Internal Loop Liquid Cooling™

 

High Efficiency Liquid Cooling for CPUs & GPUs.


Internal loop liquid coolers enable server manufacturers to utilize the highest performing CPUs and GPUs in high density server and blade designs where air coolers cannot support these processors. The highest performance processors are typically the processors that draw the highest wattage (have the highest TDP—thermal design power) and require the most cooling. The superior cooling characteristics of liquid enable Asetek internal loop liquid coolers to capture more heat and transfer it into a given air stream. For example, servers that are limited to 95W TDP CPUs today can often support 130W TDP CPUs with Asetek internal loop liquid cooling.

 

Key Attribute:

  • More efficient removal of processor heat to data center air.

Benefits:

  • Enables maximum performance processor (max TDP) use in dense chassis.
  • Enables overclocking for High Frequency Trading.
  • Lowers required fan speeds, saving power.
  • No changes required to data center infrastructure.

Gallery:

 

 

 

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How Internal Loop Liquid Cooling Works:

Internal Loop Liquid Cooling uses Asetek’s patented, high efficiency, sealed loop liquid cooling technology to effectively cool the highest wattage, high heat flux components: CPUs and GPUs. The same technology is already in service and cooling nearly a million CPUs and GPUs in tower PCs and workstations.

The illustration to the left shows a block diagram of a typical Internal Loop Liquid Cooler. Two CPUs are liquid cooled in this illustration; however any combination of CPUs and GPUs can be cooled. The cold plates remove heat from the processors and into the flowing cooling liquid. Low power, low pressure pumps are integrated with each CPU cold plate and provide the liquid flow. Asetek Internal Loop Liquid Coolers operate at such low pressures that a pressure spike leading to a failure within a server simply cannot occur. These pumps draw cool liquid from the liquid-to-air heat exchanger, move the liquid through the cold plates and circulate it back to the liquid-to-air heat exchanger. Each pump is capable of providing sufficient flow for the cooling loop to operated effectively with the second pump stopped, providing N-1 redundancy. In addition, the pump motors are hot swappable. Regular chassis fans move air through the heat exchanger and the heat exchanger removes heat from the flowing liquid and into the air flowing through the server chassis.

The efficiency gained with this arrangement enables Internal Loop Liquid Coolers to remove more processor heat into a given chassis air stream making it possible to use higher wattage processors in a given server design. Another advantage of this approach is the heat from the processors is evenly distributed across the chassis air flow. This eliminates the intense thermal shadows that are often present downstream of CPU air heat sinks and makes it easier to cool the components in these areas. Excess thermal capacity within the Internal Loop Liquid Cooler is eliminated by slowing chassis fans, saving power.

Internal Loop Liquid coolers are compatible with 1U and above form factor servers and 1U blade servers. The low profile Asetek integrated pump / cold plate units have interchangeable mounting mechanisms compatible with Intel and AMD server sockets including Intel 2011 standard and narrow ILM sockets and AMD G34 sockets. Liquid-to-air heat exchangers are available in a multiple form factors for operation with 40mm, 80mm, 92mm and 120mm fans and scalable to almost any performance or density requirement.

Internal Loop Liquid Coolers are 100% helium integrity test by Asetek then filled with cooling liquid and factory sealed. Data center operators (and server OEMs) never need to touch the liquid in or refill Internal Loop Liquid Coolers.

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Calculating the Benefits:

Extreme Performance:

 

Current Situation:

  • Intel Xeon X5687 CPUs run at a stock speed of 3.6GHz.


Liquid Cooling Benefit:

  • Adding liquid cooling increases heat transfer efficiency.
  • Added heat transfer efficiency and a special server motherboard enable CPU overclocking.
  • For example: with overclocking the Xeon X5687 run at 4.17GHz a 16% improvement in speed.
  • CPUs and GPUs are both overclockable for extreme performance.

Server Density:

 

Current Situation:

  • Many servers are limited to 95W CPUs.
  • Four CPUs per RU yields a CPU maximum density of 16kW.

Liquid Cooling Benefit

  • Adding liquid cooling increases heat transfer efficiency.
  • Higher heat removal efficiency enables higher power processors.
  • 150W CPUs are possible per RU with liquid cooling.
  • Each rack now supports 25.2kW of CPU power, a 58.7% increase