Vadim Chobanu

I was an advocate of watercooling and always believed in it. I believed in it so much that I even invented and developed my own waterblock for the VGAs. If I was to have that product 3-4 years earlier, probably it would have been successful, now I struggle to see a long term demand and wont bother investing any more time or efforts or even think about it.

Probably many will say that I am gone mad, yet I have valid reasons for that and below I will give the technical explanations behind it.

1) The CPU manufacturing process is shrinking and the current generation of Intel CPUs is at 45nm, due to move to 32nm later on this year. I hear many say ’so what has the manufacturing process to do with the actual watercooling being obsolete?’ It’s simple – more components packed together in the same size will need quicker heat exchange by the exactly same area of contact and the copper commonly utilised in the industry is starting to bottleneck and no matter how quickly the liquid will be pumped, through the CPU block and how cold will that be, the actual CPU temperature will be quite different from the overall ambient liquid temperature.

Example: back in 2006 when Core 2 Duo (65nm launched, the watercooling made a big difference to how much you could push your system to. To stably overclock the first batches of E6600 CPUs to 3.6Ghz on a commercially available air cooler was almost impossible, yet possible with watercooling. It actually made a big difference to the overall CPU temperatures. Now, with the launch of the Core i7 the watercooling struggles to give you as much quantitative benefit when compared to aircooling and I believe that will shrink even more when the manufacturing will move to 32nm. Unless of course diamond or diamond based heat exchangers and compounds will be widely accepted as a cooling standard. One of the latest attempts in this domain was reported by Custom PC not long ago - http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/605550/researchers-create-new-thermal-material.html

If it will be cost efficient, then there is still hope for watercooling to be effective for a few more years to cover the 22nm CPU manufacturing, but probably not as much for the 16nm later on.

Fact: If you look below at the E6600 world records you will see all attempts were made using one sort or another of extreme cooling, such as liquid nitrogen or cooling cascades.

Now if we do the same search for the newer core i7 CPUs, we would notice that in the top searches we get even aircooling and watercooling alongside the liquid nitrogen. That makes a watercooled Intel Core i7 CPU 27Mhz faster than watercooling, leaving even some phase change cooling results behind.

A ‘better’ alternative to watercooling is considered Peltiers/TEC (Thermo Electric Cooling) which is being adapted for use in PC systems by the Canadian Cool IT and in the UK an interesting attempt at using the concept was done by Kobalt Computers, where a Core i7 CPU was overclocked to 4.4Ghz with fairly interesting temperatures as reported by media. I was never a believer in TEC due to the efficiency limitations (the best peltier will only achieve 67% conversion efficiency and that is behind other technologies (PSUs are currently at 80-90%), yet the concept works. Maybe its not the quetest cooling, but it works.

Achieving 4.4Ghz from a Core i7 with good temperatures is pretty impressive, yet the price or availability for the full system was not released and I would imagine they are quite prohibitive in the today’s climate when no-one wants to spend money. A smartly built aircooled system with the same components wont be that far of from those results and that is fact.

My second argument today against the need for extreme speeds is also simple – what for?

A few years back it was understandable – to play the latest games on the highest settings you needed to overclock heavily and always have tomorrow’s technology. Today there are not that many games that wont play very well on a aircooled and overclocked to 3.6Ghz Core i7 with a few high end VGAs from AMD or Nvidia in it.  So the only purpose of watercooling would remain  - noise removal, which will win against the TEC concept.

I understand that not everyone will agree with me, please feel free to comment

  

Gaming High End Desktop Replacement Laptop

I didn’t like the laptops for many different reasons. Historically the majority of them were having proprietary parts that were not compatible with each over – PSU, Optical Drives, FD, HD mounts etc and I hated that you couldn’t upgrade them as normal desktops. Back in the days, I even came across some BIOS limitations that didn’t allow me to install a different windows version – i.e. instead of the originally installed windows 98, to upgrade it to windows XP. Lets just keep this short and say – I wasted too much time on useless laptop troubleshooting/upgrading which lead me to hate them.

About 4 years ago, it all changed with the Clevo D900 Laptop for me: desktop-type CPU and Chipset, full size keyboard, proper high resolution screen; all the parts inside could be upgraded/changed – beautiful! Only downside to it all was the weight, heat and battery life as you can imagine from a 17″ Gaming Laptop. Just to make a comment here for those who haven’t heard of Clevo. Clevo is a OEM manufacturer of laptops chassis and as such, you normally wont come across this name, but instead you could recognize their products under Alienware, Rock, Eurocom, etc brand names.

Anyway, I liked the product, however, not long after that, the heat issues  proved to be a problem. Different parts inside were failing more often than we wanted – HDs, Memory etc. Looking back, I can tell that the majority of these problems resulted from improper use. I will elaborate. The laptops have ventilation holes at the bottom and naturally they shouldn’t be obstructed. If you use this laptop just stationary as a desktop replacement, then its fine. If, however the beast is to be used sometimes as a ordinary laptop, then you will more than likely obstruct those holes, when placing it on your laps or other non-solid surfaces. What does that mean? Shorter life for your components.

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*** If you are a vegetarian please navigate away from this page***

Dear reader, I am yet again sorry for not writing anything more PC hardware related… I have a weakness that is called good food… To be more precise, I love home grown meat. I love it so much that I even refused to eat supermarket pork long time ago and I always struggle to find a good butcher to supply a decent piece of pork. Call me choosy if you like, but the majority of pork meat in the UK in my opinion is substandard. Compared to other European countries such as Germany, Spain etc,  we are very much left behind unfortunately in UK. I have nothing against British Lamb or Beef, actually I love it very much, though I can’t force myself to eat British Pork from the majority of suppliers. However, earlier this year, my searches paid off and I finally found a place that offered some really good pork. It was a farm in Devon and apparently they use some rare Berkshire breed and rear them outside organically. Oh, just so we don’t get confused here, no, I didn’t travel all the way to Devon…I took the risk to order online and they did a home delivery service using citylink, so the meat was arriving fresh all the time. The place is called little foxhole farm and you can find it at their website – http://www.littlefoxholefarm.com/

To be frank, the pork was so delicious, for the first few weeks, it was my only choice for all the meals, no matter what. I didn’t even want to go out… It tasted completely different from anything else that you normally can buy. My only problem was the fact that I had to wait after ordering. I remember the first time when i placed the order it was a good few weeks wait. Being a nature that wants everything yesterday, I found this a bit of a challenge. Therefore, whenever i was coming close to any markets, I didn’t hesitate to take my chances again, yet fruitless.

As a firm believer in the simple fact that when you try hard enough, it eventually pays off, the disappointments didn’t stop me from trying yet again and again. So yesterday it was my day! But I will explain as to how it happened as well as show you some pics, plus a quick recipe.

It all started that I had to attend a business meeting in Canterbury and my wife wanted to visit the Cathedral for her coursework. As you can imagine, there was no much hesitation, as killing 2 birds with one stone and 2 rabbits with one shot is something I can’t say no to, especially considering that I don’t drive and my wife does.

Anyway, Canterbury even on a cloudy day is a nice place to go to and the Cathedral is quite an outstanding building to see inside and out.

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Apologies for not writing more often… I don’t know the exact reason, but recently, I found it difficult to focus on writing something about hardware and to be even more honest, I haven’t even played any games for a good few months now. I know, it’s a disaster, and some of you may say, I must be going mad, but I found myself preoccupied with the real world pleasures and to be more precise I took a trip to Moldova. For the purpose of this blog, I shall call it a business trip as it had to do with my next venture of which you will find soon enough

Until not so long ago, Moldova wasn’t even on Custom PC Map and what’s even more ironic, I was always forgetting to take a picture with me holding Custom PC when I am away… ok, ok, I am lying – I just find myself doing something different all the time and my magazine always happens to be left at home. However, I have nothing to blame my nature any longer as it seems someone called Nick Stevens has done it last week! 

So, while hesitating in writing my next blog, which was to be called ‘Building your own Vadim PC’, I just changed my mind and decided to write this article about my trip to Moldova. I guess it won’t be the last blog about the country , so I won’t go into much detail except that Moldova even though being a communist country (on the paper) it doesn’t need a visa for British and EU citizens. The other problem with Moldova in becoming a good tourist attraction is the fact that there is only one ‘direct’ flight per week and that ‘direct’ flight makes a stop in Paris (go figure out) to pick up and drop off some passengers there. So instead of paying £410 for a return flight I decided to make my way through Romania with BA. Daily departures from Heathrow, early arrival in Bucharest, twice as cheap (just something over £200), so cant complain. One tip for the traveller – avoid the Bucharest airport Taxi drivers like plague! They are absolute nasty rip offs. I won’t go into this one too much, but be warned – they can charge 3 times more than they should and won’t even blink. Knowing that, after fighting a few annoying taxi drivers to leave me alone, I took a bus to the Train station priced at just a few quid and then the train to Galati – a city on the border with Moldova, not far from where my parents live. The train was relatively cheap – less than 10 quid for the whole distance which is around 200 miles. I could have taken a flight to Kishinev – the capital of Moldova, but I was feeling adventurous and saving a bit of money is always a good idea if that involves seeing the country by train and having the time to do so

As my parents live in country side, all the food is home grown, so a few days there is always something to look forward for me, as you can see below – all is natural and indeed home made. As I arrived on a weekend, it was only Monday that I had to make my way to Kishinev for the planned meetings, which allowed me to fully enjoy the country.

Wont comment here, but was very tasty

Grapes - Moldova variety

Sundried Fish - perfect with beer

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