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Hitachi Demos Water-Cooled Notebooks

Posted by timothy on from the hissing-steam dept.

Sprocket writes: "Water-cooled processors, currently the domain of supercomputers, high-end servers, and garage hobbyists, may be about to enter the mainstream. Hitachi has developed a prototype notebook PC that uses a water-based solution to cool down its Pentium 4 processor and is planning to commercialize the product for corporate users in the third quarter of this year... read more"

7 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Not just for overclockers anymore by Starship+Trooper · · Score: 5, Informative

    Kind of like Honda shipping riced up Civics by default, it's pretty funny that the industry is following the overclockers. To take a look at the roots of water cooling, check out the definitive hobbyist on the subject, complete with alternate designs, plans, technical faq - the works.

    Personally, I'll buy it when it's packaged and done for me, and not until then.

    --
    Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
  2. Re:Water-cooled by cadallin451 · · Score: 2, Informative

    The original Japanese Dreamcast was. The American Dreamcast just had a fan. It still negates the point of this article though. Water cooling for consumer electronics has already happened and is, in fact, Old News.

  3. This is not new, by any means by jerkychew · · Score: 2, Informative

    Dell has cooled its laptops via water for at least a year now. Take apart any Latitude or Inspiron over 800MHZ and look at the small copper pipes that sit in front of the cooling fan. Those pipes circulate water over the CPU, helping to cool it.

  4. This already exists. by jonnythan · · Score: 5, Informative

    Water cooled laptops are nothing new at all. Check out these water cooling laptop articles, produced from a quick google search:

    Toshiba

    IBM

    I know there are others, but I can't seem to find them at the moment. It's certainly my underestanding that there have been water cooled laptops in production for quite a while.

    1. Re:This already exists. by p3d0 · · Score: 3, Informative

      You're talking about electrical conductivity, methinks. Salt water actually has a lower thermal conductivity than pure water.

      Thermal conductivity doesn't matter all that much for a water cooling systems, though, because the primary heat transfer mechanism is convection. You need a tiny little bit of conduction to heat up a tiny bit of water, and then convection carries that water elsewhere to a radiator which dissipates the heat.

      --
      Patrick Doyle
      I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
  5. Re:Intel: take a Marketing class by tftp · · Score: 4, Informative

    As long as I can regulate the performance (and the battery drain) it's OK. Many notebooks are used mostly as desktops, but the owner has to travel with them occasionally. That's the fate of all notebooks I have at the office. Two of them are travelling right now, but when at customer's site, they will be plugged into AC and demoing our stuff at full speed. Same when I use them at the office. Rarely they are used on airplanes.

  6. Re:Intel: take a Marketing class by BigBir3d · · Score: 2, Informative

    Jetta recently came out with a P4 laptop, in both 1.6 and 1.7GHz.

    sadly, they do not sell to the public.