Bet you weren’t expecting that headline tonight, were you? Well, it’s about as literal as I could get. Some enterprising boffins at the University of Rochester used a high-powered laser to etch microscopic patterns in silicon such that water overcomes its own hydrophilia and goes in whatever direction they please. This is very much still a laboratory discovery, but a few years down the road, you might see this kind of thing built into chips as a sort of hybrid active-passive cooling solution.
The issue I see with it is this, though: the water is drawn to the pattern on the silicon, right? More so than to itself. So once it reaches the silicon, what will pull it away? It seems like water would simply coat the silicon in a single-molecule layer, and then the rest of the water would roll downhill as normal. But hey, who the hell am I?
Fans in our high-powered PCs keep getting bigger and louder, since our high-powered CPUs and high-powered video cards keep pumping out more and more heat. And no matter how “silent” they’re advertised as being, four of five of them in one case will always make some noise. So what can you do? Liquid cooling is a possibility, but installation can be complicated and failure can be catastrophic. So why not go for a passive solution? Sure, it’s not quite as “effective,” but it’s incapable of making noise — kind of like my friend’s cat.
These big-ass heatsinks just sit on top of your CPU and just let the heat seep out at its own rate. They’re so big, though, that the heat always has somewhere to go and eventually what airflow you do have (I guess you can have a couple fans) will whoosh it right out the vents.
The problem is that these heatsinks, being enormous, are also super heavy. If you’ve got a side-mounted motherboard, and 99% of you do, it’s totally inadvisable to clamp one of these suckers on there, cause it’ll probably rip the CPU right out of its seat. However, if you’ve got a HTPC that sits on its side (yet has the depth to hold one of these monsters), it won’t be a problem. Just don’t reach in there and touch it, it’s hot and sharp.
We should probably note right off the bat that a “green gaming PC” is a sort of contradiction in terms, akin to the world’s “smallest giant panda.” But that doesn’t mean Maingear’s aim with the Pulse is completely bonkers: essentially it’s a low-power machine that still aims to provide a good gaming experience. Short of going the nettop route and note quite going ridiculously green, there’s a middle ground where you’re using advanced but low-power components, creating something that won’t dim your lights when you turn it on, yet can play Call of Duty 4.
The specs are modest: A low-end 45nm Core 2 Duo or Quad and a GeForce 9800 GT ECO running on an ION chipset, altogether drawing about 165W. You’ve got plenty of room for RAM (up to 8GB), and a regular hard drive (if you want greener, you can go with SSD). It’s got 7.1 audio and a nice shorty-tower case, plus it doesn’t break the bank, starting at $799.
I’d go further and get some passive cooling in there — with no spinning drives and no fans it’d be quiet as a mouse as well as a power saver.
