The World's First CPU Liquid Cooler Using Nanofluids

An anonymous reader writes "CPU water cooling may be more expensive than air cooling, but it is quieter and moves the bulk away from your CPU. It's also improving, as Zalman has just demonstrated with the announcement of the Reserator 3. Zalman is claiming that the Reserator 3 is the world's first liquid cooler to use nanofluids. What's that then? It involves adding refrigerant nanoparticles to the fluid that gets pumped around inside the cooler transporting the heat produced by a CPU to the radiator and fan where it is expelled. By using the so-called nanofluid, Zalman believes it can offer better cooling, and rates the Reserator 3 as offering up to 400W of cooling while remaining very quiet. The fluid and pump is supplemented by a dual copper radiator design and "quadro cooling path," which consists of two copper pipes sitting behind the fan and surrounded by the radiators. The heatsink sitting on top of the CPU is a micro-fin copper base allowing very quick transfer of heat to the nanofluid above."

Comments

Re:Nanoparticles? Pshaw, son:

[rahvin112]

CFC's are not miracle cooling agents. They work on vapor-compression cycle that takes advantage of thermodynamics to move heat from one place to another. If you put CFCs in a line like water cooling without the normal refrigeration cycle they will perform worse than water at heat removal.

They *may* be on to something

[arielCo]

As ridiculously shallow as the TFA is, there is some work on nanoparticle-liquid suspensions:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135943111200511X

Nanoparticles in Thermoelectric Power Plant Cooling Fluids

Nanoparticle Additives Boost Industrial Cooling Systems (That Means Saving Energy)

I'll try to make sense of it (can someone more competent provide a Cliff's-notes version, please?).

Meanwhile, sorry to rain on the bash party.