Home arrow Blog arrow Asetek CEO Blog arrow What's best - a Corvette or a John Deere? Part II
The CEO's Corner

 

Dear Reader,

My name is André Eriksen and I am the founder and CEO of Asetek. I founded Asetek back in 1997 focusing on compressor cooling and overclocking. During the years we built very strong brand names and successful products such as VapoChill and WaterChill. A couple of years back we decided to leverage our experience from the channel market and started to focus on the OEM market. I have decided to create this blog and provide you with an open minded and honest opinion on the thermal market as being a part of the PC and server market.

We have seen a consolidation of the market during the last year, but unfortunately at the same token we have also seen a commodization of products/PCs, which is not necessarily to the benefit of either the PC vendor or the end user. Here at Asetek we believe that proper thermal management (and the obvious benefits associated with it) is often times overlooked or cut away due to overly focus on cost cutting (commodization).


Image

View André S. Eriksen's profile on LinkedIn


This phenomenon, general trends in the market and benefits from thermal management is what I will cover in my blog. From time to time I will also include guest writers and coverage from trade shows etc. I hope you will enjoy reading as much as I will enjoy writing, and please do not hesitate to provide any feedback you might have.  
 
What's best - a Corvette or a John Deere? Part II PDF Print E-mail
Friday, 25 April 2008

Originally I had not really planned a Part II, of this post. However, after reading a couple of press reviews of our LCLC recently, I got inspired to follow up on the heat pipe VS liquid cooling thing again.

 

If you have not read Part I yet, you should do that here

 

Last week I got a link to an LCLC review at Hothardware.com. I was not even aware they had a unit for review, but I have to say that I was very impressed with the professionalism and soberness of the article when I read it. I feel it is seldom that any site reviews anything this thoroughly nowadays. The funny part is that they basically came to the same conclusion as for example Anandtech, when stating that liquid cooling has exactly same performance as air cooling (or rather the opposite).

 

However, if you start to scratch a bit under the surface, you will find that there is significant difference anyway. For example when looking at the pure CPU temperatures, they are about equal. However as the review unit includes a GPU cooler as well, and as the 8800 GTX probably consumes 60W in idle mode, the LCLC is actually removing 60W more of heat than the air cooler, and still capable of keeping the CPU at the same temperature. These 60W probably increases the CPU temperature with 5'C.

 

Just to do a santity check I looked at this review, in Danish (English conclusion on the last page) they test without a GPU in the loop, and see a 5'C LCLC lead over their air cooler. So my "back of an envelope" estimate is probably pretty accurate.

 

Also the air cooler and LCLC is not tested with the same air flow in the Hothardware review, since the fan on the air cooler is running 2640rpm, and the fan on the LCLC is only running 800rpm. There is a test where the air cooler is also only running at low rpm, and this case the temperature is 5'C higher. So it it very fair to assume that the LCLC would have performed 3-5'C better at the same airflow although I have not studied it in detail.

 

Finally all tests are done in an open bench. As the air cooler would pump all the CPU heat in to the chassis, the CPU temperature would definitely be much higher, whereas the LCLC would transfer the heat out of the chassis. Again this could easily have a 1-3'C gain on the LCLC.

 

All things equal it actually means that the LCLC actually performs significantly better than the air cooler in this test. I have suggested my good friend Dave, to do an update to the article, but no matter what I still like the review a lot. The reason for liking this review a lot, although my above-mentioned points are not explicitly addressed is that Hothardware, although implicitly, addresses them systematically by mentioning the lower noise etc. in the article.
 
Very good read indeed!

 

ASE

» 1 Comment
1Comment
at Tuesday, 03 June 2008 18:23by stasdmStanislav Dmitriev
Just reasently I thought of "best cooling system" for overclocker/ Followa are the results: 
 
Overclocked computer cannot be cooled be the air cooler - that is known. But what other cooler to choose? 
There are three basic types of coolers to select from: water, thermoelectric (Peltier) and two kinds of phase change, namely: thermal pipes and direct evaporation (in principle, they differ only by cooling substance, but in result differ dramatically). 
 
If to compare by the temperature the CPU might be cooled to, they will stand as follow (better first): direct evaporation, thermoelectric, thermal pipes, water. 
 
So, my first thought was to use direct evaporation. But after second thought I understood that it (and Peltier) is good either for a short run, or for the work in the humidity-controlled environment in 24x7 operating mode. Without the humidity control there sooner or later will be water condensation that will ruin the system. If computer is turned on/off (at least for the night), thermal fatigue will do it naughty job. 
 
On the other hand, neither thermal pipes, no water may keep processor cool at high clocks. Thermal pipes are good to take the heat off only is they are substantially chilled themselves - with air cooling the appropriate vents combination must be about half a meter high! Water is a good cooler, but somewhat latent and just cannot be effective on the small chip surface. On the other hand it is not easy cooled. So, there seem to be a dead end. 
 
Bu
» Post Comment
Only registered users can write a comment.
Please login or register.