\/em><\/p>\n You see, to get a 5350 to run at 3.3 Ghz you gotta do the volt mod too.<\/p>\n Wait? Whu\u2019d he say\u201d<\/p>\n A whut mod an a whut mod?<\/p>\n (Hold ya hosses boys, I\u2019ll be gettin\u2019 there…)<\/em><\/p>\n And whuudya know… it worked!<\/p>\n Sun-E-Beaches, I got me a 3.3GHz Octo-core MacPro! WooHoo! Let\u02bcs do some video!<\/p>\n Begin Encode… Hmmmmm…<\/p>\n Restart, Begin Encode… Restart, Begin Encode… Restart, Begin Encode… It was the heat. Within minutes, Handbrake<\/a> would drive the CPUs over 70\u00baC and the computer would auger-in like it was carrying Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens to a show.<\/p>\n I know I should have undone everything then & there and thought myself the better for it. But remember how your Dad used to look at you incredulously and ask, \u201cDammit Boy, ain\u02bct you got no sense at all\u201d? Yeah? Well me too, so \u201cOnward thru the fog\u201d I went.<\/p>\n Well, the short form is this: If I waited until 3 am, opened the windows to the outside until the ambient room temperature was 35\u00baF, took the silly cardboard and duct tape contraption I made that directed the air from my shop fan into the front of the case, AND set smcFanControl<\/a> to run all my fans at 3,000 RPM…<\/p>\n \u201cWhat in God\u2019s name…!? it\u2019s sounds like a 737 in here!\u201d<\/em> (What can I say? I married a\u00a0Flight Attendant)<\/p>\n \u201cGo back to bed, babe\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s 3:30 in the morning! What on earth are you doing?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cProving Dad wrong, babe. Now go back to bed\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cHoney, your father has been gone now 5 years…\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cAnd he\u2019s the one that always said \u2018better late than never\u2019. Go back to bed, babe\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n and I almost<\/em> finished the entire encode.<\/p>\n I gotta find a better way to cool these pups…<\/p>\n Google, Google, Google.<\/em><\/p>\n Read, Read, Read.<\/em><\/p>\n Yup, so this is where the water cooling comes in.<\/p>\n You see, it was simply amazing<\/em> how fast these these CPU\u02bcs would heat up. If they didn\u02bct literally start in a frozen state, you had no chance with the OEM Apple supplied copper-to- aluminum heatsinks. (Now, thru the retrospectoscope, I think a very large all copper conventional air-type heatsink may have had enough heat capacity and diffusion ability to handle it from a near frozen state, but how much fun would that have been, huh?)<\/p>\n Physics tells us if you can\u02bct get rid of it, you\u02bcre gonna have to hold it and, my friends, nothing holds heat as good as water. (Just ask anyone who has ever seen a hurricane up close and personal, they\u02bcll tell ya\u02bc.)<\/p>\n Water cooling it is. Sooooooo….<\/p>\n Google, Google, Google.<\/em><\/p>\n Read, Read, Read.<\/em><\/p>\n I got a little educated. I learned things like laminar flow, turbulence, and \u201cDelta-Tea\u201d (I think it\u02bcs kinda like a Mint Julep, except for folks from Mississippi), and went out to spend some money. And boy howdy, did I.<\/p>\n This was painful. All that I initially wanted was something that could rapidly absorb enough heat to keep the the thing running, and I thought I\u02bcd found the answer. You see, I\u02bcm not the first person to water cool an over-clocked MacPro\u2014some guy named Zack Fanning at Asetek had already done it<\/a>, so all I needed to do was copy him. But Zack had his own pet engineer from the company to do him a complete custom job (and like all administrators, had no freakin\u02bc clue how it was done). Worse yet, that engineer had gone and found himself a new owner. (I heard NASCAR<\/a>. That may be sour grapes though.)<\/p>\n But you\u02bcd think that with Intel selling 20 billion or so 5000X type servers that there\u02bcd been a few folks that put water cooling systems on them. Yeah well, Homey don\u02bct think so. I mean who in their right mind would water cool a rack mounted server?<\/p>\n \u201cWell, Hell… I\u02bcd just add more air conditioning…\u201d<\/em> I was told by the Computer\/IT Engineers (their facial expression I interpreted as them thinking that I had too many- or too few- base pairs to play in their sandbox).<\/p>\n By now it was obvious from every engineer that I talked to they weren\u02bct going to help, so I grabbed my helmet, crayons, and went back out to the corner to wait for that short yellow bus to take me home.<\/p>\n The problem was finding a way to mount a water block to the motherboard. See, not too many aftermarket water blocks have mounts for the LGA (Land Grid Array) 771 socket which is what the MacPro1,1 uses.<\/p>\n But I did find <\/em>one. Finally.<\/p>\n The discontinued Koolance<\/a> \u201cCPU-340\u201d had a mount that could be used on a 771. And although it was big and heavy, should be mountable on a 5000X type server with the accompanying mount. But notice your dear MacPro isn\u02bct a rack mounted server. And please take special notice of the memory cage used to support the DIMMS and provide the laminar airflow that you wouldn\u02bct need to if it was a 1U server. In other words, Dorothy, you\u02bcre not just gonna slap a pocketwatch in the Tin Man\u02bcs chest an have it work. This thing is doable, but I was going to have to find a way to get a square peg into a round hole. Good thing I\u02bcm an ER Doctor, huh? We eat problems like this for lunch everyday. You give me a big enough hammer and I\u02bcll drive the Empire State Building through the smallest round hole you can think of.<\/p>\n Next, remember how I told you that heat bothers us fat people? You do? Good, because my office is still going to be hotter than it was before this little brain surgery was done. You see, each original 5160 in the MacPro has a TDP (Thermal Dynamic Power) of 80 watts, but a 5365 has a TDP of 150 watts (but twice the number of cores!). And for arguments sake, let\u02bcs say the top thermal power of a 5365 would get to is 120 watts at full load, OK? Well, a 5365 is runs at 3 Ghz- I\u02bcm at 3.3 GHZ- and assuming (rightly so) power is proportional to frequency then my chips should draw 132 watts (3.3\/3=1.1, or 110%).<\/p>\n Like the math, huh? (Always makes the guy writing the article look like he knows what he\u02bcs talking about.) Then here\u02bcs a little more for you.<\/p>\n P=v\u00b2\/R. It means the power is proportional to the square of the voltage. And that\u02bcs what the VID mod does to the core voltage. So is an estimation of 132+ watts per chip reasonable? Yeah. Probably even a bit conservative.<\/p>\n What does all this mean? Imagine of adding two 100 watt incandescent bulbs inside your Mac and then shut the side panel. Now hold that thought in your head for a minute. OK? Good. Then as soon as you\u02bcre done sitting there screwing off with that stupid look on your face you can go wring out my shop towel \u02bbcause things are gonna get hot!<\/p>\n Next, all that a water block does is transport the CPU\u02bcs heat somewhere else. Most \u201cOver Clockers\u201d will have the water pumped to a radiator with fans attached to dump the heat into their room. The cool water, having lost its heat to the room, loops back to the CPU\u02bcs to start the process all over again. They even have to back off their overclocks in the summer due to the heat dumped into their rooms. You see the problem here, right?<\/p>\n (Sigh…)<\/em><\/p>\n OK. One more time: Fat guy, hot room, summer coming. Got it?<\/p>\n Hmmm. I should remind you again that I\u02bcm a cheap bastard. But you probably shoulda figured that one on your own since I didn\u02bct just buy an air conditioner.<\/p>\n So you see, it isn\u02bct just that I needed to cool the processors, I needed to get their heat out of my office. The rub is that I don\u02bct wanna pay for it. Heat as it turns out, flows down hill, from hot to cold, for free. That\u02bcs what makes the ice in your tea melt. But in Texas, when its 90\u00ba outside, the heat is going to have to flow uphill to get out of my office and that, my friends, is the what that makes the guys at the STNP<\/a> smile.<\/p>\n A radiator with fans blowing hot air over it just heats the water more. I needed a free cold \u201csink\u201d for my heat to go to. I looked all around me, over and over, but no real sink could I find. The it occurred to me- don\u02bct look \u201caround\u201d, look \u201cup and down.\u201d<\/p>\n Up. Space. The universe. Now that\u02bcs cold! Like only several degrees Kelvin cold. Just look up some night. That blackness is essentially the absence of any heat at all. A \u201cdownhill\u201d flow\u201d? It\u02bcs a bloody downhill plummet. And believe it or not, it\u02bcs a doable technology too, but just not with the \u201cspace\u201d I had available to me.<\/p>\n So then I looked down, and guess what? There was a big \u02bbole heatsink right at my feet!<\/p>\n Google, Google, Google.<\/em><\/p>\n Read, Read, Read.<\/em><\/p>\n The idea of a geothermal heatsink again isn\u02bct original, but isn\u02bct common either\u2014at least for computer people. Fortunately, the guys that did do it published their experiences on the Web to help the rest of us out.<\/p>\n And there\u02bcs more than a couple of ways to do things, depending on such things as where you live, the type of home, and your budget.<\/p>\n Not only that, I didn\u02bct need much space to make this thing work\u2014after all, it was to be buried. Buried where you ask? Well, it\u02bcs buried in the only logical place I had to bury it.<\/p>\n Right outside my office window.<\/p>\n In the wife\u02bcs flower bed.<\/p>\n Now, for you married gents out there, I\u02bcm sure you see the problem I faced here. The solution however, beautiful for its grand scale and elegance, really is beyond the scope of this article. Actually, statistically speaking, it\u02bcs beyond the scope of 97% of you fellas reading this. But to that last 3% remember that story that goes, \u201cthe way to a man\u02bcs heart is through his stomach?\u201d Well, the way to a woman\u02bcs heart takes a slightly<\/em> different route.<\/p>\n There. It is decided. I\u02bcm gonna have me a 3.3 Ghz GeoThermally Water-Cooled OctoCore MacPro1,1! Whoop!<\/em> (a \u201cWhoop\u201d is an Aggie<\/a> thing. You wouldn\u02bct understand.)<\/p>\n
\nPanic.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nPanic.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nPanic.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nPanic.<\/em><\/p>\nArrrrrrgghhh!<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
Materials and Methods Part 1- The Why\u02bcs<\/strong><\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/octocore1-img6.png\" "\\"octocore1-img6\\"")