Extreme Cooling

Beyond basic convection heatsinks, there are more advanced methods of cooling your computer components which are capable of doing a far better job. For hardcore overclockers, extreme cooling solutions are commonplace. For the casual computer user, however, these methods are in most cases overkill to the point of absurdity. Extreme cooling devices involve more advanced design concepts, but still operate on the same basic principle: remove the heat that is generated from the components from inside the computer.

Water Cooling

Water cooling is easily the most commonly implemented type of extreme cooling in computer systems today. In order to understand why anybody would want water inside his or her computer, we turn to chemistry.

After being fantastically exploited by the motion picture industry, it’s no wonder why most people have an inherent fear of the potential destruction water can cause when mixed with electricity. And rightfully so, water is a fairly good conductor of electricity, and can certainly turn you into a crisp in a hurry if combined with an electric current (as often depicted in the movies). If water and electricity can kill a human, then they could certainly bridge contacts on a motherboard and cause a massive failure in the computer arena as well. This is one reason why water cooling (or liquid cooling as it should really be called) is far from recommended for casual computer users. Nevertheless, liquid cooling kits are quite commonly used due to their relative ease of operation and wonderful results.

The reason liquid cooling can cool a system quicker and more effectively than air cooling is based off specific heat, a relatively fundamental property in chemistry. The specific heat of any substance is defined as the amount of heat required to cause one unit of the substance’s mass to rise in temperature by one degree Celsius. This definition varies in terms of units depending on what you are measuring and in what regional system you are measuring by, but it works as an all-encompassing general description. So, if we were producing heat from something, the surrounding medium would heat up at a certain, calculated rate. The rate at which this happens is directly dependent on the specific heat of the surrounding medium. For instance, in a convection heatsink, the item that is producing the heat is being cooled by the surrounding medium (in this case, air) at a rate that is directly dependent on its specific heat.

The higher the specific heat of a substance, the more heat it can absorb before rising in temperature. All substances have different specific heats, and it just so happens that water’s is pretty high. The specific heat of liquid water is 4.184 J/gK (Joules per gram Kelvin), whereas the specific heat of air is 1.005 J/gK. This means that it takes about four times the amount of heat to raise the temperature of water by one degree than it does air. The implications here are profound. If water circulates around the component instead of air, the rate at which heat is removed from the area is four times what it would be if air were to be used (assuming similar rates of flow).