Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories claim to have developed, by today's standards, an insanely efficient CPU cooler fan.
The "Sandia Cooler" features curved fins and achieves 30x improvement in heat transfer over a commercial Dynatron G950 cooler that served as comparison.
The cooling performance of both devices was 0.2 degrees Celsius per Watt, but the Sandia cooler has a surface area of just 400 cm2, while the Dynatron cooler uses a whopping 12,000 cm2 due to a massive heat sink, which the Sandia Cooler does not have. The volume of the prototype cooler is about 170 cm3, compared to 2,200 cm3 of the traditional Dynatron structure.
According to the researchers, their cooler solves three key problems of CPU coolers today. The claim a several-fold reduction in boundary layer thickness, intrinsic immunity to heat sink fouling, and a "drastic reduction" in noise. What makes this solution even more interesting is that it does not use exotic materials and can be manufactured for about $10 per unit. However, the reserachers say that mass-produced coolers may be less efficient than their prototype and achieved only about a quarter of the cooling performance and about 0.05 degrees Celsius per watt, which is still more than seven times more efficient than the Dynatron solution.
There was no information on commercial availability, but the researchers said that multiple patents have been filed and that their product is currently in "alpha" status.
It will be interesting once they come out on the market with consumer product.
It is a neat design though.
jer
I hope this isn't going to slice my finger off.
That looks like a heat pump to me.
I hate it when stupid heat sinks get clogged w/ dust and don't work any more so the CPU just throttles down all the time and you wonder why it's stuttering. This looks great...no more friggin' dust in tiny little vanes...
1) Sandia's own diagram of the device shows it cooling a surface from 40C down to 25C. If that is what they chose as numbers for a diagram, then it is reasonable to assume that is predictive of what their real world expectations are. Perhaps the technology may not be quite so efficient when the temperatures are higher, say, that of a modern CPU which, before cooling, is going to be in the triple digits.
2) I think that people are assuming that this device will somehow cool better than current technologies. But nowhere do they claim that. Since when is the average gamer worried about the power consumption of the CPU cooler? Most would happily accept a CPU that sucks twice the power of anything currently on the market, as long as it keeps the CPU cooler. Sandia only claims their design will cool more efficiently, i.e., at a lower cost - and perhaps only within the hinted at sweet spot of 45 degrees Celsius.