Measuring Microwave Output From A Laptop?

bethorphil asks: "I was shopping online for a laptop today, and as I was choosing my processor speed, I noticed that the clock frequency of a decent CPU (2.4 GHz) was about the same frequency as the radiation used in a microwave oven. This got me thinking about recent headlines of laptop heat causing male infertility. If the heat alone is a threat, It would make sense that holding a 40-watt microwave emitter in your lap could cause even more serious problems down the road. I assume (optimistically, perhaps) that laptops are designed to shield the user from radiation, and not just to protect the system from interference. , but what I'd really like is a way to test for myself how much microwave radiation actually comes from my laptop. So far, the most interesting thing my searches have come up with is this quack-tastic low emission PC, but actual tools for an amateur to measure this stuff seem hard to come by. What's the best way to find out if my laptop is nuking the family jewels?"

The clock is 2.4Ghz

[ArchieBunker]

and might emit a few microwatts at best. The plastic case should stop that. Microwave ovens on the other hand are just a modern RF oven. You dump 800 watts into a cubic foot steel box, something is going to absorb that energy and convert it to heat.

Re:I won't worry about the laptop

[node 3]

However, it's a known fact that the mechanics of microwave cooking are fundamentally different from traditional cooking

No, it's not. Like all forms of traditional heat-utilizing cooking, you heat up the food at some place, which heats the rest of it.

Frying, baking, boiling, steaming, etc, all work like this. Microwaving, instead of heating the surface of the food, heats all of the water molecules within the food. This is exactly the same as if you had a knob and could change the temperature of the water without changing the rest of the food in any way. Any notion of "nutritional" changes are highly suspect. There's just no reason to believe microwaves, for example, could significantly change the vitamin or mineral content of the food.

Microwaves are non-ionizing radiation. That means, roughly, that they don't knock atoms into pieces, and thus don't break atomic bonds. They just heat up matter, especially water, since water absorbs microwaves so well.

Some label this pseudoscience.

That's because it is. There's no valid scientific observation, and no logical scientific model, to suggest that microwave radiation directly affects the nutrition in food.

Just because microwave ovens seem more magical than a frying pan does not excuse them from the rigors of science or the laws of reality.

Re:hard to measure

[Blittzed]

I am one of the prof geeks you refer to, who works at a University and we do have the equipment to test this (ie 7GHz Spectrum Analyser), and we did exactly that when the first P4 2.4 GHz CPUs appeared a few years ago. We built an antenna tuned to the correct frequency, hooked it up to the Spec An, turned it on, pulled the case off, put the antenna in and we got... nothing. Not a peep. Zip. Buck all. This was as we expected, but we thought we'd do it anyway. So you can all put your conspiracy theories away! ;)

Re:Hertz = per second

[Blittzed]

Sure do!

The Pentium 4 performs much less work per cycle than other CPUs (such as the various Athlon or older Pentium III architectures) but the original design objective - to sacrifice instructions per clock cycle in order to achieve a greater number of cycles per second (i.e. greater frequency or clockspeed) - has been fulfilled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4 [wikipedia.org]

And in case you aren't satisfied with that:

As early as 2000, THG observed that the Pentium 4's performance was clearly inferior to that of its predecessor, the Pentium III, on a clock-for-clock basis. http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050525/ [tomshardware.com]

There are a ton of other sources, just try googling...