Liquid cooling again

tkntkn
Posted:
in Future Apple Hardware edited January 2014
Apple seems to be going through extreme measures to keep heat down.



PowerMac G5- nine zone cooling with controlled fans plus that ridiculously large case. Not good engineering no matter what anyone says, just a lot of working around problems



xServe G5- two big fricking air vents on the front, apparently noisy as hell



and the remainder don't have G5s yet



I think Apple needs to seriously start evaluating and taking the lead on liquid cooling. It is already being used in some notebook in Asia, so it is doable.



It would be silent, it would be space efficient, and allow them to shove G5s everywhere. Just imagine a rack of xServes that actually run cool without fan noise. Or Powerbooks that don't get hot at all...

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 19
    onlookeronlooker Posts: 5,252member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by TKN

    Apple seems to be going through extreme measures to keep heat down.



    PowerMac G5- nine zone cooling with controlled fans plus that ridiculously large case. Not good engineering no matter what anyone says, just a lot of working around problems



    xServe G5- two big fricking air vents on the front, apparently noisy as hell



    and the remainder don't have G5s yet



    I think Apple needs to seriously start evaluating and taking the lead on liquid cooling. It is already being used in some notebook in Asia, so it is doable.



    It would be silent, it would be space efficient, and allow them to shove G5s everywhere. Just imagine a rack of xServes that actually run cool without fan noise. Or Powerbooks that don't get hot at all...





    Pffft.....
  • Reply 2 of 19
    macserverxmacserverx Posts: 217member
    You can't put them everywhere. Liquid just absorbs more heat which can then be piped somewhere else to let it out. But only 17" PowerBook has the surface area (on your lap to dispel that kind of heat. On Power Macs, you'd have still have the fans to blow the heat off the radiator.
  • Reply 3 of 19
    powerdocpowerdoc Posts: 8,123member
    Water cooling is interesting for laptops. For desktop, fans are still recquiered.



    Basically water cooling is displacing the heat from a place to an another (in a better aera) via water conduction. The heat have still to be evacuated. As Macserver, said, a powerbook have enough aera and the appropriate material (aluminium) to evacuate this heat. In a desktop, fans are mandatory.
  • Reply 4 of 19
    cubistcubist Posts: 954member
    Also I thought I read on another thread that there was a problem with using liquid cooling in laptops carried on aircraft.
  • Reply 5 of 19
    composercomposer Posts: 212member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by cubist

    Also I thought I read on another thread that there was a problem with using liquid cooling in laptops carried on aircraft.



    The likely conducting fluid would be alchohol rather than water. Alchohol, being flammable would pose a potential safety/security risk to the airline.



    Why alchohol? probably able to conduct/dissapate heat faster than water.
  • Reply 6 of 19
    pbpb Posts: 4,255member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Composer

    The likely conducting fluid would be alchohol rather than water. Alchohol, being flammable would pose a potential safety/security risk to the airline.





    I don't think the problem is the material used, since for security they would use a neutral liquid. The problem is pressure variations, which could damage the cooling system with all the consequences would that have.
  • Reply 7 of 19
    curiousuburbcuriousuburb Posts: 3,325member
    That and the fact that at altitude, aircraft cabins are below atmospheric pressure.



    Nobody wants a ruptured pipe due to pressure differential, even if the risk is low.

    Hot liquids on circuit boards are worse than hot liquids on your lap.
  • Reply 8 of 19
    amorphamorph Posts: 7,112member
    The risks of liquid cooling in aircraft are overstated. Apple has used liquid cooling in laptops for years, and people have been taking them on planes for years, and I have heard nothing about Pismos or TiBooks exploding in-flight.



    There is some very interesting new cooling tech that uses very small channels to gain an order of magnitude more surface area for cooling. This is how the Cooligy CPU cooling tech works.



    The reason liquid cooling is not appropriate as a primary cooling technology for a tower is that liquid cooling requires you to know exactly where the hot spots are, and exactly how hot they get. This is not a luxury that you have in a machine where drives and PCI and AGP cards and huge banks of RAM can be inserted and removed arbitrarily. The PowerMac G5 does, however, use liquid cooling on the CPU daughtercard, to cool the CPU's power supply.
  • Reply 9 of 19
    aphelionaphelion Posts: 736member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Powerdoc

    .... In a desktop, fans are mandatory.



    Err... here's one from Tom's Hardware that doesn't need fans:









    Quote:

    The entire TNN 500A chassis, in fact, is a giant heatsink. Both the right and left side panels of the TNN 500A chassis feature natural convection cooled heatsinks; with the huge 400mm width of these side panels, both side panels of the case serve to radiate the heat to the outside of the chassis.



  • Reply 10 of 19
    airslufairsluf Posts: 1,861member
    Kickaha and Amorph couldn't moderate themselves out of a paper bag. Abdicate responsibility and succumb to idiocy. Two years of letting a member make personal attacks against others, then stepping aside when someone won't put up with it. Not only that but go ahead and shut down my posting priviledges but not the one making the attacks. Not even the common decency to abide by their warning (afer three days of absorbing personal attacks with no mods in sight), just shut my posting down and then say it might happen later if a certian line is crossed. Bullshit flag is flying, I won't abide by lying and coddling of liars who go off-site, create accounts differing in a single letter from my handle with the express purpose to decieve and then claim here that I did it. Everyone be warned, kim kap sol is a lying, deceitful poster.



    Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.



    Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
  • Reply 11 of 19
    aphelionaphelion Posts: 736member
    Heat Pipes are used in the Zalman case to transfer heat from the componets to the side panels, which are in fact large heat sinks. (and in AirSluf's G5 board above)



    The use of heat pipes in Apple products technically makes them fluid cooled (it's not water), but this is in a sealed copper pipe, with a wicking action to accomplish heat transfer.



    The Cooligy system uses active microchannel cooling to accomplish the same objective, but with a more sophisticated device.



    Quote:

    The Cooligy system also employs an innovative electrokinetic pump which is solid state, and works based on the principles that apply when a fluid passes through a negatively charged porous glass disk when a positive electric field is applied. Or in other words, as a positive electric field is applied to the fluid, hydrogen ions are produced that have the effect of pushing the water through the openings in the porous glass disk, creating flow.



  • Reply 12 of 19
    tfworldtfworld Posts: 181member
    Hmm didnt know that the G5's used liquid cooling. That is pretty cool. I wonder why they needed to use that when they have 9 cooling fans? I can see this allowing for future speed increases. Maybe they plan on using the case, or a version of it, up until they hit 5Ghz?
  • Reply 13 of 19
    mattjohndrowmattjohndrow Posts: 1,618member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by onlooker

    Pffft.....



    what? why?
  • Reply 14 of 19
    jadejade Posts: 379member
    the nine fans are for silent operation. It could have been cooled with less fans but it would be noisy.
  • Reply 15 of 19
    neilwneilw Posts: 77member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by TKN

    Apple seems to be going through extreme measures to keep heat down.



    PowerMac G5- nine zone cooling with controlled fans plus that ridiculously large case. Not good engineering no matter what anyone says, just a lot of working around problems





    The premise is wrong, at least in terms of the PowerMacs. Apple is going to extreme measures to keep *noise* down. The G5's could make do with fewer fans, as typical PCs do. But they'd be noisier.
  • Reply 16 of 19
    screedscreed Posts: 1,077member
    Funnily enough, the pipe on the Powermac board doesn't cool the CPUs but apparently the two motherboard controller chips.



    Screed
  • Reply 17 of 19
    bartobarto Posts: 2,246member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Aphelion

    Err... here's one from Tom's Hardware that doesn't need fans



    Yeah, I took a look at that case a few days ago. It's nice, except for the $1400 price. Assuming Apple could manufacture such a case (and make it pretty) for $1000, and the G5 case is $300, that's still a $700 increase in the price of a G5. Is an totally silent case (except for the hard drives) worth it over the current G5's case? Probably not... when you consider how quiet the G5 is.



    Not to mention the fact that the Zalman has overheating problems with super fast components... for instance the kind of components Apple uses in the G5.



    A lot of people seem to be using water/liquid cooling and heatpipe cooling interchangeably. They are quite different. Heatpipe cooling is what you see on the underside of the G5 motherboard (and the iMac motherboard, and the iBook motherboard, and the PowerBook motherboard), and is useful for limited situations like for instance cooling the G5's U3 chip by dissipating the heat into a giant heatsink of a case.



    Water/liquid cooling for desktops isn't really suitable outside the enthusiast/overclocker market, due to the maintenance required of water cooling systems, not to mention their high failure rates.



    Barto
  • Reply 18 of 19
    airslufairsluf Posts: 1,861member
    Kickaha and Amorph couldn't moderate themselves out of a paper bag. Abdicate responsibility and succumb to idiocy. Two years of letting a member make personal attacks against others, then stepping aside when someone won't put up with it. Not only that but go ahead and shut down my posting priviledges but not the one making the attacks. Not even the common decency to abide by their warning (afer three days of absorbing personal attacks with no mods in sight), just shut my posting down and then say it might happen later if a certian line is crossed. Bullshit flag is flying, I won't abide by lying and coddling of liars who go off-site, create accounts differing in a single letter from my handle with the express purpose to decieve and then claim here that I did it. Everyone be warned, kim kap sol is a lying, deceitful poster.



    Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.



    Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
  • Reply 19 of 19
    crusadercrusader Posts: 1,129member
    Wow, 30 watts produced by the system memory controller. That is insane.
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