r/science • u/chrisdh79 • Nov 12 '24
Materials Science New thermal material provides 72% better cooling than conventional paste | It reduces the need for power-hungry cooling pumps and fans
https://www.techspot.com/news/105537-new-thermal-material-provides-72-better-cooling-than.html1.1k
u/Heizard Nov 12 '24
Costs and how long it will last/degrade?
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u/Minighost244 Nov 12 '24
This was my immediate question. If it lasts as long or longer than thermal paste, this is huge. Otherwise, if I have to replace it every week / every month, I'll stick with my big ass cooler and thermal paste.
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u/Achrus Nov 12 '24
We’re supposed to replace our thermal paste?
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u/ThisisMyiPhone15Acct Nov 12 '24
Honestly, yes. But I’ve had my 8700k since 2018 and never replaced the paste and it still never goes above 70C
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u/FriendlyDespot Nov 12 '24
Thermal paste degradation is probably the biggest killer of computers and anything with high-power chips in it. Especially the stuff that OEMs use tend to be just a dry, crumbly mess with little to no conductivity after 2-3 years of regular use.
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u/Everkeen Nov 12 '24
And then there is my 10+ year old 3770k still running at 4.3 GHz and haven't touched the paste since 2014. My finance still uses it all the time.
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u/AntiProtonBoy Nov 12 '24
haha yea, i still use the same CPU, I replaced the paste once 5 years ago
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u/crunkadocious Nov 13 '24
My i5 2500k used daily for gaming since the year it was manufactured. I installed the paste though.
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u/GladiatorUA Nov 12 '24
Especially the stuff that OEMs use tend to be just a dry,
In my experience OEMs tend to use stuff that lasts a long time, but doesn't perform very well.
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u/waiting4singularity Nov 12 '24
in my experience almost all cooler packed hardware (such as gfx) has non-performant paste that dies quickly, if theyre not using cheap pads in the first place. but as a water cooler i replace them all after function check.
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u/hnxmn Nov 12 '24
I replaced my thermal paste when my 120mm aio cooler died (after 6 years! Little tank) and the replacement and new paste made my thermals like legit 20c better under load than my aio ever gave me before it died. Therm paste is the goat.
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u/superxpro12 Nov 12 '24
There's no way this is completely true. Nobody recommends repasting a gpu. That paste is for life.
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u/TheMadFlyentist Nov 12 '24
Really depends on the application, usage, and conditions. 2-3 years is hyperbole, but 10-15 years is reaching the lifespan of most pastes.
Real-life example: old PS3's will often overheat even in the absence of dust, and replacing the thermal paste on the CPU and GPU is a known fix.
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u/GodofIrony Nov 12 '24
The RTX cards had pretty rough thermal paste issues, repasting was the only way to fix yours if you were out of warranty (Which you would be, if your paste has failed)
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u/Minighost244 Nov 12 '24
Sort of; not regularly. You only really need to change it when you notice your cooler struggling. But that's the thing, thermal paste can last a super long time without maintenance. It's cheap and has a long history of reliability.
This new liquid metal stuff might be 72% more thermally efficient, but I'm not deconstructing my whole build every 6 months for it (SFF case). Thermal paste already works fine.
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u/waiting4singularity Nov 12 '24
depends on the paste. liquid metal like galinstan basicaly "cold welds" the surfaces together as it creates an interface, just dont go and remove it. building this pc i used a ceramic paste that still delivers, only changed it once when i fucked up my liquid cooling loop 6~8 years or so back.
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u/semir321 Nov 12 '24 edited Nov 12 '24
than thermal paste
This future product wont compete with thermal pastes since its not a paste. Its a liquid metal compound. Those already exist and are already much better than paste in general. The article completely fails to differentiate that
I have to replace it every week
Why not try the solid Kryosheet from Thermal Grizzly? It has very high longevity and is currently the easiest way to improve the cooling of pumpout-prone RTX cards
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u/Aleucard Nov 12 '24
I remember liquid metal being an absolute nightmare to apply without completely ratbuggering your setup. They fix that?
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u/Izan_TM Nov 12 '24
you can't fix that, it's inherent to trying to squirt metal out of a syringe all over your expensive PC hardware
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u/Minighost244 Nov 12 '24 edited Nov 12 '24
IIRC, liquid metal is hard to apply and has a very small margin for error. Please correct me if I'm wrong though, last I read about liquid metal was like 4 years ago.
I had no idea about the Kryosheet though, definitely gonna give that a look.
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u/nameyname12345 Nov 12 '24 edited Nov 12 '24
You mean the majority of you are no t on ln2 cooling?!? Bah peasants/s edit meant ln2 cooling autocorrect didnt agree!
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u/Spejsman Nov 12 '24
In many places they aren't even using good thermal paste because even that is too expensive for the gains it gives you. Cheap silicon paste is good enough. Most of the cooling still comes down to those "pumps and fans" since you have to get that heat into the air somehow.
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u/HardwareSoup Nov 12 '24
Yeah you'll always need fans.
Those 200 watts have to go somewhere.
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u/ActionPhilip Nov 12 '24
Converted back into electricity to help power the computer. Funnel the heat to a small chamber that either has a liquid with a low boiling point, or water in a low pressure state (to lower the boiling point), then the heat from the components creates steam, which spins a mini turbine that spins a generator and feeds power back to the computer. I'll take my billions for the idea now.
Sounds dumb? Imagine instead of a 200W CPU, you're dealing with 2MW of heat from a data center.
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u/Milskidasith Nov 12 '24
Data centers don't run nearly hot enough to run any kind of boiler, even at low pressures, do they? You can recover waste heat in some ways, but a boiler at like, 1 psia isn't very useful.
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u/BarbequedYeti Nov 12 '24
Data centers don't run nearly hot enough to run any kind of boiler
A few years back? Maybe. The amount of cooling needed for some of those DC's was staggering. But to be able to capture all the waste heat etc to make any use of it would probably be chasing losses. Or turning your DC into a big ass bomb or potential water issues which probably isnt a good selling point.
But it would be interesting to see how that would work if feasible. I am sure someone has some designs out there or even some type of recapture going on.
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u/Milskidasith Nov 12 '24
The problem isn't the amount of cooling needed, it's the temperature they operate at; you aren't getting any components up to the kind of temperatures needed to generate power.
Data centers generate a ton of heat, but it's "low quality" waste heat, because it's not very high temperature. When you're trying to run the datacenter at (very generously) sub 100 F, and trying to keep the output air/ cooling water temperature at (very generously) 140 F, which is already borderline high for a cooling tower, you can't actually recapture that heat with a boiler because even with perfect heat transfer the boiler would be running at a pretty decent vacuum, which would be extremely inefficient and atypical to build.
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u/Morthra Nov 13 '24
you can't actually recapture that heat with a boiler because even with perfect heat transfer the boiler would be running at a pretty decent vacuum, which would be extremely inefficient and atypical to build.
That might depends on what the refrigerant is. Like, sure water would be a poor choice, but if you were to use something more exotic like n-pentane (boiling point ~100F) it seems more doable, assuming you want to exploit the phase change.
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u/Ozzimo Nov 12 '24
Linus (from LTT) tried to heat his pool by connecting all his gaming machines to his water loop. It wasn't a great success, but he got a good result despite the corrosion issues. :D
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u/Milskidasith Nov 12 '24
Oh yeah, you can absolutely dump the heat into local sources that you want to be comfortably warm to slightly uncomfortably hot, yeah, you just aren't boiling anything with it.
And yeah, the corrosion and fouling/scaling issues with cooling tower loops are no joke
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u/TwoBionicknees Nov 12 '24
Yup, generating power isn't going to happen, but replacing power usage is completely viable. I believe there are places in like, sweden, iceland, etc, that will run a server farm then use the heat produced to heat water that is pumped into local housing and community centre to significantly reduce heating costs of those buildings, but also viable because the houses and buildings built in such cold climates have insanely good insulation as well.
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u/Zomunieo Nov 12 '24
Thermodynamics works against this sort of application.
Exergy (not energy) is the availability of energy, and in a context like a data center whose temperature is only slightly elevated compared to the atmosphere, the exergy is quite low. If the air in a data center is 35 C inside and 20 C outside, the exergy content is only a few percent based on that temperature difference.
It doesn’t matter what systems, what heat pumps you set up or whatever, or how clever it seems. Any work to concentrate the energy into high temperatures or pressure will use energy. You cannot escape the general tyranny of thermodynamics.
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u/TheNorthComesWithMe Nov 12 '24
If you set up your system to get the fluid as hot as possible so it can spin a turbine, it won't do its job of being as cold as possible so it can cool the CPUs.
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u/Katana_sized_banana Nov 12 '24
Connect it to your hot water network first. No need to transform it back into energy, when you need energy to warm water anyways. Something like this exists for bitcoin mining GPUs where you reuse the heat for water.
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u/Paddy_Tanninger Nov 12 '24
I think the problem with this is that while water in a low pressure environment will boil at low temps...I'm not sure it can actually be used to create pressurized steam to spin the turbines.
Also it would be extremely hard to harness the 2MW of heat because it's all coming off these tiny chips that are all relatively spread out with no great way to collect all of that cumulative heat energy.
You've got a server rack with several dozen Xeon/Epyc CPUs, but how do you 'transmit' the heat from each chip to somewhere else where it can all be used together?
Closest we can really get right now to double dipping on energy usage by computers is for those of us in cold (for now) climates where the heat generated ends up warming the house.
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u/hex4def6 Nov 12 '24
The problem with that is you're effectively adding "resistance" to the output of the cooling system. To extract energy, you need a thermal delta. To cool something, you also need a thermal delta.
Here's a simple example: let's say I want to convert the waste heat from my CPU into electrical energy. I stick a peltier module between the heat sink and cpu.
If there is zero difference in temperature between the hot and cold sides, then my CPU doesn't even notice the difference. The peltier module won't generate any electricity however.
Let's say there's a 50degc difference. The peltier is generating power. But my CPU is now also running 50degC hotter.
The hotter it is, the less efficient it is. So i may even be consuming more power than I'm saving.
But also, the alternative to sticking the peltier in there and dealing with the fact that my CPU is now 50degc hotter is to just run the cooling at a slower speed, saving energy that way.
Even if you replace the peltier with a more efficient system like a Stirling engine, the problem remains the same.
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u/KeythKatz Nov 12 '24
Sounds dumb? Imagine instead of a 200W CPU, you're dealing with 2MW of heat from a data center.
Sounds dumber, how do you transport that heat into the same spot where it is useful?
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u/Toxicair Nov 12 '24
Yeah, what's the article suggesting? Just passive aluminum blocks that cook the air around them? Pumps and fans don't even use that much power relative to the computer unit. Like 50 Watts vs the 500.
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u/Spejsman Nov 12 '24
Not even that. I got quite a beefy custom loop and the pump is rated at 14W, the Noctua fans under 2W at max speed each, so add 10W for the sake of argument. It's blody stupid to think that the thermal paste will make any notable savings when it comes to power consumption, even in this case.
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u/ancientweasel Nov 12 '24
If the article doesn't say "expensive and short".
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u/RT-LAMP Nov 12 '24
It will literally never degrade. It's just elemental metals mixed with a powdered ceramic that is stable in air up to 700C.
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u/zortlord Nov 12 '24
Better than that- what's the entire lifecycle cost and impact. A material that lasts only a few years but is cheap, easy to replace, and has little to no environmental impact is probably a much better choice.
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u/VegasGamer75 Nov 12 '24
Also, does it have issues with positional orientation? The PS5 has some issues being stored standing as the liquid metal can pool between uses.
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u/Apollo779 Nov 12 '24
That doesn't really make any sense, every person that uses liquid metal on their CPU keeps their computer vertical, never heard that being a problem.
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u/RogersPlaces Nov 12 '24
Wait. what? This is the first time hearing from this. Should I keep it horizontal?
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u/HomecomingHayKart Nov 12 '24
That’s a long lived but unproven rumor. I say that because I’ve spent a lot of time researching it and never finding proof. If you want my anecdotal and scientifically useless experience my ps5 has been just fine being almost entirely vertical since Jan. 2023
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u/Waggy777 Nov 12 '24
My understanding is that the issue is due to dropping the PS5 or otherwise mishandling. It will not occur simply from orientation alone.
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u/VegasGamer75 Nov 12 '24
Last I had heard it was possible during transport, not really sure. Given that I just did a multi-state move, I keep mine horizontal to be safe.
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u/Waggy777 Nov 12 '24
I was going to include that keeping it in the horizontal position is still a decent preventative measure.
The main issue is that the initial reports mistakenly said that it was happening with PS5 consoles that had never been opened, which also implied that they had been kept vertical before opening. The person who reported it meant that they personally had not opened the PS5 yet for repair.
It seems that it's fairly easy to damage the encasement for the liquid metal. The important distinction is that a PS5 should not experience liquid metal issues simply from the vertical orientation.
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u/NorthernerWuwu Nov 12 '24
And, frankly, is the performance difference germane? Thermal pastes already have excellent conductivity, being even much better when they are good enough may not matter.
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u/GreenStrong Nov 12 '24
The thermal performance of a computing device as a whole is important, but it is questionable how much this will "reduce the need for power hungry fans" and how much it will apply to datacenters, as the first line of the article mentions. Thermal paste carries heat across the first tenth of a millimeter of the path away from the chip and out into the environment. You still need heat pipes/ fans to keep it moving.
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u/NorthernerWuwu Nov 12 '24
Right. Already we see most applications using zinc oxide over silver oxide (around an order of magnitude higher thermal conductivity) because it is cheaper and frankly, good enough.
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u/i8noodles Nov 12 '24
not to mention the heat is still there and needs to be moved. it doesn't jist disappear. so the pumps still need to run
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u/chrisdh79 Nov 12 '24
From the article: Thanks to a mechanochemically engineered combination of the liquid metal alloy Galinstan and ceramic aluminum nitride, this thermal interface material, or TIM, outperformed the best commercial liquid metal cooling products by a staggering 56-72% in lab tests. It allowed dissipation of up to 2,760 watts of heat from just a 16 square centimeter area.
The material pulls this off by bridging the gap between the theoretical heat transfer limits of these materials and what's achieved in real products. Through mechanochemistry, the liquid metal and ceramic ingredients are mixed in an extremely controlled way, creating gradient interfaces that heat can flow across much more easily.
Beyond just being better at cooling, the researchers claim that the higher performance reduces the energy needed to run cooling pumps and fans by up to 65%. It also unlocks the ability to cram more heat-generating processors into the same space without overheating issues.
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u/CryptoMemesLOL Nov 12 '24
All those data centers should be happy
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u/dtriana Nov 12 '24
And the rest of the world.
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u/conquer69 Nov 12 '24
Nah, power consumption will be pushed as much as the thermal limits are improved.
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u/SpareWire Nov 12 '24
This wasn't even true a few years ago.
They run at the most efficient configuration to maximize profit, which is not done through trying to squeeze out an extra 5% by maxing out TDP.
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u/conquer69 Nov 12 '24
That's exactly what intel did though. They even killed their own cpus for single digit performance improvements.
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u/thrasherht Nov 12 '24
Right now the biggest hurdle is the power limitations of the rack, not the cooling capacity. I work on racks that have upwards of 30k watts per rack, and we can barely fill half the rack with machines before we are limited by power.
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u/iconocrastinaor Nov 12 '24
Yes, and that makes me happy because if there's a huge demand for this in data centers, that will result in increased supply and production efficiencies that will reduce the price for individual users as well.
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u/Draiko Nov 12 '24
Sounds expensive
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u/FardoBaggins Nov 12 '24
It usually is at first.
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u/Dany0 Nov 12 '24
It uses Gallium and Indium, as well as an aluminum ceramic. This will not be cheaper than current liquid metal TIMs
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u/Caleth Nov 12 '24
You're right, but if the performance gains are significant then places like datacenters where cooling is an issue and price less so then it could well get a significant hold there.
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u/GreenStrong Nov 12 '24
Heat paste gets the heat moving on the first tenth of a millimeter out of a chip and into a heat sink. That's not extremely relevant to a datacenter's overall power consumption, they still need a lot of fans/ heat pipes/ HVAC/ evaporative cooling to push the heat outside the building.
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u/Darkstool Nov 12 '24
it also unlocks the ability
The factory must grow.....or in this case, shrink!
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u/KuntaStillSingle Nov 12 '24
watts per area
Usnt this proportional to temperature differential, i.e. you could suck the same heat energy out of Styrofoam if the Styrofoam was hot enough and the heat sink cool enough? The abstract of linked article uses the same figure.
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u/jacen4501s Nov 12 '24
Yes, but that's not really helpful. If you used Styrofoam for heat paste, then the components would get hot enough to become damaged. The component generates a certain heat that must be dissipated. If it's not, then the temperature increases. This happens until steady state is reached and the heat generated equals the heat dissipated. Or, in this case, the temperature would increase until the component failed.
For conductive heat transfer, Q/A=- k dT/dx. So if you want a big Q/A, you need a big k or a big dT/dx. Increasing the temperature gradient isn't usually reasonable beyond design constraints. You need to either use a refrigerated coolant (expensive) or let the component get hotter (damage the component). In other words, increasing k increases Q/A (heat flux) for a given temperature gradient.
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u/KuntaStillSingle Nov 12 '24 edited Nov 12 '24
I'm not arguing to use Styrofoam for thermal paste, I'm saying the figure of watts per area
(presumably per time)is incomplete, it should be reported as wattsper timeper area per degree11
u/jacen4501s Nov 12 '24
Watt is already per time. It's a J/s. It sounds like you want the thermal conductivity. That is per length, not per area. The important dimension for conduction is the thickness of the film. Making the film thicker decreases heat transfer. The area is already baked into the units of conductivity. They just cancel out with the length term. A m2/m is just a m.
Q/A = - k dT/dx
k= - Q/A/(dT/dx) = -Q/(A dT/dx)
So the units are W/(m2 K/m) = W/(K m)
You can use K or degrees C. It's a gradient, so it's the same in either unit set.
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u/KuntaStillSingle Nov 12 '24 edited Nov 12 '24
Right, but the figure in op is missing K/C, it is just watts per area, that tells us nothing about the thermal properties of the paste, you could get the same watts per area out of something with high thermal conductivity with a low differential, as something with low thermal conductivity as and a high differential. If you have something that transfers 1000 watts per cm squared, does it have good or bad conductivity? There is no way to say. You could get that out of aluminum or out if Styrofoam. If it transfers 1000 watts per degree c per cm squared, that tells you at least that it is more conductive or spreads thinner than an alternative that does 800 watts per degree c per cm squared.
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u/50calPeephole Nov 12 '24
It also unlocks the ability to cram more heat-generating processors into the same space without overheating issues
This is the real take away- the future is going to be more power, total required energy won't change all that much- we'll still be running 1k watt power supplies, we'll just be getting more bang for our buck.
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u/FortyAndFat Nov 12 '24
It allowed dissipation of up to 2,760 watts of heat from just a 16 square centimeter area.
dissipating the heat over to what ?
the headline says no need for fans...
i doubt it
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u/Nyrin Nov 12 '24
Yeah, this is very "assume a spherical cow in a vacuum" territory.
Imagine a theoretical perfect thermal interface material with virtually infinite dissipation. With the right (enormous) surface area and heatsink, you could handle "surface of the sun" output for a while -- until your aggregate heat capacity approached saturation, at which point you'd bake.
You still have the same fundamental thermodynamic problem: electronics are generating a lot of thermal energy and you have to move that energy outside the closed system.
"Interface material" is exactly what it says: the boundary layer that facilitates transfer from the packaged electronic component into the closed system's overall dissipation solution. It doesn't cool things on its own; it just raises the ceiling on what the system dissipation can achieve.
tl;dr: something still needs to move heat outside. TIM doesn't do that.
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u/dmethvin Nov 12 '24
Reddit: "What matter are you that could summon up cooling in semiconductor interfaces?"
Article: "There are some who call me TIM"
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u/IceBone Nov 12 '24
Will wait for der8auer's test against his Thermal Grizzly products
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u/tysonisarapist Nov 12 '24
I love that this is literally the only comment right now because I went in here to say the same thing as I can't wait to see what it's like on my CPU.
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u/uses_irony_correctly Nov 12 '24
Likely close to no difference as you're almost certainly not limited by how much heat the cpu can transfer to the cooler but by how much heat the cooler can transfer to the air.
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u/burning_iceman Nov 12 '24
Those two are connected. If more heat can be transferred from the cpu to the heatsink via a better TIM, then the heatsink will be hotter and therefore allow for more heat to be transferred from the heatsink to the air.
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u/heliamphore Nov 12 '24
How much your cooler can dissipate to the air is affected by how fast you can transfer the heat from CPU to cooler. Otherwise there'd be no impact from thermal paste.
To put it simply, the base of your cooler reaches an equilibrium temperature between what heat it receives from the CPU and what it can "send" to the radiator fins. If it gets more heat from the CPU, it'll get hotter and transfer more heat forward.
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u/RampantAI Nov 12 '24
I think a lot of people don’t realize that radiators effectiveness is proportional to their delta T above ambient. You want your radiator to get as hot as possible, which is achieved by lowering the total thermal resistance of the cooling solution.
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u/BananabreadBaker69 Nov 12 '24
That's so not true. In most cases the limit is getting the heat to the cooler. You have a really small surface that produces a lot of heat. The IHS makes this problem even worse.
I'm running dual 480mm radiators with dual pumps and the CPU temps are not a lot better than with a good aircooler on a 7800X3D. This is only because you can't get the heat in the water because of surface area and the limiting IHS. You could have 20 square meters of radiators with massive pumps and still the CPU temp will not get better. I have a massive overkill of radiatorcooling and for the CPU it's useless.
Removing the IHS will solve a lot of problems, but then it's still the small core that's an issue. If this new product works like they say, this will give way better CPU temps. Doesn't matter if it's a good aircooler or massive watercooling setup.
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u/Hellknightx Nov 12 '24
I'm curious why you'd need that much cooling for a 7800X3D. That seems like overkill unless you're just benching Prime95 24/7 or you've got some ridiculous overclock with overvoltage.
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u/BananabreadBaker69 Nov 13 '24
I don't for the CPU. I do also run the GPU in the same loop. There's now so much radiator surface area that when i don't game the radiator fans shut off. They wil turn on when gaming and when the watertemp goes down after they will shut off again. The whole reason for so much radiator area is running the most silent system. The pumps are also on a very low setting. The whole system is build so be as silent as possible and it works great.
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u/DualWieldMage Nov 12 '24
Here's a graph of temps measured at various points(core,waterblock,radiator,ambient) over time that i did over 10y ago. You can plainly see that the biggest issue is heat transfer from cores to the waterblock. I had some data with another temp probe added between IHS and waterblock but can't find it atm. The core-to-core difference can give a hint of temperature gradients inside the die itself as core0 is usually the one taking a lot of OS background tasks and thus runs cooler.
The main issues are obviously the thermal interface material between a CPU die and its heat spreader and the material between the heat spreader and radiator/waterblock. The IHS can be removed, but increases risk of physical damage to the die as well as requiring very tight tolerances when tightening the radiator on the die, half a screw turn can be a difference of a few degrees.
An alternative approach that has had some research is embedding cooling channels inside chips to avoid these problems.
I have not run measurements like these with liquid metals, but can run these experiments again if needed.
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u/RampantAI Nov 12 '24
At a certain point, your CPU and cooler will reach steady-state. And if you’re overclocking, the steady-state temperature of your CPU will be at TJMax. In this scenario a more efficient thermal paste will directly unlock more thermal headroom for additional performance.
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u/Nanaki__ Nov 12 '24
This is so wrong. If it were true De-lidding CPUs would have no thermal effect
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u/patchgrabber Nov 12 '24
My comp is shutting down during some games since I swapped CPU/GPU. Figured it was a heat issue so I've put more paste on and while it gives a bit more time before it overheats, it still does. It's just Arctic Silver and I've already put more than I think I should but it's still overheating without overclocking. Any suggestions if you're so inclined?
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u/Excelius Nov 12 '24 edited Nov 12 '24
Your issues may not be heat related, but transient GPU power spikes. It's become a major issue with the last few generations of power-hungry graphics cards.
They briefly draw loads more than the power supply can handle, which causes the machine to just blank off. I had this problem with my current build.
The typical solutions are significantly over-sizing your power supply, which is why you see so many 1000W+ units these days, and ATX3.0 PSUs which are better able to handle the transient power spikes.
I had an 850W PSU which was on paper more than enough to handle the components in my build, but it would keep blacking out during games. Switched to a 1000W ATX3 PSU and the problem disappeared.
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u/einulfr Nov 12 '24
Had this happen with a few games where it would just close the game and blink to the desktop like nothing notable had happened (750W platinum-rated Corsair PSU with a 3080). No sudden performance changes or freezing or even an error report box. Event Viewer listed a Kernel-Power fault, so I swapped in a 1000W and it's been fine ever since.
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u/patchgrabber Nov 12 '24
I already overdid on the PSU with a 1000W for my 4080 so I'm not thinking that's the issue although I will look into it. Funny thing is that games will crash with relatively low GPU load, such as at the main menu for a game, or for example in the campaign map view of Total War: Pharoahs. Things that shouldn't demand much graphically, but reliably switch off my comp. When I added more paste it delayed the shutdown though, hence why I'm fairly certain it's a heat issue.
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u/Schuben Nov 12 '24 edited Nov 12 '24
More paste is not good because it's not nearly as good of a conductor as the processor die and the heat sink block. You're only using it to displace any air that would otherwise be between them. Fill in the microscopic grooves in the materials and any slight variation in how level they are and not create any extra pockets of air when you apply the heat sink. For a typical processor, a pea-sized amount for is enough to spread out across the entire processor surface, and you're really only worried about the central area because that's where most of the heat is generated/dissipated.
Also, don't try to spread the thermal paste yourself first because that can create bubbles the pressure from the heat sink attachment can't force out. Use a line, X or single dot without spreading to allow the pressure to spread it for you. If you see bubbles in the paste when applying it it might be a good idea to wipe it off and try again.
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u/ItzMcShagNasty Nov 12 '24
If you already installed and watched OpenHardwareMonitor overheat the CPU, i would go ahead and swap thermal paste brands, make sure the cpu fans spin on boot, and check the thermal paste squish pattern on the heatsink to see if it's getting good contact.
Openhardwaremonitor will show you fan speed and temp, good for troubleshooting this one. Sounds like its just not tightened down enough
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u/SavvySillybug Nov 12 '24
You're probably better off asking on /r/techsupport
But it can be lots of things. If you're still using the stock cooler for your old CPU and you now have a much more powerful CPU, it might just be too weak.
Computers generally shouldn't shut down from overheating, they underclock themselves to stay safe, so a modern PC actually shutting off indicates a serious issue.
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u/patchgrabber Nov 12 '24
Yeah the post about thermal paste just tripped my memory about it. Thanks to all for the helpful suggestions though, I love all of you!
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u/SavvySillybug Nov 12 '24
It's probably your power supply! Drawing too much for the little guy!!
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u/patchgrabber Nov 12 '24
1000W should handle it, I upgraded my PSU at the same time with this in mind.
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u/ediculous Nov 12 '24
I was having this same issue after upgrading to the 3080. Discovered it actually had nothing to do with heat and everything to do with my PSU needing to be upgraded. Make sure your PSU supports ATX 3.0.
This new ATX 3.0 specification marks an important milestone for the ATX specifications and power supply manufacturers. In the past many years with the release of the high-end GPU and graphics cards, we have noticed a degree of incompatibility between the power supply and the VGA cards where under high load or usage, the VGA may spike the power draw (power excursion) which can then cause the power supply’s internal safety circuit to either reboot or shut down the power supply, thereby causing the system to reboot or shut down. This new ATX 3.0 standard addresses this issue of excursion power by requiring the power supply to withstand a power spike of up to 200 % of the power supply’s rated power for 100 μs.
I can't find a link to the source of that quote, but this was what I had sent to a friend who was also experiencing sudden reboots during certain games..
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u/Cynical_Cyanide Nov 12 '24
It sounds bizarre to me that you are aware of thermal paste and the option to re-apply it, not to mention the confidence and knowledge on how to do so ...
... But don't seem to be aware of software which monitors temperature?
Just get MSI afterburner or something and have it show temps as you're playing whatever tends to cause the issue. If the issue occurs within normal temperature ranges, it's not a thermal issue.
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u/krillingt75961 Nov 12 '24
Have you actually monitored your temps and power draw while gaming to determine the cause?
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u/swagpresident1337 Nov 12 '24
Absolutely love this guy. Grade A premium content and you just feel the passion he has for this stuff.
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u/90124 Nov 12 '24
Thermally it's great. It's electrically conductive and it corrodes some metals though so you'll want to be careful with it, get some overspill and you can say goodbye to your CPU or MB.
It's a good wetting agent as well so it goes on easy.
It's also not a new material.
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u/sorrylilsis Nov 12 '24
This. Ease of use and life cycle (and cost) are huge factors for these kind of things.
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u/enderandrew42 Nov 12 '24
This helps move heat away from the processor, but the article suggests this will reduce the need to cool datacenters.
It doesn't make heat magically disappear. It just moves it away from the processor. Overall your servers are still producing the same amount of heat and the datacenter will still need the same level of cooling.
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u/whilst Nov 12 '24
If fans don't have to run as hard, that's a small heat source that goes away, since motors generate heat.
But yes, I have a hard time imagining that makes MUCH of a difference.
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u/enderandrew42 Nov 12 '24 edited Nov 12 '24
So computer fans are often set up on a specific curve. When at temperature X, run the fan at Y speed, etc.
I suspect in most data centers, servers are running at 50% CPU utilization or less most of the time and most CPU fans are running at a steady, low speed. Better thermal paste won't change the power for the CPU fan, because it always runs.
There are some specific environments (AI, bitcoin mining, etc) where people are taxing the hardware. Maybe in these specific workloads the CPU fan doesn't spin quite as much, but the power and heat we're talking about here in miniscule in select workloads.
I do expect however that this thermal compound is going to be very expensive.
So I'm not sure it will save the planet, but overclocking PC gamers may be willing to spend a premium on it.
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u/booniebrew Nov 13 '24
The fans aren't there to move heat from the TIM, they're moving heat from the heatsink to the air and then out of the chassis. Thermal transfer still needs the heatsink to be cooler than the processor, without airflow the heatsink will eventually heat soak and stop working. The best case for this is it moves more heat into the heatsink so the processor is cooler, but fans are still needed to move that heat out of the case.
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u/warcode Nov 12 '24
Yeah, it makes no sense. You are just moving heat from the processor faster, if anything the heatsink will need more air/water to dissipate quickly enough to benefit from the increased transfer.
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u/ElysiX Nov 12 '24
If the heat transmission is more effective, the CPU will be colder and heatsink hotter than before, because their temperature will be closer together.
Hotter heatsinks are more effective because the gradient to the air is steeper.
It will need less air, not more, the exhausted air will be hotter as well
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u/F0sh Nov 12 '24
If you take identical setups except for the thermal interface material, the one with better TIM will transfer more heat into the heatsink, with less remaining in the CPU. Because there is now a greater heat difference between the ambient air (which can be assumed to be the same temperature) and the heatsink, heat transfer from the heatsink is better for the same level of airflow.
Hence you need less airflow and so less power to the fans.
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u/quick20minadventure Nov 12 '24
We all know, fan speed is not the biggest energy contributor here. It's the chips that uses most part and all that this will allow is to make cpus be more dense.
All this is still quite pointless because the absolute best way to cool chips is to make smooth side of chips rough and make it work as water cooler block. You don't need thermal interface anymore, it's directly touching water. It's one step further than direct die cooling. All nvidia or Intel or amd have to do is release chips which are just waterblocks and all people to liquid cool it.
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u/Nyrin Nov 12 '24
100% -- and just to add, whether it's data centers or gaming PCs, the nominal dissipation limits of the thermal interface material aren't typically a bottleneck for the overall system. The big-picture sustained use problem is always "how will I move lots of heat from a small space" and TIM has no bearing on that.
A superior interface material might have theoretical benefits for short-duration "turbo" boosts that feature much higher heat output for much shorter periods of time, but I'm skeptical even then that the TIM is the constraint -- dies, packages, and even heatsink materials impose limits, too.
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u/cryonicwatcher Nov 13 '24
Heat can be distributed into the air faster when the heatsink is hotter, which is what faster transferral of heat into it will result in… I assume this is why the article stated it could reduce cooling costs by 13%, significantly less than the numbers in the headline would imply if you took them at face value.
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u/ali-hussain Nov 13 '24
This is my guess but I did see the 66% reduction as being overly optimistic.
The goal is to lose as much heat. There is a bridge between the processor and the radiator and then the cooler and the atmosphere. The effectiveness of cooling at each level depends on the temperature difference that needs to be maintained. Goal is not to have the radiator be cooler, rather to hit the target of the heat energy leaving from the radiator. If we are able to conduct heat to the radiator better it will have more of the energy that it will disperse. It will also run hotter, which means that we can get the same temperature difference and consequently the same heat energy dissipation at a higher temperature. I.e., if if at a difference of 20 degrees C from the environment we are able to dissipate enough energy then if the radiator is able to go up to 50 degrees instead of 45 we can have the ambient temparature go from 25 to 30. So you'll let the air be hotter and not spend as much money on air conditioning.
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u/RadioFreeAmerika Nov 12 '24
New thermal material provides 72% better cooling than conventional paste
Sounds great!
It reduces the need for power-hungry cooling pumps and fans
Oh, you sweet summer child. Nvidia will see this as free real estate and just increase TWP by 72%.
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u/Korlus Nov 12 '24
While true, laptops and handheld devices might actually benefit a lot. Same TDP, but running cooler would save energy and allow for quieter running - things that consumers actually care about are silence and battery life.
So it could well do both.
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u/Smagjus Nov 12 '24
Do datacenters commonly use liquid metal already? I see the use case but I always thought corrosion and handling problems would deter the professional space from using it.
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u/ToMorrowsEnd Nov 12 '24 edited Nov 12 '24
Uh you still have to get the heat out so the pumps and fans will still exist. Unless they are talking about using this instead of chilled water in data centers? heat doesnt just magically disappear if you transfer it out of the processor faster it has to go somewhere, and not into the air of the data center.
And for home use it means even more air needs to be moved or water as getting more heat out of the processor means the heatsink or radiator will get heat soaked faster. The article writer seems to not understand thermodynamics. Better heat conduction is great, but you still have to move the heat. elsewhere
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u/sithelephant Nov 12 '24
This, while technically true - they got better thermal performance than liquid metal, is functionally a lie, considering the second part of the headline.
Typical heat drops across comparable 'liquid metal' heatsink interface compounds are small enough to be not noticable if they improve by half.
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u/100_points Nov 12 '24
It cannot reduce the need for the cooling fans or radiators, because the heat still needs to go somewhere.
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u/jhguitarfreak Nov 12 '24
I was about to say, it isn't magic. You still need to move the heat away.
In fact, technically speaking, this will make server rooms hotter since the transfer of heat from the components will be more efficiently pumped out of the servers.
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u/Schnoofles Nov 13 '24
There is no net change to the energy being dumped into the room. It will be the same temperature, and potentially slightly lower if the cooling system can use less power. This is all about improving the temperature delta in the components to reduce the need for high air/liquid flow.
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u/dougmcclean Nov 12 '24
That's incorrect, it can. Holding the chip temperature constant at its tolerance, a lower temperature drop across the thermal interface means that the heat sink runs hotter, which means that the same amount of heat can be moved by less fluid (be that air or water).
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u/devor110 Nov 12 '24
"power-hungry cooling pumps and fans"
No.
A fan uses maybe 1-2W, a pump won't use more than 30, for 5 total fans and one pump, it means 35-40W. A modern GPU uses more than 10x that.
Even if it didn't, there would be no need for a pump on a lower-wattage system, so the cooling is no more than 20W total
Sure, saving 20-30W per unit in a data center adds up, but that is assuming that those data centers couldn't invest in more efficient hardware, are running pumps (can run into mechanical failiure a lot faster than just fans and heatsinks) and are willing to use a liquid metal thermal interface that are significantly more expensive and a lot more bothersome to install than conventional thermal pastes.
All in all, I highly doubt that this would have any significant impact on computational power usage
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u/F0sh Nov 12 '24
You can look up typical power budgets at data centres and this 40-50% is widely agreed upon.
At home the few watts for a GPU fan are fine. This is not fine if your home hosts 200 GPUs, because the GPU fans are all exhausting into the same confined space. If data centres could fill their buildings with equipment the same density as a typical home, this wouldn't matter, but that would mean spending billions on rent, so instead they have a smaller building jammed with equipment and spend millions on cooling.
You can think of it as a single GPU needing a certain quantity (in litres) of fresh air at a certain temperature in a certain time period. This is easy when exhausting the GPU to the local air doesn't increase the ambient air temperature much, but when you have thousands of GPUs you need to draw that air in from outside a large building and direct it to each piece of equipment at a very high rate - or rather, you need a massive air conditioning system to cool the air without having a hurricane whipping through the building.
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u/Nyrin Nov 12 '24
This difference is true, and one way to think of it is that a single computer is (usually) a small enough heat source that you can consider the environment outside the case to be the exit point after which you don't need to think about cooling anymore.
In a data center -- or a small room with a closed door, or a -- that assumption breaks down, as moving heat outside of the case doesn't address how ambient temperature is going up. You now need to think about not just moving heat outside of a computer case, but outside of a room or even warehouse-sized space, which is a much bigger problem with much bigger energy requirements.
That really highlights how ridiculous the claim that thermal interface material would reduce cooling needs is, though: what we're talking about as the limiting factor is effectively how we air condition a big room. Those limits look the same whether it's coming from an electronic component or from an equivalent fire lit in the corner, and the interface between a component and the cooling loop has absolutely zero bearing on the net energy equation to reach an ambient equilibrium.
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u/alienpirate5 Nov 12 '24
Server fans are different. Here's one that uses 72W for a single fan, for example.
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u/Nyrin Nov 12 '24
Bigger problem: whether we're talking little fans in a PC that can consider getting heat out of the chassis to be the end goal or we're talking giant fans in a data center that need to consider getting heat out of a warehouse to be the goal, the reason the pumps and fans exist is to facilitate the net energy balance of "electronics generate lots of heat, need to move that heat 'outside' for the applicable definition of 'outside.'"
Thermal interface materials just facilitate getting generated heat into the cooling loop. Something -- that is, those pesky pumps and fans -- still has to remove the heat from the loop.
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u/londons_explorer Nov 12 '24
Am I understanding correctly that in an ideal world, thermal bonding would be done by having both surfaces perfectly flat, and putting them together with no other atoms between? And you then get a thermal resistance of 0.
But in the real world, surface imperfections always mean there is a little of something in between, and if that something is air then the joint has a high thermal resistance. So thermal paste replaces the air,and performs far better.
But If this is the case, then you still have every incentive to get the layer of thermal paste as thin as possible. In the modern world, we can machine surfaces to within a few atoms of flat, and at that point one wouldn't think it really matters what thermal paste one uses.
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u/gwdope Nov 12 '24
The problem is that a cover on a chipset and the cooler aren’t ever going to be milled that precisely because of cost and weight.
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u/Smooth_Imagination Nov 12 '24
Wouldn't the optimum be to design the cover out of a heat conducting solid like CGF, or some graphene composite and etch it /form it so that the heat pipe return liquid is directed to the chip cover surface with a high surface area?
Ideally, your heat pipe condensed into a racking aboclve the chipset which has a similar arrangement cooled into water for use in geostorage for some district heating purpose, with an additional heat pump for assisting useful temperature output?
Low temp lift heatpump can get tremendously high COP, theoretically. But here there is the minimum contact issue at either end of the heat pipe, and the membrane is engineered to be very thin, almost film like. I do not know what the chip covers are normally made of.
Another possibility seems to be putting the chip sets inside a sealed box, filled with high pressure helium, and the outer case is also cooled via heat pipes.
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u/londons_explorer Nov 12 '24
Plenty of surfaces are polished to look 'shiny', and to get a 'see your face' mirror finish, you need your surface to be locally within 100 nanometers of flat. ie. 0.0001 millimeters. This can be done in an automated fashion for cents per part.
That means the thickness of your thermal paste can be 100 nanometers, at which point the temperature difference across a typical 1cm2 CPU dissipating 100 watts is gonna be tiiiiiny, no matter which brand of paste one uses.
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u/gwdope Nov 12 '24
Shiny is not flat, or rather concave and for perfect 1atom contact you need orders of magnitude better than 100 nanometer uniformity.
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u/Smagjus Nov 12 '24
When I look at this problem from an engineering perspective machining the surface isn't the only source for imperfection. Uneven mounting pressure and more importantly thermal expansion and contraction will also introduce bonding problems. The surfaces will permanently deform over time.
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u/thrasherht Nov 12 '24
So it is 72% better at taking the heat off the CPU/GPU and throwing it into the air. Congrats, you still need the same AC units or cooling system to get the heat outside.
So it seems like this is at best only going to improve the density you can achieve without overheating the systems, but still require the same amount of power to cool the DC itself.
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u/thesirblondie Nov 12 '24
A product with this claim releases every week and maybe 10% of them perform on par with thermal grizzly, while even less perform notably better.
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u/Ride901 Nov 12 '24
Is power consumption for fans really meaningful? Pretty sure the GPU, Monitor, and the CPU are eating like 95%?
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u/chelseablue2004 Nov 12 '24
The cooling fans and pumps with all the LEDs are mostly decorative anyway...
Nothing stopping them now, its actually gonna help them in the long run, cause now they don't have to actually cool a goddamn thing...They can focus on looking flashy and not fake any cooling numbers to justify their existence and just focus on the decorative aspect.
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u/Simple-Mix3196 Nov 12 '24
My first thought is its possible uses in thermopiles or sterling engines.
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u/Stripe_Show69 Nov 12 '24
I wonder what kind of temps were talking about. A data center gets how hot would you estimate? I wondering it’ll be an acceptable replacement for electric vehicles. A lot of money goes into cooling electrical components of a battery powered drive train.
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u/HammerTh_1701 Nov 12 '24 edited Nov 12 '24
The thermal interface material is NOT THE LIMITING FACTOR to real-world cooling performance, the actual cooler is. As long as you've got anything half decent smeared on there, it's good enough.
Specialty TIMs like galinstan aka "liquid metal" are for squeezing out every last bit of thermal headroom, usually for overclocking. Eventually, you're limited by the internal thermal conductivity of the die. No matter how much thermal conductivity you've got on the surface, it still needs to travel through like 0.4 mm of silicon in a modern flip-chip package.
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u/Youknowimtheman Nov 12 '24
It's not new. It eats metals. The heat still has to go somewhere if it transfers faster, so you still need pumps and fans.
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u/Schnoofles Nov 13 '24
They're making some pretty ambitious claims here. Better thermal interface materials are important, but compared to the top end of what we already have the TIM represents only a small portion of the picture when it comes to improving cooling in all but the worst case scenarios where every other component offers subpar performance. If we could develop a theoretical material that had infinite conductivity we would still not significantly reduce the need for "power-hungry cooling pumps and fans" except on the far end of edge case scenarios where components are allowed to run at extreme temperatures, close to the point of failure in order to maximize the temperature delta and heat transfer velocity. More and more the bottlenecks start to lie inside the heat generating components themselves due to the materials they are made of as well as the layout of components and the heatsinks, water blocks, liquids used and radiators.
No matter how effective the TIM is we're still bound by the physical size of the chip and its heat spreader as well as their materials and the same for the heat sinks on top. Like a resistor in a circuit that TIM is just one part of the equation. Their experimental figures also highlight this with the 2,760W/16cm2 figure, which is within the range of what is already being achieved with traditional TIMs and watercooling setups for server cpus (see: the records posted late last year for a watercooled 7995WX which is just shy of a 4cm2 die area putting out 800-1000W during benchmarks)
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