Sounds too good to be true. Will we see this anytime soon to the average consumer?

Thermo-dynamics was never my thing, but how do they get the compression back into liquid state to be efficient? You refridgerator works on much the same premise as this device, take a cooling agent, allow it to expand, taking in energy from the air inside your fridge, then expell that heat through a radiator on the back. The only problem is, your fridge needs a powered compressor to get the coolant back into a liquid phase.

In theory, if your CPU ran hot enough, this thing would just shut-down, right?

Yeah when can we buy such a cooling system?

Looks fairly promising, but I'm interested to know how competitive the pricing will be. If they put it at under $275 for a GPU & CPU solution it should be a great deal!

It appears that they're running some sort of liquid in a low pressure situation so that it doesn't take much energy to evaporate the liquid and then the environment doesn't have to take away too much energy to get the gas to re-condense. They may just be able to get away with it because they use a liquid with a small heat of vaporization. For that reason, I doubt the concerns of leaking because I'd bet that the liquid is a non-conducting hydrocarbon.

I think you're right that if your CPU ran hot enough this thing wouldn't work as well. If your CPU transfers too much energy to the liquid, how is it going to condense and release all of its energy to the environment? Either there's a trade secret there or its a serious concern.

"your CPU ran hot enough this thing wouldn't work as well."

It is easy... we just need to keep our room "refrigerated"...

Phase change coolers are nothing new. It's an interesting solution in a PC, and if AMD is recommending them, they're probably not "too good to be true." Every cooling solution has limitations... you wouldn't OC your new i7 to 6ghz with just a fan and a heat sink...

If I could slap one of these on my 4850, I would... damn it's loud at 60% fan speed!!!

Seems like an evolution of their previous CPU cooler. They've just made it work more like a closed-looped liquid cooling system this time, so you can cool several components with a single large radiator.

Since they claim it's simple, I would also like them to follow up with the appropriate price. 250$ suggested is too much for me personaly. Good air cooler for CPU is 40$, good air cooler for VGA is another 40$ (with fans!).. so this thing should be priced at or below 80$. If it costs 250$ it has to provide temperatures that are much lower than those achieved by good high-end air coolers of today.

So I'm just hoping for a 100$ price.. But it will need a manufacturer to make it real. So far they've failed with manufacturing and marketing their CPU variant, even though it was announced similary as this system.

4850 at 60% loud? Try two 295's at full scream..., wicked fast but loud as heck, fortunately thats with manual settings and surpisingly under auto mode those fans never kick up. The cards seem to run fine at 85C without spooling its own fans up? I still don't know what the threshold is for the fans to auto increase where I can hear them.

I bet you do ..

From a technical viewpoint, is so simple and elegant...

I doubt they can protect it with a patent.

Anybody can do one. The hard part is to get the right fluid.

I bet the future is full of Do It Yourself kits to asembly your own one.

It can be sold just as a set of tubes, and a little jar with the liquid.

As the CPU get hotter, it will work better.

It even can be enhanced with a fan, but, who is not tired of the fan noise?

So this is basically like a heatpipe? Btw, it's probably nor "bubbles" but rather very fine "vapor". Bubbles contain air(most gases are ineffective at carrying heat compared to water/other fluids like Alcohol in a closed system) and thus ineffective at carrying heat. Hence, why bubbles are bad in a water cooling set up.

The reason your fridge needs a compressor is because it is cooling to below-ambient. The method would work with no compressor required at all to keep something above ambient, but just provide a high heat flow rate out of the system. That appears to be what was done here.

The Silentflux Media cooler has been available for AM2 & LGA775 sockets for awhile now at Directron.com for $40 and $30, respectively.

As someone noted above, this is a typical phase change cooler that contains a liquid with a low boiling point enclosed in a low-pressure casing so that it's boils just above ambient (probably 120 deg Fahrenheit). They probably have a rough surface on the inside of the blocks to allow bubbles to form easily. They use a loop to allow the gas to escape without creating back pressure.


The downsides: You probably cannot "form" (the tubes would be fairly rigid) and the blocks have to be beneath the radiator.

This seems a lot like Asetek's Vapochill Micro.
http://www.asetek.com/content/view/413/203/
The only difference I see is that they've somehow made the process more efficient, thus the lack of need for a fan.

bubbles are result of boiling->a very good way to cool

How much energy is this thing going to use? The cost of electricity might be going up by about 80% in my area and I don't want to get poor from running a overclocked pc.

That media cooler isn't the same product. I think there is a big improvement with the one they are talking about in this article.

Great, they can transfer heat to the radiator a little better... you still need to transfer that heat quietly to the air. I don't think we have a problem getting heat into the radiators, especially now with heatpipes. What we really need is a way to bring radiators down to ambient better, I think.

if in case of emergency, will the gas be toxic? I don't want silent death no matter how cool my cpu is.

I actually had an idea for something like this about a week ago. I'm a chemical engineer by trade, and this could be a very efficient cooling system.

Like bounty said though, you still have to transfer the heat from the radiator to the atmosphere. Otherwise you'll just return hot fluid to the computer and decrease the efficiency.

One idea i had for my system in the future is to route the tubes outside where there are two options:
1) Put a fan on the tubes there. Solves the noise issue. Doesn't solve the issue with energy conservation.
2) Add 50 ft of tubing, place outside, and let the natural wind cool the tubes.

Of course there are lots of other things to think about, but this is one of the better options for computer cooling. It has a lot more potential to stay quiet than other options.

looks like nothing more than what a fridge does!
(Only now the heat source is more,and thus causes the liquid to turn into gas).

Wrong...vegman84 is mostly right except they cost $29.99 for either version. and this IS OLD news. I have been actually been to directron and held one of these in my hand. I just could not convince myself one of these things would be better at cooling than my Swiftech...

see?...
http://www.directron.com/noiselimit.html
...the description? sounds the same to me. the guy at directron asked to look at it even described it as having liquid inside. +1 vegman84

ok so maybe there is actually a "media" labeled product also from SilentFlux but I do not believe that is what vegman84 was refering to. he probably just did not do a very thorough search. I however know what I was looking for having seen and held one of them. and we are talking months ago! very stale news.

It use's zero energy except that produced as heat from the CPU. The issue is that like any system that conveys heat to a radiator, the radiator will most likely need a fan, no matter how effective, heat does not just 'go away', and so a fan or some method of getting the heat out into the ambient air is will likely be needed.

To have a gas present would not require air, the bubbles would be the change of evaporating. The energy expense is found in the change of state. When you start with air, and end with air the efficiency is not as high. When evolving a liquid to a gas a greater amount of energy is needed, which is why phase change coolers carry a great deal more energy than a one-to-one state system.

This is essentially a run of the mill phase cooler with no pump, less price tag, and no subzero temps.