14 thoughts on “Name that Ware”

  1. Looks like an extremely corroded heatsink to me. From the size of the die I would say it’s from an Athlon (I remember those having their heatsink directly on the die with no heat spreader inbetween, which looked exactly like the one in the picture).
    Also, I’d say it’s most probably a water cooling system that somehow went fubar

    -Darkstar

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  2. P.S.: Holy crap, I just realized you could zoom in on the picture. Is that salt? Who in their right mind is cooling a PC with *saltwater* ?

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  3. I’d say that the sticky residue looks like one of those hard heatpad blobs, not the paste I’d expect if this was a homegrown modification; that and the Torx head make me lean towards an OEM water cooling solution like the Power Mac G5 mentioned above.

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  4. Surprisingly, Tom is correct.

    This is the leaky liquid cooling heatsink of Amit Singh’s PowerMac G5, not long after he finished writing the “Mac OS X Internals” book on it. I think it belongs into a museum. Maybe the Computer History Museum, or maybe (thanks Krusty Vader) a Geological Museum.

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  5. It’s the underside of a Delphi LCS block caked in evaporated Aquagate surfactants encompassing Artic Silver 5–applied as a last-ditch attempt to resolve the thermal shutdown issues of a dual 2.5GHz PowerMac G5 (S/N: G8517Axxxxx). I’m not entirely convinced that the discoloration isn’t, ironically, a UV fluorescent component of the “proprietary corrosion inhibitor” additives of the coolant rather than galvanic oxidation [CuCO3;(CuSO4?5H2O);AlCl3]. That said, I also can’t be certain that algae didn’t take claim in the condensation before the o-rings shat out & was accausted by bleach of some sort whenever the compound was replaced. Also that corner’s nearest the power connecter on the board, so I assume the whole rig’s titsup. Shame.

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  6. …I wish I had a picture if the CPU from a NuBus (7200, I think) desktop we had that they neglected to install the peltier between the heatsink on. The whole chip was split in two, then a few months later all the other ones got purple screens from cooking the deflection yoke.

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  7. Tom said…
    >> and by the look of the corrosion I?d say it belonged to Amit Singh.

    [trying to decide whether Tom is Amit’s co-worker at Google or his childhood enemy]

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