Thermaltake cooler evokes the age of fridges

AT THE HUGE city-sized mess called CeBIT, there were quite a few cooling innovations shown by the vendors - from Coolit Skulltrail watercooling set to gigantic Thermaltake V14 Pro CPU fan.

Secreted inside its booth Thermaltake also had its first case with a fully built in, bolted, fridge compressor cooling system for the CPU.

The compressor is fairly small - much smaller than the larger freezer setups of Vapochill family, for instance, and without sub-zero capability. On the other hand, it is far simpler to fit in, with just one radiator and fan combo along the way, all internal - one smallish controller circuit board tops it off. These are metal pipes, not bendable tubes, so the system has to be fixed for a particular CPU position.

The prototype was running with an Intel 4GHz dual-core 65nm CPU here.

When idle, the temperature in the heated booth room was hovering around 18 degrees Celsius, and when running at above 90 per cent utilisation, like on 3DMark CPU test or Prime, we'd see it top at about 35 degrees Celsius after about five minutes of non-stop full-load run. Not bad at all - especially compared to water cooling systems where the peak temperature will routinely reach 50C in such cases.

An even stronger cooling capacity would take care of heavily overclocked Yorkfields and, then, Nehalems. And at the same time add the North Bridge block to the loop.

Why not GPU? Well, on most X38/X48 mobos, the CPU and North Bridge are roughly in the same place, so designing one flavour to support these, and another version later to support Bloomfield Nehalem LGA1366 with Tylersburg North Bridge, shouldn't be a big deal.

On the other hand, GPUs can be in any position, whether slots, GPU chips on cards and so on, so, unless a bendable tubing system is worked out, or a proprietary setup for specific graphics cards is devised, there's no way for them to use this. A secondary internal water cooler would have to take care of the graphics.

It is good to have enough space around the top of the compressor to allow two full-length dual-GPU cards to fit at the bottom, just in case - even though the multi-GPU fans can get their satisfaction out of two shorter 3870X2 cards very soon, too.

In summary, we like the approach - very simple, old proven technology, seemingly inexpensive, not noisy, with no tubing mess or condensation risks, and reasonable temperature difference between idle and full load CPU run - a strong competitor to high end water cooling, at least on the processors.

The stronger versions for simultaneous quad-core CPU and North Bridge cooling would be welcome when the time comes for the final launch. µ