Cooling technology - next advances?

[jarvis82]

I'm intrigued if anyone knows or can speculate as to what the next advances in cooling technology might be - or if indeed there will be any at all!

It strikes me that if you took a cross section of the current crop of coolers (high end air, closed loop, full water), although there would be a noticeable difference between them all, they would still all fall in roughly the same ball park in terms of cooling ability. Sure full water cooling is best, and presumably will remain so - but lets say your water cooling system gets your CPU 10 degrees cooler than a high end air cooler, although its very nice to have that 10 degrees in your favour, it wouldn't be the end of the world if you had to live with the higher temperature.

I guess I envisage some form of small unit, that is capable of applying ridiculously low temperatures to a small area! I find it hard to believe that the technology doesn't exist already. I guess it does, but simply isn't viable to be offered to the consumer market due to how much it would cost.

 

[liamd89]

There's been quite a few tests with liquid nitrogen cooling.

In this test they get temps down to -196 degrees lol.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/5-ghz-project,731.html

Pretty extreme and not very practical at the moment but no doubt there will be advances from this to make it more suitable to a larger audience.

 

[Krono5]

It's all there already, just out of most peoples price ranges. Take chilled water for example, the next level up from full water. They simply don't sell it specifically for computers because not many will spend the £300 it costs. Now if they did they may be able to get the prices down to the £200 mark as what people seem to use now is Aquarium chillers and it would be cheaper cooling a small amount of water constantly (not in terms of leccy bill though) than keeping thousands of gallons at 4c with a thermostat. Then there's the cost for fittings and what not on top of that and most peopel would prefer a new GTX 680 than an extra few Mhz here or there.
The next viable form of cooling is phase change which is basically the same as chilled water but without the water. This is less efficient but can acheive greater results while being priced higher. OCZ attempted to make a phase change cooler for the mass amrket but it was around the £300 and it doesn't come with a warranty which tells you all you need to know about it (usually phase change is maybe £700+). With both of these though condensation is a problem and you need to constantly be aware of that.

Next up is LN2 and Liquid Helium which are definately not suitable for widespread use.

 

[Tealc]

Ultimately cooling is just about movement of heat from one place to another. If some method can be created to move heat more efficiently and cheaply than others then that will become more popular.

A good conductor of heat unfortunately also likes to hold onto the heat it absorbs so if a medium could be created that likes to take heat at one stage but then is really keen to dump it at another stage that would be a efficient way to move heat. Is such a thing possible? I don't know.