New Vapor-Chamber Cooling Solution Coming to ATI Graphics Cards

Need a new cooling solution, even for overclocking? CT Electronics Limited, a Vapor Chamber (VC) cooling solution provider announced its GVC-1 graphics card cooler.

Utilizing the Multiwick and Boiling-enhanced technologies (belonging to its own holding company, Convergence Technologies Limited), the GVC-1 was co-developed with Dr. Gamal Refai-Ahmed, an AMD fellow and Chief Thermal Architect. The new GVC-1 is nearly half the footprint of the stock-cooler for the ATI Radeon HD4870. During testing, the GVC-1 outperformed the stock cooler by nearly 15 percent, translating into advantages for overclocking and acoustic noise.

According to Dr. Steven Lee, Chairman & CEO of CT Electronics:

The GVC-1 provides enabling technology to AMD’s 55-nm platform and offers additional design flexibility to accommodate the evolving market conditions, and that in addition to performance advantages, all our products can also be sampled on a FreeForm platform, which is a fast-turn-around platform developed to meet the break-neck pace of the electronics industry.

Nelson Fan, President & COO of CT Electronics Limited, added:

Unlike competing products that requires significant upfront tooling investment and turnaround time measured in the months, the FreeForm platform allows interested parties to quickly ‘try’ the benefit of our vapor chambers with minimal tooling costs and typical turnaround time of 2-weeks. Thus, while the saving in tooling cost is important, more important is that the coolers will not slow down the system development time, which often needs to go through several iterations.

Now all that techno-babble aside, the 15 percent increase in performance of this new vapor chamber is pretty impressive over the stock cooler. A lot of general PC consumers have this knack of tossing their systems into less than ideal locations or in poorly cooled cases. This 15 percent increase would greatly benefit in this area in systems from large OEMs. When it comes to enthusiasts however, if it’s on the card when they buy it, it’s more than likely going to come off to be replaced with something else. Some benchmark results comparing this cooler to after-markets would be nice in the future to draw final conclusions. Would be a shame to see this idea turn into ‘vapor’.

  • Pei-chen
    Or follow Nvidia's lead and simply put a better cooler on the video card.
    Reply
  • TheFace
    Is this available for CPUs? If so what coolers use the tech? If not, why the heck not?
    Reply
  • rocky1234
    What?? follow Novidia's lead & put a better cooler on the cards good one.
    What happened with the GF8800GT's then that cooler was a joke when it was released still is. The only thing Novidia is good for is putting really big shrouds over their heatsinks to make their cards look bigger...lol
    Reply
  • rocky1234
    oh yeah & almost forgot Novidia is also good for renaming the same chips several times to newer bigger names so they can trick the public into buying the same thing twice. Also just so everyone knows I used to be a huge Novidia fan up until this renaming crap they have been doing for the last 1.5 years & over charging for their products it was not until AMD/ATI
    came out with a product that competed that Novidia brought their prices down & no they did not do it out of the goodness of their hearts for you the customers they did it because they were getting spanked in sales.
    Reply
  • SirCrono
    rocky1234oh yeah & almost forgot Novidia is also good for renaming the same chips several times to newer bigger names so they can trick the public into buying the same thing twice. Also just so everyone knows I used to be a huge Novidia fan up until this renaming crap they have been doing for the last 1.5 years & over charging for their products it was not until AMD/ATIcame out with a product that competed that Novidia brought their prices down & no they did not do it out of the goodness of their hearts for you the customers they did it because they were getting spanked in sales.I'd recommend you read some Adam Smith, and then take some economics 101, this way meybe you'll understand that no company does nothing "out of the goodness of their hearts".

    And yes, Nvidia is acyually using better coolers now (they learned after the 8800 GT stock cooler fiasco), so yhea, they beated ati to that one.

    As for the vapor(ware) cooler, if it's silent i'll welcome it with open arms (unless it's too expensive, of course)
    Reply
  • Pei-chen
    rocky1234, what problem did the 8800 GT cooler suffer from?
    Reply
  • lopopo
    i would hope that this is just a starting point for this tech. 15% over stock is good but not enough to make me moist over a new graphic card...
    ..............i would like to see 30% cooling performance with a modest $ increase.
    Reply
  • one-shot
    It seems many younger people don't understand some concepts of economics. Companies are out to make money, period. If a massive cooler performs marginally better than a cheaper one, it probably isn't going to make it. Companies cut corners to make higher profits. A few pennies here can mean dollars in the end, in a simpler way. If this is cheaper to manufacture over the current model and benefits a company, I can see it being used. If it doesn't, well, then it won't be used. Nothing is free in economics.
    Reply
  • Seems that nvidia is behind ATI in technology (DX), performance and now, in cooling efficiency.
    Reply
  • apache_lives
    i got an 8800GT with the stock cooler (slim) - wtf are you talking about? have you ever owned one yourself?
    Reply