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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."
They mention refrigerants, so probably they're talking about massive molecules like chlorofluorocarbons or something which do have some interesting properties and may actually be better coolants than water. A lot more chemical bonds = a lot more degrees of freedom in which thermal energy can be stored = much higher specific heat capacity. This is actually reasonably well understood, and the reason that the ideal gas law (PV=nRT) becomes increasingly inaccurate for anything beyond the most simple molecules
But yeah, sounds like "nano-particles" is just a way to sex-up the advertising campaign, and has nothing to do with the nano-engineered materials/mechanisms that "nano-whatsits" typically refer to.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
There are products that embed a small amount (8%) of a tailored wax material coated with a protective shell, into plaster wall board.
The wax is designed to melt at around 16C and the combination acts as a thermal mass for storing heat in buildings (actually "cool"). This gives the plaster wall boards about the same thermal mass as a brick wall.
I suspect this is something similar. Phase change nano-particles dramatically increase the heat carrying capacity of the cooling fluid at a lower flow rate and probably lower noise and power consumption.