MSI To Make Self-Cooled Stirling Engine Motherboards

By Ovidiu
on March 1st, 2008

If you ever had to do with a computer, or with buying a computer by parts, then you surely have heard of MSI. They are a big Taiwanese manufacturer of computer motherboards (those boards that you put your microprocessor and memory on). They’re not on the top of quality and performance, but they sell well, because they have cheap prices.

Now these guys came up with a new idea: why not take the heat generated by the microprocessor (from my experience I can target AMD to be such a hot “stud”), and feed it to a stirling engine, which in change spins up a fan, to cool the thing down, of course. These coolers are already in your computer, but they normally feed with electricity, which comes from your grid, which mainly comes from coal. The heat is always dispensed and lost. This is how the device looks like:

Now, we all know that the stirling engine is pretty efficient and is based on non-explosive motion principles, but who ever thought of putting it in a computer?

For the people who don’t know how the stirling engine works, here’s a short video:

That’s a green geek idea, and I appreciate it.
Do you?