Description

The power dissipation levels in high performance personal computers continue to increase rapidly while the silicon die temperature requirements remain unchanged or have been lowered. Advanced air cooling solutions for the major heat sources such as central processing unit and graphics processing unit modules uses high flow rate fans to manage the heat load at the expense of significant increases in the sound power emitted by the computer system. Closed loop liquid cooling systems may offer an excellent means to efficiently meet the combined challenges of high heat loads, low thermal resistance, and low noise. This paper describes attributes of an advanced liquid cooling system that can cool heat sources within the computer system. The cooling system described here uses copper cold plates to pick up heat from CPU and highly efficient liquid-to-air heat exchangers to transfer the heat to air by forced convection. A water based coolant is used for high thermal performance and a highly reliable compact pump is used to circulate the fluid in a closed loop. The air cooling used in computers is no longer appropriate to deliver the proper thermal management.