Sandia Develops Amazingly Efficient (up to 30x) CPU Cooler


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The "Sandia Cooler" features curved fins and achieves 30x improvement in heat transfer over a commercial Dynatron G950 cooler that served as comparison.

The cooling performance of both devices was 0.2 degrees Celsius per Watt, but the Sandia cooler has a surface area of just 400 cm2, while the Dynatron cooler uses a whopping 12,000 cm2 due to a massive heatsink, which the Sandia Cooler does not have. The volume of the prototype cooler is about 170 cm3, compared to 2,200 cm3 of the traditional Dynatron structure.

According to the researchers, their cooler solves three key problems of CPU coolers today. The claim a several-fold reduction in boundary layer thickness, intrinsic immunity to heat sink fouling, and a "drastic reduction" in noise. What makes this solution even more interesting is that it does not use exotic materials and can be manufactured for about $10 per unit. However, the reserachers say that mass-produced coolers may be less efficient than their prototype and achieved only about a quarter of the cooling performance and about 0.05 degrees Celsius per watt, which is still more than seven times more efficient than the Dynatron solution.

There was no information on commercial availability, but the researchers said that multiple patents have been filed and that their product is currently in "alpha" status.

http://www.tomshardw...ml#xtor=RSS-181

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maybe a redesigned coller based on the peltier effect would be much better

Then the issue becomes how do we cool the hot side of the Peltier? Also it needs extra power to run a Peltier plate.

Personally I watercool my PC's so a product like this isn't really interesting to me per se but any improvement on the stock coolers that processors come with is good for consumers in general. That is if this design is adopted by Intel and AMD which it probably wont be knowing them.

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Hmm, wasn't this mentioned sometime ago?

Pretty neat though.

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If this makes it's way to mass market I'll consider buying myself one. The cooler I currently have, whilst better than stock isn't great and the fact that it can both produce better efficiency and lower cost than current coolers is promising.

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If this makes it's way to mass market I'll consider buying myself one. The cooler I currently have, whilst better than stock isn't great and the fact that it can both produce better efficiency and lower cost than current coolers is promising.

Might be cheaper to make but doesn't change that some companies will exploit it's price.

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Might be cheaper to make but doesn't change that some companies will exploit it's price.

Coolers are overpriced now so I'd say that's probably a safe bet.

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i don't understand why a retail unit would be just 1/4 as good as the prototype.

The idea is quite simple, instead of having Heat Sink with many Metal Fins for Heat Dissipation and a Plastic Fan that sits on top to suck out the Heat. You have a Fan that is actually the Metal Heat Sink. This way combine them into one pieces, Half the volume with even better heat dissipation. I dont know how it got to 30x difference, but the design manage to double the efficiency of normal heat sink while using half the volume that is still only 4x better.

For for only a few dollars difference i would be glad to have that in my laptop.

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didnt intel show us a cpu cooler many years ago thats was amazing, they should some video of a CPU overclocked @ 5ghz being cooled with a air cooler?

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this would be some neat tech if it ever comes to market... $10 to manufacture and it'll retail for $49.99.

whatever happened to those carbon nanotube heatsinks that were shown at some trade show 4-5 years ago?

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this would be some neat tech if it ever comes to market... $10 to manufacture and it'll retail for $49.99.

whatever happened to those carbon nanotube heatsinks that were shown at some trade show 4-5 years ago?

vaporware :(

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