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Alienware partners with Calgary-based CoolIT Systems to offer a liquid cooling system for Alienware's quad-SLI Aurora ALX system. Containing four Nvidia graphics processors, these systems provide lots of graphics performance, but produce a substantial amount of heat as well.
CoolIT Systems is known for its liquid cooling systems, which are basically miniature refrigerators. Using a combination of Peltier coolers and tubes filled with glycol liquid (think anti-freeze), their coolers are able to chill components below freezing temperatures. The Aurora ALX system has tubes going to each of the four GPUs (as shown in the photo).
So, do you really need drastic measures to cool down a quad-SLI system? We do not have an final answer for this question yet; however, a quad-SLI system currently running through a battery of tests in our California labs, already indicated that cooling will be important for such computers.
While the system is not built by Alienware, preliminary power numbers from the system should be comparable to other quad-SLI computers. Our system consumes 330 watts of power just sitting idle at the Windows desktop. Tom's Hardware will publish detailed performance and power consumption numbers once the tests are completed.
Alienware is currently selling the quad-SLI Aurora ALX for about $7000 in a basic configuration.
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Humphrey Cheung was a senior editor at Tom's Hardware, covering a range of topics on computing and consumer electronics. You can find more of his work in many major publications, including CNN and FOX, to name a few.
