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Hitachi's Water-cooled Laptop
surfacearea writes "The Register has an article about the new Flora 270W Silent Model, a Japan-only 1.8GHz water cooled laptop. Apparently the pump and piping is all held behind the LCD in the lid. I wonder how much extra weight that consumes." But best of all, it means now laptops have
a chance to spring a leak!
"Why did you take your laptop into the bathroom? Were you looking at porn?"
"No"
"Then what's that on the front of your pants?"
"Oh, the water cooling sprung a leak"
This will save marriages everywhere.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
To me, this kind of thing strikes me as the wrong solution. I'd much rather see the emphasis on low power on low energy, rather than fixing this on the back end by coming up with a novel way of eliminating all the excess heat that is generated.
It's like saying "We found a way to reduce the emissions from SUVs," which ignores the fact that SUVs are grossly fuel inefficient in the first place.
Splish splah I was making a hack,
all on a Saturday night...
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
I still remember the DEC guys making fun of the water-pumping IBM mainframers - "I see your computer is down, have you called the plumber yet?"
oooh, imagine a beowulf cluster of those?
mmmm...beeeeerrrrr....
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
Will this really sell in a purely Japanese market? The Japanese are more obsessed with small size and light weight. Seems like Americans and Europeans are more likely to add extra weight or size to get a quieter machine.
As usual, slashdot has sensationalized water cooling, and made it seem that springing a leak can be common with a system like this.
Water cooling has been around a long time, far pre dating computers. While it may be true that over clockers working on their own PCs in their dads' garages may spring a leak, in reality a commercial water cooling system this just doesn't happen.
Springing a leak with this system would be about as likely as your new air conditioner sprining a coolant leak. It simpley won't happen within the normal life span, and assuming you don't run over it with a car or drop it down an elevator shaft.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
Tom's Hardware Guide has a pretty nifty video on installing a water-cooling system in a traditional, desktop system. IIRC, it not only cools the CPU, but also the GPU (graphics processing unit) as well as the motherboard's chipset.
Said video can be found here
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
I have to ask, what happens if you leave your laptop outside in the winter? I've have people leave their laptops in their car all the time. So what would happen this winter?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I suppose the pipes in the monitor area are of some sort of plastic which doesn't break very easily. I also guess that instead of water one would prefer to use some sort of solution that would not cause harm to any hardware components if there should be a leak.
My problem of having to go really badly while dealing with an overheating laptop has been solved.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
I know there's got to be at least one liquid that doesn't conduct electricity that would be suitable for this.. hey - materials engineers, little help?
The water cooling won't help you at all, but likely hurt you (bring on overheating faster). Depends on the effectivenesss of the insulation in your carrying case, though.
XML causes global warming.
"The solution can last for more than five years, the flexible tube can circulate the solution over 20,000 times and the pump works for more than 44,000 hours, the statement said."
And even if it does spring a leak:
"Plastic panels separate these water-cooling elements from high-voltage areas, in case of a solution leak from the cooling system. The Tokyo company also offers a three-year guarantee service for the product."
Sounds good to me!
While I tend to agree, the sensationalism of a leak springing from your laptop in the midst of a high-level confrence in some plush board room with a teak wood table isn't terribly likely. However, as noted, the coolant system runs up behind the LCD. That means that somewhere between the system board and the LCD, there's some flexing happening as you open and close the LCD on your laptop. Moving parts are potential failure points.
Let's all admit, how often have you picked up your laptop and held it by the LCD? For Joe User, it happens. Or how many times have you seen a User stacking reports and books on their laptop? More pressure on that LCD that's got the cooling system in it.
Apple had problems with their good looking Titaniums loosing connections when their cases flexed. If engineers don't look closely a real-world instances where users are going to flex things that really weren't meant to be flexed...you're going to find the wear will cause a leak. Maybe not during your warranty period..but, say a couple months after it's over? Of course then, you'll need to go buy a new laptop, eh?
There's a gimmick.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
You mean like this? (which was featured on /. recently)
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Close, but not quite. The rate that heat is generated isn't a function of the cooling system; it's a function of the heat-disappating components (and, true, only a high-power processor would have a water-cooling system).
Given an insulated enclosure and non-stopable heat generation, the second best you can do is to evenly distribute the heat among all components (actually, the best you can do is distribute more heat to components that can take the heat - i.e. heat the aluminium just to the point of melting at the same time silicon reaches its melting temperature). A water cooling system would better distribute the heat (as opposed to when I did this- my poor little fan was running, but there was no air in my bag to move).
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
In the hopes of stemming the flood of purely silly questions, here's the article which will answer something like 95% of the questions I've seen posted thus far. You lazy sods, I'll bet you don't indicate when you turn a corner while driving either.
Hitachi Ltd. has announced the commercial launch of its water-cooled notebook PC, a 1.8GHz mobile Pentium 4-based machine which uses a patented Hitachi system to aid heat dissipation.
Most notebooks are cooled by air fans, and as processors have grown more powerful and begun to generate more heat, these fans have become more numerous, larger, and have needed to spin faster.
This has also meant that fans have become noisier and might not be suitable for use in places like libraries, Hitachi said.
The new Flora 270W Silent Model uses a water-based solution tank, instead of a fan or fans for cooling down the processor. Hitachi announced a working prototype using this technology in February.
"The efficiency of a water cooling system and the air cooling system are about the same but the biggest difference is the noise the latter creates," said Masayuki Akabane, a Hitachi spokesman.
The water-based solution runs through a flexible tube that is placed over the chips and absorbs heat. The heated water solution is then sent to the display part of the notebook to be stored in a tank where it cools down.
The solution can last for more than five years, the flexible tube can circulate the solution over 20,000 times and the pump works for more than 44,000 hours, the statement said.
Plastic panels separate these water-cooling elements from high-voltage areas, in case of a solution leak from the cooling system. The Tokyo company also offers a three-year guarantee service for the product.
The new products are slightly thicker than existing air-cooled Flora models, in order to show the tank at the back of the LCD (liquid crystal display) panel and hence differentiate the water-cooled machine, Akabane said. The tank also be hidden, he said.
The products are equipped with a 1.8GHz mobile Intel 4 processor, 128M bytes of RAM, a 20G-byte hard disk drive and a 15-inch (37.5-centimeter) color TFT (thin film transistor) LCD (liquid crystal display), and are priced at ¥341,000 (US$2,941). The products can be customized to connect via Ethernet, a modem or an IEEE802.11b interface.
Hitachi started taking custom orders from corporate customers at its online shopping site on Wednesday. The products are expected to be shipped on Sept. 30 in Japan, Akabane said. The company can provide the product for corporate users outside Japan on demand, he said.
The company is still looking at market trends before deciding when to launch the product for the consumer market, he said.
Hitachi has patents for this unique water-cooling system, and is trying to promote it as a standard throughout the industry. Several high-end product makers are in talks with Hitachi for possible adoption of the technology in servers and PDPs (plasma display panels), Akabane said.
Even if you subjected the coolant system to increased air pressure, it would not weaken the plumbing. Water is an incompressible fluid, while air can be compressed. It'll take some serious PSIs to bust through a well engineered cooling system. Also, the technology of water cooling was invented during WW1, during development of fighter engines, so the technology has been proven.
Bad idea buddy. Although the tensil strength of the cooling pipes would probably contain the liquid, but you'd be subjecting them to more stress. Without air pressure pushing in on the pipes, there's only the pressure of the water pushing out. The only concern I'd have with the cooling system regards the amount of power it would consume compared to fans. You can never have too much battery life.Last thing - if you're really concerned, RTFM/RTFDS (Read the fucking data sheet)!
There's always a page describing the operating environments the device was designed for. A pressurized airplane cabin can be assumed equivalent to 10,000 ft altitude.
~A'Ëq'i4d)^'$ÊSÈòB
I wonder what Crash Coredump thinks about this?
I believe the above-referenced liquid N2 cooling project (and others) used 3M's Fluorinert as their coolant medium.
3M has information on it here in PDF format.
Just don't drink the stuff, sounds nasty...
That's my purse! I don't know you! -- Bobby Hill
I believe it's Cray/SGI that uses an interesting liquid for cooling their "water cooled" style of systems. It's a liquid that's completely inert, and doesn't react with metals, plastics, rubber, etc. And being non-conductive, you could likely pour it over the system and see absolutely nothing adverse happen.
Can someone share any more details on this stuff?
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
"Was that you?"
"Uhhh, no. My laptop's cooler was burping again." *thump-thump* "goddamthing"
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Dboyles, you might want to check that link, its going somewhere else.
You are correct; my mistake.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
I wonder how much extra weight that consumes
Just the other day I was having red wine with weight.
A system with an active cooling system (one that requires energy like this water system) will generate more heat than a system without such a cooling system. 2nd law of thermodynamics, and all.
Depending on the insulation, your system that moves the heat to the components less effected will have to work harder and harder to do so, until the whole system, cooled components and all, will overheat.
That's all I meant.
XML causes global warming.
So the water won't ruin your electronics, it just runs around the plastic panels and into your lap. Having seen a bit more discussion of that McDonald's scalding-coffee lawsuit today, I'm wondering just how hot the water can get at the CPU? Especially the last little bit after the rest has leaked out? Are we going to have someone suing the manufacturer because they were too dumb to shut the thing off and get it out of their lap when it started leaking, and got hurt by that final blast of steam and hot water?
We're well on the way to combining the two essential tools of geek life - the notebook and the coffee machine (or tea kettle for anglogeeks). Seriously: a little heat and water in the right place, and my laptop can act as a portable hot water source.
Combining laptop and espresso machine will solve so many critical workplace issues... like losing time to fetch coffee. Next stage: a dual circuit so that I can recyle my used coffee as coolant rather than having to waste time going to the toilet.
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