- Wednesday, 25 November 2009
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Do you slow down when you see a crash on the Superinformation Highway?
Laptop lid cooling returns
SEVERAL IDFS AGO, COMPAL was showing off lid-cooled notebooks. Intel has taken it a step forward and shown off a lid cooling mechanism with a vapour chamber cooler on the back of the screen.
It doesn't look like much, just an anodised aluminum case lid, and that is the point, you don't notice anything. The hinges are the tricky part, they transfer heat from the computer to the back of the screen. From there it is just a big thin vapor chamber, pretty standard fare for cooling.
Two lid cooled laptops
If it is as ready as it was portrayed at the show, expect it to show up in the MacBook Air sooner rather than later, and expect Apple to claim all the credit.
Once this tech catches on, it will radically change how notebooks are constructed, making them thinner, lighter, and fan-free. This means more reliability and better battery life, kind of hard to argue with either of those ideas. ยต
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... cooler laps!
Certainly that keeps laptops cool enough to actually be used in your lap is a good thing, but there is just one little thing bugging me. What will all that heat in close proximity to the LCD do the the screen? 

I'm sure plenty of you guys have used laptops with the lids closed hooked up to external monitors, so I'm sure you're familiar with what happens to the parts of the screen that are in closest proximity to the bits of the machine that get the hottest.
Whilst I agree I would worry about heat damage I don't see this as a problem with this form of cooling, the heat is evenly dissipated over the entire surface of the carbon/copper/aluminium rather than concentrated in hot spots that would cause damage.
so why not just have the mainboard behind the screen with a wide aluminium plate over it acting as a heatsink, and tuck the drives etc. under the keyboard? surely its easier to thread cables than a vapour release cooling system?
Just for the record, I recollect that Toshiba incorporated a lid cooler in some of their laptops several years ago so it is not a new idea.