Vacuum tubes on motherboards...way forward?

[philzee]

I have just found a motherboard that has an old fashioned vacuum tube on it have a look for yourself:
tube motherboard (http://club.aopen.com.tw/activity/tube/en/default.htm)

i wonder if this "new" idea will catch on.......

[Ghost_Hacker]

I could see someone who's computer is also their main sound system (college kids mabey??) being very interested in a "tube" MB. The sound should be much better than what most computer systems put out.


Only problem is where can you test it. I never buy Audio I can't test first before I bring it home. So I would shy away from it, since a review in a computer mag or web site would never go over as being "expert" enough for me. I need it to be reviewed by an "audio" site/mag first before I would give it serious consideration.

[david eaton]

Sounds good in theory. But - the pic shows the tube close to a PCI slot.
In my experience of glassfets they get warm!

There are enough threads on this forum that turn out to be heat related problems. Do we really want to add yet another heat source inside our computers?

Apart from that, I'm with G-H on this one. I would want to hear the difference first.



David

[philzee]

David that's exactly what I was thinking...there doesn't even seem to be anything to dissipate this new heat source, and if any of the PCI cards are in place then the airflow fom the front fan to the power supply wouldn't even go near it. And with all those large capacitors the wieght of the motherboard must put a bit of a strain on the mounting screws if it is in a tower case

[kenja]

If the info wasn't coming from Aopen's URL, I would have sworn this was a farce.

By the way, did you know that vinyl records sound better than CDs?;)

[mjc]

If it is a farce then there are about 20 or more dealers that have also been taken in.

It is not exactly cheap...the cheapest one I saw on PW was $245.
:eek:

It should sound nice though, not just because of the tube, but it has other components in the audio circuits more in line with a "real" audio device.

Also it would probably look pretty good in a modded case, with some interior lighting....hmmm.....

[RKBA]

I couldn't stop laughing! It would be worth buying the motherboard just to be able to tell friends "I had to replace a tube in my computer today and ..."! http://ron.dotson.org/pic/laugh.gif

I was born before the transistor/solid state revolution, and I had quite a radio tube collection as a youngster. I remember the famous ENIAC computer (http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/eniac-story.html) being featured on one of the popular Black and White Television programs of the time.

By the time I was a young adult and started my first computer job, IBM was selling their Model 360 computer, and production of virtually all tube based devices had ceased - tubes had become relics. Yes, I'm aware that tubes have always been preferable to transistors as Hi-Fi audio amplifiers because of their low noise characteristics compared to transistors, but even so, most Hi-Fi audio amplifiers contain all solid state electronics to this day - or at least did the last time I purchased one.

Actually however, tubes for use as computational elements isn't all that far fetched. Some researchers from the University of Cambridge have fabricated a vacuum tube triode that's about 100 nm across and is expected to "...operate under conditions of radiation or heat that would make standard semiconductor components fail." See Vacuum tubes' new image: Too small to see (http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc99/11_6_99/fob2.htm) (Caution: You made need a subscription to Science News (http://www.sciencenews.org/) to read the article.

Other researchers at North Carolina State University are fashioning tiny vacuum tubes out of diamonds. From Science News, April 20, 1996, Vol. 149 No. 16 p. 249:
Bite-sized vacuum tubes

Paying homage to the early days of broadcasting, when oak-paneled radios blared out swing
tunes, physicists Griff L. Bilbro and Christopher W. Hatfield of North Carolina State University
in Raleigh and their colleagues are fashioning tiny vacuum tubes out of diamonds.

“We’re revisiting vacuum tubes from the 1940s,” says Bilbro. “But now we’re taking advantage
of new materials and computer design tools to predict their performance at very high frequencies,
for use in radar and cellular phones.”

Vacuum tubes offer some advantages over semiconductors and computer chips, Bilbro says.
They’re more durable than other microelectronics materials, outperforming semiconductors at
high temperatures, voltages, and radiation levels.

The researchers made arrays of vacuum tubes by encasing electrodes in diamond, then evacuating
the air from the interiors. These arrays resemble “furrowed fields, with rows of ridges
and troughs,” Bilbro says. “Each array looks like a glass bead, about the size of a match head.”

A big difference between the new diamond vacuum tubes and the large glass bulbs of 50
years ago is heat. The old tubes had to glow red-hot to emit streams of electrons. The new
tubes produce current at room temperature.

“There’s an interesting irony here,” says Hatfield. “Vacuum tubes paved the way for solidstate
transistors. Now we’re seeing that, for certain applications, the new vacuum tubes offer
advantages over solid-state components.”
-- Ron

[Paul Komski]

a "real" audio device
I have a 1940's EKCO radiogram that plays radio and 78s! It may be huge, hot, mono and takes 3 minutes to warm up - but the sound beats any of the modern ghetto-blasters in both volume and quality!! :cool:

Interesting stuff RKBA; I wasn't aware of the mini-vacuum tubes - something else to read up on. :D