Water Cooling Solutions

The concept of water cooling solutions is quite simple. For better and faster heat dissipation from the CPU we add one more link in the following chain: “die -> heatsink -> air”. It’s water. Overall, such a gadget is a closed circle with water pumped along it.

Water is driven through the system by means of a water pump. Water takes heat from the CPU, comes into the heatsink and transfers the heat to the air blown through the heatsink by fans. Then it cools down to room temperature.

Using water as a heat conductor allows us to dissipate heat into the air not at once but wherever we think it proper (not necessarily inside the PC case). Water is running through the pipes and they can be of any reasonable length. The same refers to the heatsinks, which can be made of any size (within reasonable limits of course). Water heatsinks are usually much larger than those used in CPU coolers. You just can’t make a CPU cooler very large because of dimensional and weight limitations. One more advantage of a water heatsink is its thin walls and large surface area. It means you don’t need to blow the air through it with the same strength as in CPU coolers, thus there is no need to install powerful and noisy fans.

Talking about CPU coolers, we should mention water units that now stand instead of them. Water units may greatly differ in their construction, so that you could write the whole treatise on them. Anyway, they all serve one purpose: to effectively transfer heat from the die to the circulating water.

The most popular water unit design: a copper or aluminum cylinder or brick as small as a CPU socket or slightly bigger with a drilled zigzagging or spiral channel for water. The channel starts and ends with nipples to connect pipes. That’s what a typical water unit looks like from the inside:

Water units can’t boast standardized retention mechanisms as coolers do. There is a whole lot of bracers, cramps, clams and the like, so water unit installation may prove either a very easy or awfully daunting task.

Enough for CPUs. There are other things in the system chassis that require active cooling, too. Take the North Bridge of the chipset, for example. They usually equip chipset North Bridge with a small cooler or a passive heatsink, which should be cooled down with the air from the CPU cooler. But as the CPU now features a water unit, the chipset heatsink gasps for air and the chip starts to suffer from overheating. It’s all right with an active chipset cooler, but a thing like that would be noisy… What shall we do? A water cooling system can take care of this heat source, you only have to include one more water unit into the cycle. For example, like that:

But the above construction has some bottlenecks. It requires a T-bend pipe in places where the two water streams join together and come apart. This would mean extra costs, extra junctions, and reduced reliability. That’s why sequential water unit connection is often used. In that case, the water would have a little higher temperature after coming through each water unit, but this shouldn’t affect the cooling efficiency at all. Our Koolance system features this particular connection scheme of water units. It has four units in total: for the CPU, chipset North Bridge, graphics chip and HDD:

Let’s take a closer look at Koolance water cooling system. We will certainly begin with the above mentioned water units…