[phosphor]

I have to admit that I am new within this area, but there is a lot of information already researched. I am in the market to buy a water-cooled heatsink, but I wanted to know what design would be best for my present AMD beast and future processors.

I found an article that provides a history of many different water-cooled designs, e.g. Hitachi (M880) and IBM’s Thermal Conduction Module (TCM). Also, the design of future components was in question. The present day 2-D chips may change to a 3-D chip, if there is limiting physical space. Currently, this is not a problem therefore cooling is not a serious issue. However, in the near future too much heat might be given off from the entire system to keep everything cool and stable, e.g. CRAY. Imagine something like a G4 cube for your computer box.

The one thing that caught my eye was deionized water in direct contact with a micro finned chip. It stated that this set-up was able to remove as much as 790 W/cm2 of heat. [The source is dated back in 1981!] Basically, the design is nothing more than an encapsulated air-cooled (micro-finned) heatsink built on the CPU. I am curious if someone has (could) designed an Alpha heatsink using this principle. Supposedly, the higher surface area will be more effective at water-cooling than the simple copper or aluminum blocks sold on the market. BTW, the heatsink fins on the larger heatsinks might be overkill. Shorter, finely etched, heatsink fins might work just as well.

Note: I saw that overclock-watercool.com has used something close to this principle with a 486 heatsink. Any comments on this subject? Perhaps, this is already old news, but it is interesting nonetheless.

-phosphor