[HAL-9000]

I have been thinking about that Cooligy pump, it seems to be a real neat little gadget for OEM's. But for enthusiast coolers, I think it has issues.

For one, it is purely electrical in nature. As we have seen in a contest between solid state peltier coolers and phase change coolers, using mechanics offers much better efficiencies for doing mechanical work like moving heat. A Vapochill cools 150W or so, for about a 80 watt hit on the power bill. For a pelt to do the same, to just move the heat, much less lower the temperature, takes at least three times that...at its max operating efficeincy.

For an electrokinetic pump to be able to move the same hydro flowrate as say, an Eheim 1048, I would bet you would need between three to five times the power at least. That just seems to be the way solid-state devices work when moving mechanical loads. That presents two problems to the overclocker:

1. When you start talking about dumping an extra fifty watts in your cooling loop, its going to have an adverse effect on the performance obviously.

2. Since the pump works using ionization and static potential, that means big transient magnetic fields as it operates (the Bad kind of magnetic field). This could be a problem around hard drives. You can perhaps magnetically shield the pump, but it would be an expensive process, as in speakers.

3. The pump's optimum voltage for efficieny would probably not be 12V, or 5V either. There would need to be some potentially expensive transformer in the circuit to keep the pump going with the appropriate voltage. Could be wrong, but Murphy's Law I think applies here, and its rarely wrong.