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Asetek unveils GeForce 9800 water cooling system
New ‘hybrid’ cooler fits GeForce 9800 GTX and GX2 cards
Nvidia’s new GeForce 9800 GTX might have met with the equivalent of a ‘slow clap’ among gamers, but Asetek reckons there’s plenty of mileage to be had form water-cooling the GPU. The company has just announced a new water-cooling system for both the 9800 GTX and the GX2, which it says ‘exceed the stringent thermal performance, low noise and daunting reliability requirements demanded by OEMs.’
The new cooler relies on both liquid and air cooling to cool the cards, which Asetek refers to as ‘hybrid’ cooling in a bid to get on the latest buzzword bandwagon. Like Vadim, Asetek is working on the theory that the GPU is the part of a graphics card that’s in most need of water-cooling, with a water-cooled cold plate attached to the GPU, while the memory and VRMs are cooled by ‘forced air convection.’ The company reckons that its cooler can reduce the GPU temperature by a massive 25C when compared with a standard air cooler.
Asetek also claims that the cooler makes a minimal amount of noise, and claims that the cooler never makes exceeds 22dBA, compared with the 50dBA that it says is produced by standard air coolers. Asetek also says that the cooler exhausts most of the heat from the card to the outside of the chassis, meaning that your system fans will have to do less work to keep the system cool.
Asetek’s senior vice president of marketing, Gary Baum, said that ‘low noise is the new requirement for consumer PCs and workstations, and liquid cooling can achieve both optimal thermal performance and the desired low system noise.’
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the way i see it there is no point in overclocking now hardwear is getting cheaper and faster take my new 3870 512mb that is the best card i have ever had its funny but it beats my old card the 8800gtx that i got when first come out its well impressed me the 3870
Comment by bloodduty at 3:31pm 5th April 2008
This seems impressive with the figures it says it can do. Arctic delivered with the MASSIVE cooler it released for the 8800 series which cooled the card down to a very good 20C less than the original cooler but it still took 3 fans and countless heatpipes. Water cooling will be the standard in around 5 maybe 10 years. Even with die shrinks and new and improved architectures this still wont keep the temps down all by it self, the lower die sizes may help but the CPUs and GPUs will be doing more work and handling more textures, polygons, and crunching more numbers in 5 years than they do now so heat will always be a troublsome factor in gaming rigs. Im still amazed at how the Xbox 360 can have a triple core CPU (90nm) running at 3.2GHz each core and only have a small heatsink to cool it also with an extremely hot GPU sitting next to it with also a heatsink to cool it and only an tiny fan to help remove hot air. Now thats an acheivement within cooling??
Comment by CPC_RedDawn at 4:00am 5th April 2008
What about a dual slot Vapour Chamber cooler? The single slot version worked really well when CPC reviewed the Sapphire Atomic HD 3870. That managed a 20 degree saving over a standard single slot cooler, so why can't the same technology be used on the GX2's?
Comment by l3v1ck at 3:14am 4th April 2008
Manufacturers don't focus on new cooling innovations because it's not as big a draw as speed features. If one motherboard says run 4 degrees cooler and another says runs 200MHz faster, we'd all pick the faster one. This is why little focus has been paid to cooling. But now as it starts to limit the performance, people are taking notice. It's evolution is not out of synch, it is just natural. Evolution generally only occurs when there is a problem and it has to be overcome. Thus now heat is a problem cooling is evolving to overcome it. But i do agree that new approaches are need and a new form factor would be good but it needs huge supporters and lots of new features or no one will adopt it.
Comment by tac22 at 10:34pm 3rd April 2008
now that i have you confused let me explain; i think that as any one aspect of the computer evolves, the rest eventually must change in order to keep an average computer in the 'average' price range. a good computer is all about balance, anyone who has been into custom pc's for a while will tell you that, the problem is though, this balance is becoming more and more difficult to maintain. as gpu's and cpu's ge bigger and hotter, we need more and more fans and heatsinks. computer cooling is not evolving as quickly as the rest of the system, se we are forced to push our current cooling technology to it's limits just to keep things useable. but we cannot keep this up forever, liquid cooling is not rare amongst enthusiast's, but i doubt that it will ever become common in the mainstream. air cooling will always be the norm in non-enthusiast computers, but air cooling has, can, and needs to, evolve. think back a few years, 80 and 92 mm fans were more common than they are now, 120mm fans have grown in popularity for the simple reason that computers have gotten hotter, the smaller fans could not cope with the heat load as well, so bigger, quieter, stronger fans became popular. but now 120mm fans are reaching their limits and systems are not getting any cooler, 140mm fans are emerging now in some enthusiast cases, and monster 200+mm fans are showing up now as well. heatsinks are getting better slowly, but companies are still pushed into liquid cooling for some components, if components keep getting hotter, cooling will become increasingly more difficult, and a decent air cooled system will eventualy become impossible because no-one will tolerate that much noise, liquid cooling will drive the price up, and mid-range systems will become more expensive. what needs to happen is for cooling to take a leap foreward so that heat can be less of a concern for future components. we need a new form factor. atx is great, but some changes must be made for the future of our computers sake. move the graphicas cards away from the other add in cards so that their cooling system will not interfere with them, make 140mm fans the norm, and so on and so forth.
Comment by yougotkicked at 7:19pm 3rd April 2008
Like many people, I'm okey with not hearing any more about 9800 series for the rest of the year. It's been one disappointment after another so far . . .
Comment by zeevro at 7:14pm 3rd April 2008
for these cards it really is nessecary for them i'm using the innovatec blocks and there brilliant
Comment by Mizugetsu at 6:24pm 3rd April 2008
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