Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[xrunner]

Urgent Member Re Education required  https://www.eevblog.com/forum/buysellwanted/test-equipment-for-sale/msg3559544/#msg3559544

and VK5RC drop the OP a message maybe 

See my passive/aggressive response.

LOL that was perfect! 

[Specmaster]

HEAVY SNIPPAGE

This is the UK, all my quoted prices are inclusive of taxes and shipping.

The radiator is 80 x 80 mm, why do you assume I am incapable of telling the difference between that and a 120 x 120 mm one? The material is copper, not aluminium.

I don't need to take the block apart. If I had flow issues, it would be apparent. I say again, the breakdown rate when not exposed to high temperatures is so slow as to be unimportant. By the time it is an issue in my system, I'll be at the point of building a new one anyway. The material here is also copper.

And yet here in the very varied Shack my slightly o/clocked 3700X runs perfectly well with way less fuss on the stock fan ..... The big issue is now and always will be if you want to dump 100W of heat and recirculate the cooling medium even via a radiator the fluid will eventually get to ambient temperature regardless unless you add additional refrigeration. Air cooling in a decent enclosure will be warmer to start with but its fluid will never exceed ambient unlike water so the net result is about NIL under heavy sustained workloads in warm/hot environments.

ergo Water Cooling for Intel Elements and nutjobs 

Not really.
EVERY passive cooling system will ALWAYS be ABOVE ambient temperture. It it wasn't it would not transfer any heat away.  Water or water / gycol (or even straight glycol) is a much better heat transfer fluid than air.  The big advantages of liquid cooling is much better energy transfer for a given contact area and temperature difference and you can remove the heat out of the equipment case easily while taking up little space. This means you don't need the massive metal heat spreaders and/or heat pipes of an air ccooled CPU cooler and can reduce the volume of air (and contaminants) and air ducting in the case. 
Liquid cooling is more efficient, smaller and quieter if well designed. It will almost certainly provide lower CPU core temperatures (and cse internl temperatures than an air cooling system of similar volume or power consumption.
 

The small reserve of fluid in a closed loop will always in time heat up before you get to the failure methods of the pump and core so I call  on water cooling for PC's KISS for the win. In a hot environment is is a LOSER.

And it is also most certainly NOT smaller!

I gave up on air coolers years ago and switched to water cooling and I for can certainly say that water cooling is far better than air cooling. Stock coolers are no good for PC's that are on for extended periods and are being used to do real heavy number crunching or gaming, fans ramp up speed to a high-pitched whine and temps often rocket and the CPU gets throttled back and performance drops markedly. All of these I have personally experienced at some point, so I switched to really extremely large air coolers which did improve the cooling a bit but was still limited in its capabilities, then I switched to water cooling, and temps dropped massively, noise levels also dramatically reduced. Currently my PC is running at 23C and peaked at 34C with ambient temp here of 22C with air coolers those CPU temps would have been easily in the 60C plus range and I have seen them in the 80 to 90C range with stock coolers. So I'm sticking with water coolers.

[beanflying]

Not my experience at all. In days gone by where any attempt to overclock an Intel CPU to the max sure otherwise it is complete frogshit that water cooling is 'essential' for performance in particular if you go away from Intel. Case airflow in both options is way more important than water or air.

[bd139]

Agree with beanflying here.

There's no watercooled stuff in our DC or offices. Why? It's more expensive, more complicated and less reliable.  And it doesn't matter a damn to the end user.

My last two desktops were air cooled and near silent when flat out and those were a 3700X and a 10400. Yeah stuff hits 60oC - so what?

Water cooling, apart from specialist applications, is just dick jewelry.

Also it doesn't matter which vendor. It's the TDP that is important. Both vendors have products with good and shit TDPs...

[med6753]

Do you think this might benefit with water cooling?

Or it is as Bd sez just dick jewelry? 

[beanflying]

[Robert763]

BIG SNIP

The small reserve of fluid in a closed loop will always in time heat up before you get to the failure methods of the pump and core so I call  on water cooling for PC's KISS for the win. In a hot environment is is a LOSER.

And it is also most certainly NOT smaller!

First comment seems to SUPPORT liquid cooling  Liquid will be better in a hot envroment (any that the operator can stand)
It is smaller if you include the volume of ducting required to get the heat outside the case without heating up other components. Look at any commercial

[Robert763]

Do you think this might benefit with water cooling?

Or it is as Bd sez just dick jewelry? 

Well no, but that is not spot cooling like a CPU.

[Robert763]

Agree with beanflying here.

There's no watercooled stuff in our DC or offices. Why? It's more expensive, more complicated and less reliable.  And it doesn't matter a damn to the end user.

My last two desktops were air cooled and near silent when flat out and those were a 3700X and a 10400. Yeah stuff hits 60oC - so what?

Water cooling, apart from specialist applications, is just dick jewelry.

Also it doesn't matter which vendor. It's the TDP that is important. Both vendors have products with good and shit TDPs...

I think you have missed the argument, it's not if liquid cooling is NEEDED, it's if a liquid cooling system is better at cooling.

[beanflying]

BIG SNIP

The small reserve of fluid in a closed loop will always in time heat up before you get to the failure methods of the pump and core so I call  on water cooling for PC's KISS for the win. In a hot environment is is a LOSER.

And it is also most certainly NOT smaller!

First comment seems to SUPPORT liquid cooling  Liquid will be better in a hot envroment (any that the operator can stand)
It is smaller if you include the volume of ducting required to get the heat outside the case without heating up other components. Look at any commercial

Hardly 'support' it is part of the PROBLEM with PC cooling you still need to pass air over the radiator and airflow over that is as with air important. Also in a modern system the GPU is in a lot of cases burning twice the power of the CPU nad yet the CPU is in most cases the only item that gets water cooled.

Looking up 'any' commercial of someone selling a method for $ really 

[bd139]

Do you think this might benefit with water cooling?

Or it is as Bd sez just dick jewelry? 

That’s dick cancer that one 

[BU508A]

From a physical point of view, water cooling is always superior to cooling with air.
The significantly higher specific heat capacity of water alone ensures that more
energy can be transported from one place per unit of time than with a
comparable amount of air.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_heat_capacity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convection_(heat_transfer)

It is also out of question, that the handling of air flowed cooling is much easier and less prone to failure than water cooling.
If one has to stick to a high-density enviroment, then there isn't really an alternative to water cooling.
Same applies also when you need to get a lot heat (energy) out of a certain place in short time.

Just my 2 cents.

[beanflying]

The issue is not generally the immediate removal or reduction in heat from the CPU die it is the removal of the heat from the limited reservoir and closed loop system. Modern copper based or tubed aluminium heatsinks manage that really well also they do however respond faster to load as they have lower thermal inertia over liquid systems. When the fluid hits ambient or above and it will under sustained load any benefit is near nil over an appropriate welll designed air cooled system whos cooling medium remains at ambient.

The density/space argument simply doesn't hold up radiators and associated fans are similar and in some cases larger in bulk than air/heatsinks.

Fundamental thermodynamics still applies you still need to dump the 100W out of the case regardless of water or air!

[mnementh]

This is the UK, all my quoted prices are inclusive of taxes and shipping.

The radiator is 80 x 80 mm, why do you assume I am incapable of telling the difference between that and a 120 x 120 mm one? The material is copper, not aluminium.

I don't need to take the block apart. If I had flow issues, it would be apparent. I say again, the breakdown rate when not exposed to high temperatures is so slow as to be unimportant. By the time it is an issue in my system, I'll be at the point of building a new one anyway. The material here is also copper.

Okay, fine. You've got the magical unicorn liquid cooler that doesn't ever need any maintenance; I wish you both a long and happy life together. I've had enough of this.

Cheers!

mnem
 

[Specmaster]

BIG SNIP

The small reserve of fluid in a closed loop will always in time heat up before you get to the failure methods of the pump and core so I call  on water cooling for PC's KISS for the win. In a hot environment is is a LOSER.

And it is also most certainly NOT smaller!

First comment seems to SUPPORT liquid cooling  Liquid will be better in a hot envroment (any that the operator can stand)
It is smaller if you include the volume of ducting required to get the heat outside the case without heating up other components. Look at any commercial

Hardly 'support' it is part of the PROBLEM with PC cooling you still need to pass air over the radiator and airflow over that is as with air important. Also in a modern system the GPU is in a lot of cases burning twice the power of the CPU nad yet the CPU is in most cases the only item that gets water cooled.

Looking up 'any' commercial of someone selling a method for $ really 

Hmm, look in any really serious hardcore gaming rig built for a professional gamer, and yes there are such people who really do make a good living out of game playing, and you see that their rigs all sport liquid cooling of the CPU and indeed the GPU.

Yes air flow is very important in to both air or liquid cooling, because at the end of the day it is air that is transferring the heat out of the system and dispersing it into the air. Liquid cooled engines on both bikes and cars are considerably quieter than their air cooled counterparts and my experience is the same with PC's. I used to have a massive air cooler stuck on my CPU, with a case optimised for airflow with fans in the front pushing air in, straight onto and into the CPU cooler with 2 fans in a push / pull configuration, pulling the cool air from the front, through the CPU cooler and directly into the rear mounted exhaust fan pulling hot air out. There was no obstruction to the airflow, and yet fitting a liquid cooling system, reduced both the noise level and the operating temperature of the CPU by upto 30C. With a double sized rad or even triple rad, means that the 2 or 3 fans mounted on them, run at a lower RPM but with good CFM rates blowing cool air through the rads and expelling the air outside. That means that in say the case of the double rad, it has 2 fans driving air though and cooling, whereas in the air CPU cooler, with 2 fans, the first fan is pulling cool air in and as the coolers are square, the air warms up as it passes over the fins and the 2nd fan is pulling that warmer air out towards the exhaust fan but not all of that air is extracted, a lot rises up and heats the area above the CPU, which in the case domestic PC's is where? Thats right, at the top of the MB and the case so the CPU  sits in a pocket of warmer air. That does not happen with liquid cooling  as the air is directly vented outside the case.

[Robert763]

The issue is not generally the immediate removal or reduction in heat from the CPU die it is the removal of the heat from the limited reservoir and closed loop system. Modern copper based or tubed aluminium heatsinks manage that really well also they do however respond faster to load as they have lower thermal inertia over liquid systems. When the fluid hits ambient or above and it will under sustained load any benefit is near nil over an appropriate welll designed air cooled system whos cooling medium remains at ambient.

The density/space argument simply doesn't hold up radiators and associated fans are similar and in some cases larger in bulk than air/heatsinks.

Fundamental thermodynamics still applies you still need to dump the 100W out of the case regardless of water or air!

First paragraph is complete  e.g."When the fluid hits ambient or above.." the fluid will ALWAYS be above ambient whn it's on. The only time it be at ambinet is when everything is off.
Also those copper tubes are heatpipes, much higher conductivity than solid copper in their operating temperature range.

[Vince]

As promised, I made a bit of time before work to get the Tektronix 502A on the bench and powered up.  It marred the surface of that bench but oh well.  It already got its first battle scars from the HP signal generator in the background.



I used a Hewlett Packard 3310A function generator to provide an input signal.  I’ve never seen a Tektronix oscilloscope of this vintage in action in person before and the descriptions out there of the traces being pencil thin are no exaggeration. The phosphor is a really striking blue and very intense, almost painful to look at if it’s turned up too high.

Both input channels work but the triggering doesn’t and both traces vanish whenever the trigger level knob is moved off the far clockwise range of travel.  I don’t know if that’s due to user error on my part, not enough time running to get tubes and Nuvistors fully woken up after sitting idle for an indeterminate amount of time, or if the trigger section actually does have problems.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have as much time to play with it as I’d have liked before leaving for work so it didn’t get a long run-in time to start coming alive with and I wanted to get some other test equipment spun up while I was down there.

But differential inputs!  This is something that is going to be really handy for balanced line audio work so I want to restore it and find it a more permanent home on or easy reach from the bench.

Wow.... Papa Smurf 547 and now a 502A, all at once. Lucky me.  Keep us posted on this sweet creature.... have one too, also with that blue CRT which I also love. It's an uncommon colour and trace is very sharp indeed, it's hard to capture it on pictures.
Barely started restoring mine 2 and half years ago, spent only an evening on it. Just enough to bring it back to life.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/(classic)-tektronix-502a-scope-repair-restoration/

Then my house building fiasco started and I had to stop all electronic activities... hoping to resume work on that scope soon ! Mine does not look as good as yours, big physical damage and looking crusty inside out. At the beginning it almost looked like the CRT neck was broken, but somehow it was not, just looked 1000000000 times worse than it actually was, phew !
I think it can be saved and made to look pretty presentable, with some work.

Initial fault was same as Papy Smurf is having with his 547 : immobile dot(s, two guns). Was a dead tube in the horizontal amplifier. Found it in 30 seconds using only the most sophisticated, state of the art troubleshooting tool : a pair of eye balls... powered up the scope, looked at all the tubes glowing, noticed that one of them was not glowing at all, completely dark... replaced it, scope instantly came back to life ! 

Now need to troubleshoot all the minor problems, recalibrate it, do some metal work to bend the cabinet pieces back into shape, and do the cosmetic restoration inside out. A lot of work/time ahead....

[25 CPS]

This is the UK, all my quoted prices are inclusive of taxes and shipping.

The radiator is 80 x 80 mm, why do you assume I am incapable of telling the difference between that and a 120 x 120 mm one? The material is copper, not aluminium.

I don't need to take the block apart. If I had flow issues, it would be apparent. I say again, the breakdown rate when not exposed to high temperatures is so slow as to be unimportant. By the time it is an issue in my system, I'll be at the point of building a new one anyway. The material here is also copper.

Okay, fine. You've got the magical unicorn liquid cooler that doesn't ever need any maintenance; I wish you both a long and happy life together. I've had enough of this.

Cheers!

mnem
 

Come to think of it, there's something you need to add to your collection since you've got that Mac Pro.  How about a Power PC G5 dual processor machine 2.5, 2.7 GHz or the quad core 2.5 GHz machine?  That'd get you Apple liquid CPU cooling to play around with.

[med6753]

Is today "Let's piss in someone's Wheaties" day? Seems that way. I didn't get the memo. 

And trust me.....I can collect a whole bag full of piss if required.  So watch what you say to me. 

[bd139]

This is the UK, all my quoted prices are inclusive of taxes and shipping.

The radiator is 80 x 80 mm, why do you assume I am incapable of telling the difference between that and a 120 x 120 mm one? The material is copper, not aluminium.

I don't need to take the block apart. If I had flow issues, it would be apparent. I say again, the breakdown rate when not exposed to high temperatures is so slow as to be unimportant. By the time it is an issue in my system, I'll be at the point of building a new one anyway. The material here is also copper.

Okay, fine. You've got the magical unicorn liquid cooler that doesn't ever need any maintenance; I wish you both a long and happy life together. I've had enough of this.

Cheers!

mnem
 

Come to think of it, there's something you need to add to your collection since you've got that Mac Pro.  How about a Power PC G5 dual processor machine 2.5, 2.7 GHz or the quad core 2.5 GHz machine?  That'd get you Apple liquid CPU cooling to play around with.

Those liquid cooled G5’s are a reference to why you don’t want a liquid cooled computer. Leaky as hell.

[mnementh]

Agree with beanflying here.

There's no watercooled stuff in our DC or offices. Why? It's more expensive, more complicated and less reliable.  And it doesn't matter a damn to the end user.

My last two desktops were air cooled and near silent when flat out and those were a 3700X and a 10400. Yeah stuff hits 60oC - so what?

Water cooling, apart from specialist applications, is just dick jewelry. Also it doesn't matter which vendor. It's the TDP that is important. Both vendors have products with good and shit TDPs...

I think you have missed the argument, it's not if liquid cooling is NEEDED, it's if a liquid cooling system is better at cooling.

First, bd, you are comparing a DC which is designed and expects to have shitloads of high-velocity fans screaming like NASA JPL 24/7 with a end-user's box that sits next to/under a desk and has close to zero workload 98% of the time. These DCs work great, provided you A) can get the fuck out of the wailing banshee room most of the time for the sake of your sanity and 2) can ensure that the airflow into and out of said room is very well chilled and filtered.

Also, just because your DC is air-cooled, does not mean all are. Many of my biggest clients in Houston were also FinTech, and all the servers I dealt with for them were in fact liquid-cooled, with high-capacity AiO coolers purpose-made for server use by Corsair. These are not even custom made; they are now so common as to be a generic, modular product that server manufacturers design around, just like modular high-CFM fan clusters.

As for whether it is needed here... yes, it is. I run a Auto OC'd Ryzen 7 and a OC'd RTX2080Super for a high-resolution VR gaming setup (Odyssey+ goggles; were bleeding edge, now middle of the road). I tried running it with the stock Wraith cooler, and I tried a borrowed air-cooled RTX2080 first. Logs showed that both thermal-throttled with any prolonged gameplay; even on games as simple as Beat Saber. It is not just the complexity of the imagery that matters; it is the demands of the timing required to render 2K video at 90-100 FPS and have enough overhead that you can discard unneeded frames and still keep that framerate. This system literally runs right at the AMD/NVidia bus bottleneck speeds pretty much any time it is doing the job I built it for.

So yes, liquid cooling is better in this scenario, and it deals better with the heat-soak that prolonged processing in a desktop-grade PC running right at its limits generates.

And there is something that nobody here is considering, which really does make a big difference in water-cooling's favor: The difference in velocity of airflow required for effective cooling: You guys all talk aboot how "huge unrestricted airflow" in a case is critical... with air-cooling, you need that airflow to be as close to a wind-tunnel as you can get. This is because your CPU and GPU are dumping all their heat inside the case, and you have to get that heat outside as quickly as possible or the CPU and GPU just heat each other and your MB up with their waste air.

With liquid cooling, this really is not necessary. You need to be able to flow large volumes of air, yes; but it does not need to move fast. It can come in from the bottom, flow nice and leisurely around stuff in the basement, up around the MB, GPU, accessories and schizz... it doesn't matter.

The fact of being able to choose exactly where the waste air dumps, combined with the exponentially greater surface area and efficiency of a liquid-cooling rad is so much better that you can design such that the CPU and GPU both are dumping their heat directly outside the case, and none of it is in there with the MB. This means your VRM and high-speed chipset controllers and NVMe drives stay nice & cool, since they aren't dealing with the waste heat from the CPU & GPU.

This is why my rig has both CPU and GPU liquid-cooled, and each with its own rad. It is also why I'm rebuilding in a case which has a great big filter on the bottom; this design lends itself much better to the reverse-flow build I've been using for 2 years now.

Another pro for liquid-cooled in a home environment; something I've found from experience over the years: Because the air moves much slower most of the time, liquid-cooled PCs accumulate much less dust from the surrounding air, and even when they do, it matters less because the radiators deal with it so much better than the fins in an air-cooler.

This doesn't matter in a DC with ultra-filtered processed air; in a home it is a huge problem.

Okay... I'm sure I'm gonna set off a huge argument discussion with this latest installment... I guess I'd better go put muh flameproof jammies on.

Cheers,

mnem

[mnementh]

This is the UK, all my quoted prices are inclusive of taxes and shipping.

The radiator is 80 x 80 mm, why do you assume I am incapable of telling the difference between that and a 120 x 120 mm one? The material is copper, not aluminium.

I don't need to take the block apart. If I had flow issues, it would be apparent. I say again, the breakdown rate when not exposed to high temperatures is so slow as to be unimportant. By the time it is an issue in my system, I'll be at the point of building a new one anyway. The material here is also copper.

Okay, fine. You've got the magical unicorn liquid cooler that doesn't ever need any maintenance; I wish you both a long and happy life together. I've had enough of this.

Cheers!

mnem
 

Come to think of it, there's something you need to add to your collection since you've got that Mac Pro.  How about a Power PC G5 dual processor machine 2.5, 2.7 GHz or the quad core 2.5 GHz machine?  That'd get you Apple liquid CPU cooling to play around with.

*looks over at the MacPro sitting in the corner of the room with yet-again dead GPU, then looks back to 25CPS with narrowed gaze*

fuck you and the whores you rode in on. 

mnem
Very cordially, of course.

[mnementh]

Is today "Let's piss in someone's Wheaties" day? Seems that way. I didn't get the memo. 

And trust me.....I can collect a whole bag full of piss if required.  So watch what you say to me. 

Not Wheaties... "Death by Raisins" Rasin Bran. Yummeh.

mnem
*toddles off to drain the lizard*

[med6753]

And so it continues......

[Cubdriver]

To be really pedantic, ALL of them are ultimately air cooled.  The only question is whether the heat goes from the CPU directly through a piece of metal to reach that air, or if it hitches a ride on some liquid along the way between two pieces of metal, one at each end of its journey.   

-Pat