hey all, This just crossed my mind because I just remembered that a temp. of 77k (kelvin) or something around that makes things superconduct, meaning energy traveling faster and not loosing any energy while traveling from point A to point B. I was just thinking if a person could get their system (the case, mobo, and cpu) temp. to 77K wouldn't that theoritcally make their computer performance better because data goes to the every device in the computer case in the form of energy. looking forward to your responses and feedback. Gigz

Superconduction is a function of both temperature and conducting material, and computers are not made of pure enough materials to superconduct. However as I'm sure you know, sub-ambient cooling allows so much higher voltages that you can overclock anything much better at sub-ambient temps. The higher voltages are allowed by the supercooling because the signal distortion caused by heat (i.e., energy loss) is minimized. And even without the higher voltages, the signal integrity is so much cleaner that you can overclock better even at the same voltage. I read a study that demonstrated that the overclocking improvement per every 10C lowering of cpu temp was about 100mhz for today's cpus, with no change to vcore. As for the actual speed of electrical transmission, you do not notice that. It sounds like you are asking since superconducting materials cause electricity to travel close to the speed of light (0.99c instead of 0.7c, the normal speed for electricity in a computer), would that not make the machine faster. Well the answer to that is that a 3ghz machine at normal temps does an operation every 0.3 nanoseconds exactly as does a 3ghz machine at supercooled temps, the only difference being that since the electricity in the supercooled machine is travelling so close to the speed of light, when you press that enter key the very first bit does make it through the system in about 3 nanoseconds (1 meter / 300,000,000 meters per second) instead of the lame 4 nanoseconds for a normal computer (0.7 the above speed), but all bits after that are still sent at the same intervals according to the speed of the cpu, memory controller, etc. So its only that first bit that gets to the finish line 1 nanosecond faster, and of course you would not be able to detect that.

Thanks Johnoh for your response. It was very explaining. Gigz

Kelvin is used to measure light temperature. Normally 5000 is warm (yellowish range), over 7000 is cool (blue/purple) and 2000 is hot (reddish), relatively speaking. Superconduction is a complex subject indeed, a viable way to reduce loss over distance transmission. If processor could utilize the technology, CPU temp will not be an issue anymore, because there is no energy loss. No heatsink required.

thanks johnoh for the explaination. -Kailas Shastry India.