Last year I took my Computer "The Pentagon" to the German Case Modding Championship in Cologne. See last blog entry.
There a championship much closer to where I live. The Modding Masters. I didn't manage to get "The Pentagon" ready for the application deadline in 2016
So I though, let's go this year and to top that off let's go with two projects!
A few months prior to the Modding Master a certain former team supervisor, now full time teacher, called me and asked me if I wanted to take "peæk" home.
"peæk" always was a good war exhibit and exactly that it should be again, I thought. Modding Masters happens at Maker Faire Bodensee. A faire for tinkerers and, well, makers.
Perfect. After a few polishing touches on both Projects and a confirmation for a free booth I drove off with two finished projects in my boot ...
Here's an interview in german of my neighbour and me at the Modding Masters (I'm getting interviewed at 3:55):
https://youtu.be/psmnKGARQTY
This time wasn't much different from last year. Again I wasn't able to win due to the same reasons. Nevertheless there was great interest in both project. I was able to have some quite interesting technical conversations about a multitude of topics with visitors as well as booth neighbours. It was definitely worth the weekend.
(Source)
To add is that prior to the Modding Masters I added a new grafics card to "The Pentagon". I, of course, wanted to phasechange cool this one too. Seems like I had tremendous luck last time.
After three attempts as well as quite some cash down the drain everything worked as it should.
First benchmarks showed that, not suprisingly really, the passive cooling in this configuration reaches its limit at 50% GPU (Titan Xp) load. It managed, completely passive, the CPU alone up to 100% before that.
So next up will be an upgrade to semi passive. Planed is to fill the "fan-sheet", that I had made for exactly this situation back when I built "The Pentagon, with fans that should only run once a certain Temperature is reached.
The Arduino allready in the build should act as a controller for that.
Oh nearly forgot. You can buy phasechangecooling for your computer now!
A company called "Calyos" has brought their technology to the consumer level and launched it per Kickstarter.
Here's their product:
More information under: http://fanlessfan.com
The future will show if enthusiats see the potential of phase change cooling. I sure am eager to see.