Ultimate PCs (part one): water-cooling, dual-graphics and more

Monday, August 8th, 2011

It’s been two years since an Ultimate PC group test found its way into the pages of PC Pro, and this year’s selection showed exactly what we’ve been missing. Seven systems arrived to fight for the title and, with every single one boasting an overclocked processor and dual graphics, we knew we were in for a fierce battle before we’d even unpacked.

(more…)

I like Miso Soup

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

No, I haven’t been taken over by a random word generator : I genuinely like the stuff. Not just because it perfectly complements some Sashimi or a Bento Box; but because it helps me think about air-conditioning and heat. Miso soup is a mixture of stock – or dashi – with paste – or Miso. It’s supposed to arrive hot, and if you leave it in a coolish room you can see the little particles of paste circulating in an almost textbook perfect case study of convection: something very few people actually believe is really going on around us, despite being taught about it in school (by a mad Welshman with crinkly wavy hair, a la Dilbert, in my case, but I digress)…

When the weather is hot, and I’m standing in people’s server rooms and they are going nuts with fear and loathing about their precious servers going into meltdown, I like to ask them about Miso soup: and if they get all confused (and then angry and then don’t pay my bill), I ask them how much they think the air inside the typical hot-air balloon actually weighs.

Very few get it right: the answer is, about five tons. Once you get that idea into your head, getting emergency cooling for servers sorted out starts to make a good deal more sense – and those elephant’s-trunk so-called aircon units which harassed managers tend to put in as a reflex action during these periods, start to look more like a way to throw kilowatts into the air for very little benefit, than like a smart way to stop your servers going into meltdown.

Got any good “boy stood on the burning deck” stories from extreme heat or wild weather?