

The OCZ Hydrojet cooler uses an advanced heatsink material





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RE: needs some work
By MrTeal on 6/10/2007 12:49:21 PM , Rating: 2
While that's true, there will be differences between pumped fluids and solid copper. If you had your baseplate connected to the radiator by a solid piece of copper, your only means of transporting the heat is conduction. Even with an infinite radiator (the radiator is at ambient temp), you'd still have a temp difference between base and radiator caused by the heat transfer coefficient of the material. Vastly simplified, with fluids you have the baseplate heating a small volume of water, that water then moves to the radiator, where it gets dissipated. Very little temperature difference between radiator and baseplate.

That's kind of the same mechanism as heatpipes, although they uses the evaporation and condensation of the liquid to transfer heat, and are not pumped.

RE: needs some work
By Hare on 6/10/2007 1:37:23 PM , Rating: 2
True. Like I said in my last paragraph, the more efficient the heatsink is, the bigger the difference. My point was that water as a transport is not the main reason why water cooling is effective. Nowadays the heat generated by CPU's can be pretty easily handled with heatpipes. At >200W heat loads water cooling starts to show its power.

Water cooling has also another benefit. Usually the heat is exhausted out of the case compared to traditional air cooling. Air cooling can not be as effective if the ambient temperature is >30C compared to water ~20C (room temperature).

RE: needs some work
By SmokeRngs on 6/11/2007 10:06:32 AM , Rating: 2

This is not completely correct. The water is a big reason why water cooling is more efficient. While copper absorbs heat better than aluminum, it does not release the heat as easily. Water acts as an intermediate between the two. In most cases, water can pull the heat off the copper plate a lot better than aluminum keeping efficiency high. The water then travels to the radiator where the larger surface area of the aluminum dissipates the heat much more quickly than the copper.

Water allows both materials to work more efficiently together.

Now, I wouldn't mind seeing a carbon nanotube based waterblock. The results from that would definitely be interesting. It absorbs and releases heat more efficiently than copper and would be very well suited to replace it as the base material in a waterblock.

