News Pics of the G5 Liquid Cooling System

There's been speculation in the forums about the Liquid Cooling system being employed in the new G5's. Well, Apple Insider has some pics up of said cooling system. You can see the pics here.

From the looks of it, it looks like a pair of heatpipes are cooling some chips on the logic board, but not the CPU's - as far as I can tell, the pics show the pack side of the board, and the CPU's and cooling blocks are hidden from view. You can see the gray pipes running upto where the CPUs would be, and to the large radiator.

I gather that the whole unit sits behind the bottom fans inside the G5 case.

What do you make of it? Looks a neat little setup.

 

Agreed. The second picture shows ie more clearly, you can see the CPU blocks in it. Looks like a very basic system with only the two blocks, a pump and a radiator. Them chips on the back of the board are cooled by heatpipes and heatsinks, and appear to be unrelated to the liquid cooling.


You know that OSX dynamically controls the pumps flow rate? Pretty neat

 

It might be time to replace my mac.
Its a dual 1 ghz, but maybe i will mod it...

 

Would this be because they're loud pumps or it just doesn't wanna waste the extra tenth of a watt to keep the procs 5c cooler? Heh... keep the hardware right at it's limit. Sounds like what MS would do if they made procs.

Great idea though. I hope they aren't having heat issues like the prescott and are doing it almost as a novelty or quiet computing thing.

Fans?? I don't see a fan anywhere... although I might just be missing it.

 

The G5 case is chock full of quiet, temperature controlled fans which keep the airflow high throughout the case, while keeping noise to a minimum- 9 fans and 21 temp sensors IIRC. The case is also subdivided into 'zones' by strategically placed shrouding, so the airflow goes where it is designed to go. The whole thing is very well thought out IMHO. I hope BTX is as well executed as this.

 

lol, thanks for linking to my thread GOO (could have sworn i put that in the GD forum though )

I dont get the waterblocks though... It looks like there are two waterblocks in the 2nd pic, but wouldn't that mean that there are holes in the mounting plate? Still weird. And its really weird that the radiator is placed on the left of the pic, since the airflow in the G5 cases blows left to right (as looking at that pic). That means the heat goes right back over the proc!

Hehehehe, if MS made procs we could assume that windows would be alot better OS then it is, becuase we wouldn't know if the crash was the proc or the software

 

mmmmmm o-face material there....

The heat going back over the processors really wont be a big deal as they are cooled by a fan that needs cold air in that location....

Im sure alot of pc makers will start using similar methods here soon on their highend machines..

 

Well....yeah. Apple has been leading the way for some time.

 

There's more detailed engineering drawings of the system over at Apple Insider now:

Diagrams detail Apple's new liquid cooling system