New CPU Cooler Boasts Huge Energy Savings

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NEC has developed a new system cooler that uses 80% less energy than a typical stock fan setup, and 60% less than a water-cooled setup.
The cooler works by using the CPU itself to boil the system's CFC substitute (as pure CFC emissions are harmful to the environment), which begins to change its state into a gaseous nature around 50 degrees or so. The evaporation draws heat away from the CPU, and the vapor inside the cooling system traverses its way back into a centralized radiator. The radiator uses an attached fan to cool the gas back into a liquid, which then passes its way down to the CPU area once more.
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So what are typical CPU fans? 5 volt? 12 volt? Sounds like an expensive way to save a couple watts of power.
 
I like how they use the huge percentage points to mask that they are only saving a maybe a watt or two of power at the most.
 
CrunchGear reports that the cooling fan draws less energy than a typical setup and, in addition, the entire cooling apparatus itself costs roughly 70 percent less to produce.
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According to the article, it uses a radiator and fan to cool everything down again to a liquid. Assuming fan prices are constant I don't see how you're going to save 70% of production costs moving from a heatsink, to a radiator + CFC + cpu block + tubes.

But hey, if they do it - more power to them. Sign me up!
 
I'm confused, this sounds like every heatpipe heatsink ever. how can it even use 80% less energy than a stock fan heatsink...if it has a fan on it?
 
This comes across to me like it's geared for either the office pc or your non-overclocked, brand name, store bought computer setup.

Basically it comes across to me as a variation of the typical tower heat sink.
Instead of a tower of fins on top of the processor it seems like it will relocate the fins away from the cpu and allow for mostly passive air cooling.
The fan is not used as much and they get to claim it saves energy.

Probably fine for the non-overclocked, low power office pc, but would probably be inadequate for enthusiast use.

...my $0.02 anyway :cool:
 
Maybe this would be great for a HTPC? Assuming that you're going for non-overcocked, quiet operation.
 
Pumps and undervolted fans already draw essentially a negligible amount of power compared to the computer itself.

Meh. Call me when they start making diamond heatsinks I can afford.
 
It just sounds like they just put a more efficient heat transfer medium in your standard heatpipe.
 
Then again for data centers it may not be bad. I don't buy the "70%" cheaper to make statement. I'd rather see data centers cooled through a ground source heat pump with some piped off to water cool the servers.
 
Achron said:
Then again for data centers it may not be bad. I don't buy the "70%" cheaper to make statement. I'd rather see data centers cooled through a ground source heat pump with some piped off to water cool the servers.
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Data centers are typically cooled with Leibert water cooled AC units. The servers themselves typically have multiple high flow fans. I could imagine servers could save some energy with more efficient cooling not requiring as many fans, but not much compared to teh energy they consume (unless the majority of the servers are sitting idle or under low load most of the time).
 
They just describe how a heat pipe works... Hey, arnt most cpu coolers made with heat pipes? They are just making a common thing sound cool:mad:
 
Phase change and heat pipe tech has been in use by the DoD and quite a few other public ventures for a few decades, heck the footings on the Alaskan pipelines use phase change units to prevent the oils heat from melting the permafrost footings.
 
70% cheaper to make never reflects to the consumer, its always 70% cheaper to make for the manufacturer and around 70% more cost to the consumer, thats always been the case.
 
Unless they are piping the refrigerant like a watercooling system and venting the heat outside, I don't see how this can save 40% in overall power consumption.
 
I don't think by overall consumption they mean systemwide.

I think they mean in relation to a stock CPU cooler. So if a stock CPU cooler uses, lets say 15w of power, this would use what, 7-8?

In the larger scale of things and not on a single system concept, I could see there being overall benefits. But, there's already things in the market than can do just that,

So it seems like a reinvention of the wheel, when the wheel we got already is improved on.

Systems generate watts, no matter what you do, unless you lower that aspect of it, you're only redirecting your "savings" to another area.
 
Unless I am misssing something obvious, how is this any different from the zillion other heat-pipe HSFs? Perhaps the fan is more efficient, but I am hard pressed to believe that you can save any significant amount of energy. I guess you can spin numbers to make them look great, 40% of what? 1 nJ?
 
They stuck a mini air-conditioner onto a processor. Cool.

They will probably get 100 patents for something that's already been done, just not stuck on a processor.
 
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