News Silent pump for water-cooled PCs developed

From New Scientist:

A new water-cooling system for computer chips has been developed that incorporates a clever pump with no moving parts. The system, developed by Californian start-up company Cooligy, aims to silently solve the problem that the faster chips get, the hotter they become.

In the near future, the chips in high-speed laptops and desktop PCs will generate so much heat that traditional air cooling systems will struggle to cope. Simply increasing the speed of the fans used will increase the noise they make and the risk of mechanical failure. So a number of companies are now working on systems that use water to draw heat away.

The computer industry's rule of thumb, Moore's Law, predicts that the speed of the central processing unit in a computer doubles every 18 months. "And as we go from one generation of CPUs to another, the heat dissipated by these chips doubles as well," says Cooligy's Andy Keane.

Some water-based cooling systems already exist. Hitachi announced a water-cooled Pentium IV laptop in February 2002, while in May 2003 NEC released what it claimed was the world's first mass-produced water-cooled desktop PC. Some laptops also use pipes containing methanol or other liquids to transfer heat away from the CPU by convection.

Full report here

0.2 of a litre per minute - that's 12 litres an hour. Is it really going to be enough? Most of the pumps I've seen you lot use are measured in hundreds of litres per hour....

 

Yes if you want to run you cpu (and only that) at stock levels whilst still performing the same as a standard heat sink.

 

but whats the use of just performing that same as a standard heatsink, isn't the point of watercooling that it performs better then a standard heatsink and therefore will be able to cope with the added heat created by new cpus? at least in this case?

 

not quite... you're too logical
They're probably thinking they'll increase the effeciency as the need arises... in other words, they're dooming themselves to failure...
But the pump sounds like something from the Hunt for Red October