PS3 not ginormous?!?

A cooling system like that would make console sizes even bigger cause of all the tubes that have to run all over the place.

Imagine the pstwo with a large 5000rpm fan on the left where it gets hot. That is what all future consoles should look like.
 
[quote name='Mistik']Water cooling system? What happens if there is a leak or something? Water cooling doesn't sound good for a game machine if you ask me. What is it they use in those high end computers? Liquid nitrogen? How bout some of that? :D[/QUOTE]
It wasn't water cooling per se, but the Dreamcast was liquid cooled.

"Liquid cooling system: Dreamcast features and incredibly unique liquid cooling system that stops the unit from overheating even in extreme conditions. An in-built fan keeps the chipset cool while a thermal cut-out switch will immediately shut down the system and prevent any permanent damage should the fan or cooling system ever fail.

The combination of technology and marketing from some of the world's largest companies, like Microsoft, NEC, Hitachi and Yamaha, plus a developers list of more than 300 companies will see the Dreamcast become the next-generation gaming and lifestyle production well into the next century. The Dreamcast will be the ultimate home entertainment unit, with the power to outperform top-end PCs, to access the Internet with incredible ease and will be the home of the best videogames the world will ever see. "



Good thing too. How else would I be able to unlock all the characters in Marvel vs Capcom 2 without lifting a finger? :D If it wasn;t for the cooling, my DC would be a doorstop.

http://www.tweak3d.net/articles/dreamcast/
 
[quote name='Quackzilla']High voltage =/= heat

And PS3 is not going to use water cooling, it is too high maintenance.[/QUOTE]

Funny thing though, first gen Dreamcasts did. But it turned to not be cost effective for the US market.
 
That picture is comedy......I got my ps2 on launch night and the dvd player has never worked right. I definetly won't be buying a launch ps3, and I still haven't bought my psp
 
i still think the gba owns the xbox and ps2.

tho it is much smaller and definitely less powerful. Also there are more creative games produced in general for gba
 
[quote name='CappyCobra']
Good thing too. How else would I be able to unlock all the characters in Marvel vs Capcom 2 without lifting a finger? :D If it wasn;t for the cooling, my DC would be a doorstop.

http://www.tweak3d.net/articles/dreamcast/[/QUOTE]

from that article:

A mate and old colleague of mine, Steve 'Geese' O'Leary is currently one of the head honchos at Sega Ozisoft. He is playing a critical role in the marketing of Dreamcast, and agreed to an interview regarding the Dreamcast and its future.


:rofl::applause: WHOOPSIES!
 
[quote name='Scrubking']Everybody seems to be missing the point.

As technology continues to advance ALL consoles should be getting smaller not fucking bigger! Yet the opposite seems to be happening.[/QUOTE]

Just like every other high performance semiconductor product, the demands for increased performance move at a faster pace than the technology.

Products like the SNES were not terribly ambitious for their era. The manufacturing process was in use for a few years already and none of the chips pushed the edge on the number of transistors or clock rates. It wasn't until the Dreamcast and all consoles that followed that designs were planned around production technology that was yet to be used for mass production.

It can be counter-intuitive. High-end processors use lower voltages than their predecessors but the power they draw has only increased. Intel recently had to change their product strategy because they hit a power and heat barrier to their policy of pushing for ever higher clock speeds. One of the big problems with the manufacturing processes that allow chips with transistor counts in the 100s of millions is power leakage. As the wires get tinier it more of the electrons just wander off on their own instead of staying on the path. That generates waste heat and requires yet more power, albeit low voltage, than ever to drive these chips. Some new technologies like innovation in insulation layers help but only a bit.

The thing to remember about the tiny PStwo is that it would have been physically impossible to produce in the year 2000 without including a refrigerator for it to live in. The cutting edge tech then was .18 micron. The PStwo chipset is the result of using a much smaller process (.13 micron IIRC) and integration of the EE and GS into one package.

Now, Sony had two ways they could go with that. If they were looking for a performance upgrade they could see how much more speed this smaller chip would allow with the same power draw and cooling support as the original chipset. Which would be fine if they were making a PC but this is a console. Staying identical in performance to the installed base was a requirement, so instead they ran the new chipset at the same speed as before and got something that drew a hell of a lot less power and generated a lot less heat, making it possible to package it in a tiny package. (Note that this also required making the power supply external and eliminating the hard drive bay for much of the reduced volume and cooling.)

The PSP and PS3 (and Xbox 360 and almost certainly Revolution) use an even smaller 90 nanometer process. The former has to take a PS2 level of performance and make it viable for a battery operated handheld and the latter has to push the cutting edge of processing power in a mass market package. So the PSP runs relatively slow by today's standards to have a low power draw (and not become to hot to hold) while the PS3 runs as fast as it can without having a power supply as big as your head. The PS3 will probably have a good sized external brick but not excessively large. This is why reports of the Cell running at well above 4 GHz did not translate into a PS3 of that speed. The power and cooling issues would have been the same as a top of the line PC.

(It was Nvidia's unwillingness to develop .13 micron versions of their Xbox chips that made it impossible to do a major redesign of that system. Intel has long since shrank the Pentium II to that size to get its speed up to 1.4 GHZ. Running it at the Xbox's 733 MHz would make it very power efficient and require only a small heatsink for cooling.)

Every big semiconductor manufacturing company is currently gearing up for 65 nanometer production with 45 nm on the horizon. At 45 nm it may be possible for the PS3 and Xbox 360 packages to get a lot smaller but those versions of the chipsets are a few years off.
 
[quote name='Scrubking']A cooling system like that would make console sizes even bigger cause of all the tubes that have to run all over the place.

Imagine the pstwo with a large 5000rpm fan on the left where it gets hot. That is what all future consoles should look like.[/QUOTE]

Liquid cooling can mean a range of things. In things like game consoles it just means sealed tube of liquid to better conduct heat away from the machine. More expensive than a heat sink and fan but a big payoff in efficiency, size, and acoustics that makes it worthwhile. In a console there are usually only two chips needing this level of cooling. It's a static environment that isn't subject to changes by the user. In a PC there can be all sorts of complications brought on by all the possible optional heat sources that might be added in the form of drives and boards.

Also, a lot of the elaborate PC based systems are not just liquid cooling but active refrigeration to support major overclocking. You could buy a Kryo-Tech system running at 1 GHz long before AMD or Intel had their official offering of that speed.
 
[quote name='Mistik']Water cooling system? What happens if there is a leak or something? Water cooling doesn't sound good for a game machine if you ask me. What is it they use in those high end computers? Liquid nitrogen? How bout some of that? :D[/QUOTE]

Liquid evaporation heat pipes aren't delicate. If you manage to break one you've probably destroyed other crtical components as well. It isn't like these machines are intended to be opened by end users. These pipes are going to be facts of life for the launch versions of PS3 and Xbox 360. Later revsions of the chipset will allow for lesser cooling requirement but aren't going to happen for a few years.
 
I find it really horrifying that people can look at the disc slot and not realize immediately the approximate size of the unit. Are these same people also known as being 'accident prone?'
 
Actually I wouldnt try to match the system size by the drive door because the PS3 uses Bluray, which I dont know how it compares to regular DVDs.

Some pics I've seen suggest it's smaller, some larger some the same size but the caddy could add extra width more so than I can judge from an internet pic.
 
[quote name='Sleepkyng']from that article:

A mate and old colleague of mine, Steve 'Geese' O'Leary is currently one of the head honchos at Sega Ozisoft. He is playing a critical role in the marketing of Dreamcast, and agreed to an interview regarding the Dreamcast and its future.


:rofl::applause: WHOOPSIES!
[/QUOTE]
You do realise this article is based in AUSTRAILIA not the US. This guy was in charge of the Aussie launch.
 
[quote name='Alpha2']Actually I wouldnt try to match the system size by the drive door because the PS3 uses Bluray, which I dont know how it compares to regular DVDs.

Some pics I've seen suggest it's smaller, some larger some the same size but the caddy could add extra width more so than I can judge from an internet pic.[/QUOTE]

It's well known to be a standard 12 CM sized disc, so even with the caddy it's very familiar as a point of reference.
 
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