I was discussing cooling with a friend via IRC, and he raised this question, and to be frank, I tried to answer it as best as I could.
The conversation is as follows:
Friend: "so realistically, how cold can a computer go?"
Me: "probably about to the point where the temperature difference between the aluminum/copper traces and the silicon they lay on is big enough for it to break connections. However cold that is. You'd have to find a chart of temperature expansion/contraction rates for the various materials and do some math to figure out how far the differential could go before breakage occurred, and then add say, 10 degrees for variance. That'd be my guess, but I'm not an expert on temperature and how different materials behave under different temperatures."
My answer was based on the basic principals that all chemical combinations have different expansion/contraction rates, but I find the answer pretty lacking.
Can anyone point me to a site that has this sort of information, or maybe just post it here?
The conversation is as follows:
Friend: "so realistically, how cold can a computer go?"
Me: "probably about to the point where the temperature difference between the aluminum/copper traces and the silicon they lay on is big enough for it to break connections. However cold that is. You'd have to find a chart of temperature expansion/contraction rates for the various materials and do some math to figure out how far the differential could go before breakage occurred, and then add say, 10 degrees for variance. That'd be my guess, but I'm not an expert on temperature and how different materials behave under different temperatures."
My answer was based on the basic principals that all chemical combinations have different expansion/contraction rates, but I find the answer pretty lacking.
Can anyone point me to a site that has this sort of information, or maybe just post it here?
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