Liquid Metal CPU Heatsink Beats Water Cooling

unassimilatible writes "Bios Magazine is reporting that the world's first commercially available liquid-metal based CPU cooler is about to ship. Danamics, a Danish company, claims that its LM-10 outperforms standard air-cooled heatsinks and most watercooled systems with a mere 1W power draw. 'The liquid metal is a key component in Danamics cooling systems. Liquid metal has two major advantages when cooling high power density heat sources: Firstly it has superior thermo physical properties that decrease temperature — and temperature non-uniformity — on die and across chips. Secondly, the electrical properties of the liquid metal enables efficient, reliable and ultra compact electromagnetic pumping without the use of moving parts, shafts, seals, etc.' Awesome technology, if it actually works and is affordable. The submitter requests that the moderators terminate all T-1000 jokes."

Re:Reads like an ad...

[DanWS6]

It's a true slashdot story then.

Re:The obvious choice...

[Deadstick]

some dumbass

As opposed to a person who (a) thinks mercury and bromine are the only two liquid metals and (b) thinks bromine is a metal at all?

rj

Re:No T-1000 jokes, huh, submitter?

[realmolo]

Yeah, I know. I forgot to put in the breaks. I do that a lot. I'm used to EVERY OTHER FORUM SOFTWARE IN THE WORLD, where the breaks are inserted for you.

Re:What metal?

[Detritus]

Has mercury replaced plutonium as the most feared element by the "Let's all run around in circles, and scream and shout" wing of the environmental movement?

Re:Magnetic pump?

[maglor_83]

Isn't that exactly what a heat pipe does?

Re:Sodium cooling

[Chryana]

I can't speak for the piston aircraft engine cooling part, but the advantages of sodium weren't sufficient to keep using it in submarines [wikipedia.org]. Basically, if the reactor had to be shut down, it was impossible to restart, since the coolant would have by that time frozen solid. Not so desirable in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So, as far as I know, cooling with liquid sodium is not used in any currently running nuclear submarine. Anyways, I am quite skeptical of the bold claims made in this press release. We see the usual patent pending technology, which has broken some unknown thus far barrier to the widespread use of this technology in the PC cooling area, putting the company ahead of the competition. I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, it looks like a potentially very effective venture capital sink for clueless investors with money to burn.

Re:Toxicity?

[Alastor187]

If it's being used to cool CPUs, I don't think it needs to be liquid at room temperature, since the area near most modern CPUs is considerably hotter than that! If your CPU is running at room temperature, you probably don't need much cooling (and if you do, you're going to need a much more elaborate system than merely one based on a liquid metal, since a passive heat-sink isn't going to take you anywhere below room temperature).

This may be true when the machine is running, but what about when it is initially started? As the processor begins to warm up the cooling medium will still be solid. Since solids are hard to pump the heat generated by the processor must be transported by conduction only. If the designer goes through the trouble of using a liquid cooler, it is probably safe to say that conduction only heat removal is not sufficient. So this presents some serious transient start-up issues.