Fan club
- Published: 07 March 2008 17:52
- Author: Sutherland Lyall
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- Last Updated: 07 March 2008 17:52
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Green geeks planning to slip over to Hanover this week for the monster CeBIT electronics orgy have been getting really excited about a computer processor fan which runs itself.
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| The principle of the Stirling engine |
It's called the APC (air powered cooler). Designed by motherboard manufacturer MSI, it has no power connections and its fan spins around courtesy of the heat (not air) given off by the cpu (central processor) chip.
Climb under the desk and open your computer box and you'll see that your cpu is cooled by an electric fan or, if you are a serious gamester, a liquid cooling system with transparent pipes, strange luminous green fluid and a big radiator.
MSI's APC device, which is dinky and looks real pretty as a diagram, is actually a Stirling engine.
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Robert Stirling invented it circa 1816 and ever since it's been billed as the engine of the future. Now it is: titchy and cooling your next computer.
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But what's this? Somebody pointing out that if you added up the power usage of all the fans in your computer box they would use only a tiny fraction of the energy dissipated by the cpu in the first place. I hate naysayers.
