HAHA sterling engine:
Actually don't laugh. A mining card will convert over 90% of it's spent energy as heat. You can run a stirling engine outside your PC case to recover 40-50% of the wasted heat as mechanical work or oscillating energy then convert that into electricity and back into the power supply
It also doubles as automatically tuned cooling installation.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is not the sterling engine subject to carnot efficiency? 1- T_C / T_H ? Assuming you have something like ambient temp for T_C, and an efficient heat exchange between cards and whatever reservoir you are using for your sterling engine, I don't see how you would get more than 20% efficiency from a sterling engine even in the most extremely hypothetically favorable case.
So reclaiming 20% of otherwise wasted energy is a worthless waste of time? Shit guys we better tell... Well shit, everyone. Because EVERY COMPANY IN THE WORLD would jump on a chance to recoup 20% of otherwise unavoidable wastes, assuming the buy-in isn't absurdly high.
I don't know if a sterling engine WOULD work well or not but it's worth a crack and if someone would like to experiment with it, I'm not going to call them an idiot because my gedanken experiment couldn't achieve better than 20% efficiency.
Feel free to quote where I said it was a worthless waste of time. Or where I called someone an idiot. Quoting this post doesn't count.
You're an idiot.
I was merely questioning his statement, asking where his numbers were from, when the theoretical maximum (carnot himself understood that no such engine can even exist) is half of the claimed numbers. In all likelihood you will get a fraction of that value in a real world scenario.
I will add to boot that the buy-in
will be absurdly high for a small user to find a custom sterling engine of suitable size, heat transfer setup and whatnot, unless you are running a massive mining cluster. I'm not saying that it isn't worth playing with, or that seeing someone set one up wouldn't be quite interesting. But don't expect that anyone can just jump on board and cool their 4 radeon 5870s while dropping their power bill in half at little to no cost.
. Atomic cost is not the decider of materials cost. The materials that make up a diamond are carbon atoms, I could probably get those for free. It's the process of shaping those carbon atoms into a diamond which is difficult, and yields a higher price than carbon alone.