News - Versarien water-cooled PCs use a “revolutionary” heatsink material

[HEXUS]

Patented porous metal copper technology, VersarienCu, is behind 10x efficiency claims.

Read more.

[DemonHighwayman]

Hmm very interesting, I wonder if they will license out the new tech to current waterblock manufacturers.

[Kanoe]

Hmm very interesting, I wonder if they will license out the new tech to current waterblock manufacturers.

I think they need to unless they have plans to produce the cooling units and sell them directly without being attached to PC's already.

This might help open up the cooling performance gap between air and watercooled again which has been narrowing (as long as you had a case big enough to house the high end air cooled solutions) and would maybe finally convince me to go that route in my PC.

[rootminus1]

Reduces bottleneck of heat transfer from plate to fluid, but I imagine it has it's own problem of reduced flow rates through the honeycomb

[edzieba]

Looks like foamed copper. Interesting, but while you've dramatically increased the surface area of the block/water interface, you've decreased the block/CPU surface area, as well as dramatically lowering the rate of heat conduction through the block.

I guess if you very, very carefully selectively melted one side of the block of copper foam you could create a gradient transition of solid to foam, but for all the complexity and expense I'm not sure if it'd have any noticeable advantage.

[Cog]

The only real problem I can see with this is that such fine channels through the heatsink will be easily blocked by any impurities in the water and any oxides forming on the copper.
Using this foamed copper will mean coolants will have to be selected very carefully. Additives can leave residues which are no problem normally but could leave deposits large enough to block the tiny channels.

Looks like foamed copper. Interesting, but while you've dramatically increased the surface area of the block/water interface, you've decreased the block/CPU surface area, as well as dramatically lowering the rate of heat conduction through the block.

The contact area and rate of heat conduction should have very minimal impact since the water flow will be almost exactly adjacent to the CPU. The foam basically means the copper is now less of a heat transfer medium and more as a container to simply hold water in place.

[KrisWragg]

I keep debating a fully watercooled system, I currently have an Arctic Accelero closed loop for my 7950 but it would be nice to have a proper loop with CPU and another 7950 in crossfire. But it just seems like such a hassle (and cost).

[theanalyzer]

Why dont they use graphene again? Tech not mature? Too expensive?

[OMGUSED]

this + zalman's nanofluid will rule the cooling solutions

[scaryjim]

Why dont they use graphene again? Tech not mature? Too expensive?

I don't think there's been enough graphene produced ever to make even a single water block! Graphene is a very new material, and will be prohibitively expensive for a long time.

Pleased Versarien are finally getting their tech into consumer products after pursuing the dense server cooling market initially - I met the team both socially and professionally a couple of years back (observant hexites will probably remember me mentioning it a few times) and they're a good bunch with a really impressive set of products. The key to the copper foam is that it has a very high rate of heat conduction, so the reduced contact to the baseplate is irrelevant - it quite simply ducts heat away from the contact area and into the cooling fluid faster.

[dezontk]

PC Cooling is coming on leaps and bounds. Good times for overclockers.

[KeyboardDemon]

I can't wait to see some actual performance results and side by side comparisons with established PC cooling solutions, such as Versarien vs NH-D14 etc... Plus complete solutions where they have blocks to cover a PC and multi GPU system.