Advancement in cooling technology

I read about that in Electronic Design this month. Very interesting. Using liquid cooling there is essentially no practical limit to the power the chip can dissipate, provided you're able to fit a large enough radiator to dissipate the heat from the liquid coolant. For a PC-sized case, you could probably make an air-cooled radiator dissipating maybe 500 watts with a reasonable temperature rise. The coolant can take the heat from the microprocessor with a minimal temperature rise via the microchannel cooling system. As an aside, we're already close to reaching the limits of air cooling using microprocessor-sized air-cooled heat sinks. Part of the problem is that they can't be made much bigger and still fit on the motherboard. Compounding the problem is the fact that air in the case is already hotter than ambient. The new approach avoids both those pitfalls.
 
I just found a sexy article that proves without a reasonable doubt that all athlon XPs can be run passivley in a completely passive system.



Here's the link from SPCR

The system uses a single heatsink that could be mounted to the side of a case and uses stock heatpipes to transfer the heat from teh CPU to that heatsink.
 
I think any microprocessor under about 100 watts can be passively cooled using a setup similar to the one in that article. Actually, anything can be passively cooled if you use a large enough heat sink. Look at nuclear power plant cooling towers, for example. Nothing but convection at work. :wink: Not a fan in sight.
 
In the plants I worked in the towers had pumps. The area around the towers was louder than the plant floor.
 
It looks promising but I'd have some reservations about the deionized water and how long the buffers are going to last. The membrade they are using to generate flow electrically would clog pretty easily. And DI water is very corrosive when used in materials which are not particularly corrosion resistant. Copper certainly will corrode under the right circumstances. I imagine this explains the use of the buffers. How long will the buffers last?

Aside from the pump I don't see anything really that unique about the system.

Anyone else notice the pump they tested required 150V? Gonna need a new transformer for that somewhere along the line.
 
The ATX form factor is the limiting factor IMO. Hopefuly BTX will help remedy that by using a 92mm fan to funnel cooler outside air directly over the large CPU heatsink. ATX is limiting PSU fan to 80mm (excepting the FSP x00-60PN PSUs with 120mm fan but that is not ideal either, extracting hot air from the case) - a very low speed 92mm fan sucking -ambient- air through the PSU would be a better solution, for example such a fan could move 25CFM at a noise level below 20dB which should be sufficient for any PSU under load if the air is at ambient (non case) temperature...
 
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