Scythe Giant Ninja [CeBIT 2008]

Capsaicin · Post by **Capsaicin** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 11:52 am

Will the insanity never end?

jaganath · Post by **jaganath** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 12:17 pm

we didn't see heatsinks this big even at the height of Prescott madness; so why are we seeing them now, when most CPUs are much cooler? unless it's some kind of elaborate company in-joke?

JazzJackRabbit · Post by **JazzJackRabbit** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 12:40 pm

Actually, given the fin spacing this looks more like beefed up version of Scythe Infinity.

lm · Post by lm » Wed Mar 05, 2008 1:00 pm

I hope that uses bolt-through mounting by default.

JLee · Post by **JLee** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 1:04 pm

why!?
they just released the orochi!

Post by **MikeC** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 1:04 pm

At every tradeshow, every company competes for attention. Spending all the big $$ to be there, they have to make deals and/or get some attention to make it worthwhile. Scythe has been showing absurd creations at shows for years. Like this one from last June...

I think all the recent absurdly huge heatsinks from Scythe indicates that it's getting harder to keep growing the DIY heatsink business.

Felger Carbon · Post by **Felger Carbon** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 2:00 pm

Can we pause for a moment and consider the CPU, which is what them absurd HSFs cool? Intel and AMD are having to push CPUs with more and more cores at the public at a time when most software only makes use of one core.

Intel is already up to six cores/package across the counter, I believe. If some software ever appears that can actually use all six 100% of the time, we'll be back in Prescott territory again, heatwise. Maybe worse.

The software industry, particularly the HPC segment, has been looking for ways to keep lotsa cores busy (e.g. parallel computing) for a great many years, with mostly no success re: general purpose computing. Aside from gaming enthusiasts (ray-traced graphics), I don't see a role for multicore CPUs on the desktop.

m^2 · Post by **m^2** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 2:05 pm

Felger Carbon wrote:Intel is already up to six cores/package across the counter, I believe. If some software ever appears that can actually use all six 100% of the time, we'll be back in Prescott territory again, heatwise. Maybe worse.

These 6 core processors wil be 7xxx Xeons, for high end servers. They will run close to 100% all the time

FartingBob · Post by **FartingBob** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 2:28 pm

CPU's themselves are becoming more and more efficient and cooler. The fact that a high end quad core can produce less heat than a single core pentium made only 3 or 4 years ago is testiment to the advances in efficiency. The consumers are driving it as well, people are becoming more energy aware and the growing market for near-silent HTPC's and laptops that need to be cool is helping as well.

Heatsinks however seem to still be getting bigger. While this is 90% likely to only ever be a prototype for publicity it does point to the fact that heatsinks arent getting that much more advanced, just adding more surface area and heatsinks.
Theres a limit to what this can do before something new will be needed. Watercooling or things like TEC show that you can do compact cooling still, but its too complicated and expensive right now to really take off. Give it a decade though.

elec999 · Post by **elec999** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 6:13 pm

I want to see a cooler that can easily cool a cpu without any fans or very low speed fans.
Thanks

D Incorporated · Post by **D Incorporated** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 6:25 pm

Felger Carbon wrote:Aside from gaming enthusiasts (ray-traced graphics), I don't see a role for multicore CPUs on the desktop.

A lot of the higher-end audio applications I work with make use of them, and they come in quite handy, especially when you've got nearly 2GB of 32-bit WAV tracks being processed through multiple FX plugins simultaneously.

krille · Post by **krille** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 3:26 pm

While a HSF that would exert enough leverage on the MB to break the PCB in two might be overkill, the more efficient the HSF the more performance you'll be able to squeeze out of a CPU at the noise level. Taken to the extreme, this could mean OC'ing while running passive!

Tkpenalty · Post by **Tkpenalty** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 11:27 pm

Scythe need to learn that the copper base is the reason why their latest products arent very successful. I mean there is a limit to how effective the heatpipes are, all this heat transfer is bottlenecked by the fact that they are using increasingly thicker copper bases.

The thing was that the copper base on heatpipe coolers was for against damaging bare dies... however the day of the bare dies is over as virtually all modern CPUs use an IHS.

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Tue Mar 18, 2008 5:40 am

Hello,

I think that the issues with Scythe Ninja's performance has more to do with poor contact/bonding between the heatpipes and the base (take the recently reviewed Akasa HS as an example of how this should be done), as well as the mounting pins; when a through-bolted backplate is much better.

The thickness of the copper base in and of itself is not the issue, IMO.

smilingcrow · Post by **smilingcrow** » Sat Mar 22, 2008 6:29 am

Felger Carbon wrote:Intel is already up to six cores/package across the counter, I believe. If some software ever appears that can actually use all six 100% of the time, we'll be back in Prescott territory again, heatwise. Maybe worse.

Itâ€™s not that hard to load 4, 6 or even 8 cores if you are doing Audio or Video recording, editing, transcoding etc.
The 6 core Intel chip is fabricated at 45nm and if you look at the power consumption of their 45nm process it shows that itâ€™s a non issue unless you are over-clocking.

Felger Carbon wrote:The software industry, particularly the HPC segment, has been looking for ways to keep lotsa cores busy (e.g. parallel computing) for a great many years, with mostly no success re: general purpose computing. Aside from gaming enthusiasts (ray-traced graphics), I don't see a role for multicore CPUs on the desktop.

HD camcorders are now fairly affordable ($500+) and most use H.264 which is very computing intensive so the more cores the merrier. Itâ€™s just a matter of using software that supports 4+ cores which is not unusual for this market segment.

JazzJackRabbit · Post by **JazzJackRabbit** » Sat Mar 22, 2008 3:30 pm

smilingcrow wrote:
Felger Carbon wrote:The software industry, particularly the HPC segment, has been looking for ways to keep lotsa cores busy (e.g. parallel computing) for a great many years, with mostly no success re: general purpose computing. Aside from gaming enthusiasts (ray-traced graphics), I don't see a role for multicore CPUs on the desktop.
HD camcorders are now fairly affordable ($500+) and most use H.264 which is very computing intensive so the more cores the merrier. Itâ€™s just a matter of using software that supports 4+ cores which is not unusual for this market segment.

I think his point was that not every software can be parallelized. Video/photo/3d vectoring can be parallelized, maybe games if you can put physics/ai on separate threads from the main one. On the other hand you can't really parallelize EAC ripping program because in that case you are limited by your drive speed. Same with most database driven programs, most of the time you're waiting for database response, until you receive data back you can't do anything.

Felger Carbon · Post by **Felger Carbon** » Sat Mar 22, 2008 3:42 pm

In addition, using a multicore CPU in an HD videocorder has nothing to do with desktop PCs, as far as I can see.

smilingcrow · Post by **smilingcrow** » Sat Mar 22, 2008 3:48 pm

JazzJackRabbit wrote:I think his point was that not every software can be parallelized. Video/photo/3d vectoring can be parallelized, maybe games if you can put physics/ai on separate threads from the main one.

I only responded because he categorically stated that he sees no role for multicore on the desktop which just seemed plain uninformed.

Felger Carbon wrote:I don't see a role for multicore CPUs on the desktop.

smilingcrow · Post by **smilingcrow** » Sat Mar 22, 2008 3:57 pm

Felger Carbon wrote:In addition, using a multicore CPU in an HD videocorder has nothing to do with desktop PCs, as far as I can see.

Video Editing with a multi-core desktop PC.