X-bit labs

Monday, May 9, 2005

New Way of Cooling PC Components. Liquid Metal Coolers Investigated

Basically, there are a number ways of cooling a PC’s hardware components, the most popular and reliable one is air cooling, a few others, such as water cooling, nitrogen, cascade and other types of systems are far more efficient, but are generally more expensive and less reliable. In spite of all those disadvantages, for overclockers, water cooling is a common thing in today’s PC industry. nanoCoolers, a startup from Austin, Texas, offers yet another way of cooling computer chips: the liquid metal cooling loops technology may provide efficient cooling without taking as much space as water cooling, and without making as much noise as air cooling.

“As current cooling solutions reach their limits, the industry is in need of a unique advanced cooling solution. nanoCoolers’ liquid-metal cooling loops have all the attributes to fill that need. Part of the uniqueness of our thermal solutions is in its simplicity. The cooling loop consists of liquid metal as the working fluid, a heat source exchanger, an ambient heat exchanger, an electromagnetic pump, and interconnecting tubing. There are also attaching mechanisms, a fan, housing structure, etc. but the simplicity of the solution is quite unique,” starts the official presentation at nanoCooler web-site.

“The liquid metal has significant advantages over other single phase liquid solutions. The thermal and physical properties of the material give it the ability to cool extremely high heat fluxes. With its very low vapor pressure, the boiling point of the material is in excess of 2000°C. This provides the capability to cool extremely high power densities without the liquid-metal changing phase, removing power density as the limiting factor in cooling performance. The liquid metal is non-flammable, non-toxic and environmentally friendly. As a metal, the liquid is both highly thermally conductive and highly electrically conductive. The thermal conductivity makes it ideal for heat removal and dissipation. The electrical conductivity enables the use of electromagnetic pumps to propel the liquid,” claims the manufacturer.

• NanoCoolers: Liquid Metal Cooling Loops Technology for Computer CPU Cooling.
• techPowerUp!: NanoCoolers Puts Liquid Metal in Your PC.

ATI RADEON XPRESS 200 – Slower Than NVIDIA’s nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition. ATI’s Integrated Chipset for Intel Not Faster Than Competitors – Report

ATI Technologies is the oldest and currently one of a few graphics processors designers on the globe, but today it is not enough to only develop successful visual processing units to be in competitive position. In order to address emergent market segment of low-cost PCs ATI develops core-logic sets with integrated graphics cores, just like its rival NVIDIA Corp.

PClab.pl web-site from Poland has decided to make it clear which of the graphics companies deliver better chipsets for Intel processors and whether their core-logic products are competitive compared to Intel’s 925X and 915G products.

“Although the article is in Polish, the pictures and benchmarks are self-explanatory,” said Pawel Pilarczyk of PClab.pl.

The article covers wide aspects of ATI, Intel and NVIDIA platforms performance in different cases. While ATI’s RADEON XPRESS 200 for Intel chips with up 1066MHz processor system bus and 667MHz DDR2 support generally delivers better performance compared to Intel’s 915G core-logic, especially in terms when it came to integrated graphics core performance, Intel’s 925X managed to outperform ATI’s product in a significant amount of benchmarks. When compared to NVIDIA’s nForce4 SLI Intel Edition, 925X fell behind in a number of cases. Intel’s top 955X core-logic performance details were not covered.

• PClab.pl: RADEON XPRESS 200 for Intel Review.