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!

THG video

[dboyles]

Tom's Hardware Guide [tomshardwareguide.com] 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 [tomshardware.com]

Even MORE info

[yknott]

ITworld [itworld.com] has more info on the laptop. To answer those who say this laptop will spring a leak:

"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!

How much power does the pump use?

[geekee]

Does the water pump use significantly more power than a fan? I wonder what the effect on the battery lifetime is.

Re:Water?

[Jonsey]

While I'm far from a material's engineer, (and Karmically down from stopping to feed the trolls on an OT post) there has been much discussion of this both at Icrontic Forums [icronticforums.com] and Gideon Tech Forums [gideontech.com]

From the general views of young overclockers (myself included) water is really the only way to go, though concepts involving chilled mineral oil have been floating around. If there's no debris on your electronics, you could run them under de-ionized and de-mineralized water, but as that so rarely happens in the real world, it's generally best to just go with good water, in a well tubed system.

Tygon(r) tubing is wonderful stuff, that very rarely kinks, and can sustain many bends before it's strucural integrity is comprimised. Just clamp the tubes down tightly, and I'd be willing to use the system with no more fear that an aircooled desktop. Aircooled laptops scare me more, those things can heat up very quickly, and the airflow in them is low to none.

Mineral Oil just doesn't transfer heat well enough to be practical, and water runs the risk of shorting things out. What we need is non-viscous non-conductive Arctic Silver! : )

- Jones

Re:Clever

[brad3378]

Self Correction:
A vertical surface will not always have more efficient convection heat transfer than a horiziontal surface. My point was that air currents are more compatible with vertical surfaces than horizontal surfaces.

Consider this:
What cools faster in a refrigerator?
A can of beer on it's side or a can rightside up?
In my heat-transfer class it was discovered that cans on their sides chill roughly 20% faster assuming air is allowed to circulate around the can. The reason being the airflow forms an inefficient plume above the vertical can.