Glad youve abandoned the whole board idea
the VRM\VRDs alone on a modern mobo would burn the board
with no where for the heat to go but into the board, the heatsinks will get hotter and hotter through time till they start to shed more and more
radiative energy and eventually melt, that is if the VRD doesnt die first
(I have a big autoclave but I wouldnt use it for whole board testing,Im fabricating vaccum test chambers out of dive tanks and other oxygen bottles)
the vacuum chamber idea really is tied to the CPU simulator idea
I picked up a
Welch Duo-Seal the other day and have some ideas on both determining the heat gradient across an IHS and then replicating it with a simulator.
(I still don't see the need for a UHV system, Glacerbay's vacuum panels are .05 torr, and reducing it lower doesnt substantailly add to the insulative R value
http://www.glacierbay.com/vacpanelinfo.asp we will have no common conductive edges like a dewar flask or panel, just the connections to the simulator and waterblock we could even make good guestimates as to the heat transfer through those by independently measuring them)
Been making quite a bit of progress on the heatsink\waterblock test front (but more on others)
picking up a Setra 230 DP transducer (0-5 PSID) as well as cutting a deal to have a sonic temperature immune "low flow" mass flowmeter fabricated by Eesiflow.
(0.3% of range and calibrated to our "typical" coolant mix)
the biggest hurdle I have in my vacuum chamber is finding affordable feedthroughs
the simulator is another matter
consider the problem is backwards
if you know how much energy the block is moving in isolation
and you can measure how much energy the CPU is employing
the difference from the energy being moved in the real world through the block would be the secondary pathways
its measuring the power the CPU is employing that is where it hurts
http://www.chromaate.com/english/pro...?gid=44&id=892