Asetek prototypes liquid-cooled laptop

Gamers and overclockers will already be familiar with the performance and quiet operation benefits of liquid-cooling the internal components of desktop computer systems. Power users these days are not necessarily sitting in front of the beige base tower of old, however – other formats like the All-in-One and laptops have benefited from significant processing, memory and storage boosts in recent years. We've already seen liquid-cooling specialist Asetek squeeze its technology into a 2.28-inch thick All-in-One prototype, but now the company has developed a slim liquid cooling system for notebooks that's said to improve acoustic and thermal performance without increasing the form factor.

Asetek has chosen to showcase its new cooling solution in an Alienware M18x gaming laptop with the Core i7 processor overclocked to 4.4GHz and the dual GPUs ramped up to 800MHz, which would have been too much for the original heat pipes to handle. Taking advantage of the fact that the CPU and GPUs rarely fully stress at the same time during real world operation, the system interconnects all of the laptop's thermal management modules to extract heat from the CPU and GPUs as needed, effectively borrowing idle cooling capacity from each other. The slim form factor liquid cooling technology's coldplate is also said to have less thermal resistance than a heat pipe.

The upshot is that the Asetek system allows for higher-performance components to be used in thin devices like laptops than would be possible using air-cooled management solutions. In tests, the new technology resulted in an 18 percent performance improvement in the 3D Mark 11 benchmark score, a 16 percent improvement in PCMark Vantage scores, and Futuremark's 3D Mark Vantage score went up by 23 percent.

The following video features the company's Zack Fanning explaining and demonstrating the new slim form factor liquid cooling technology.

Source: Asetek