

(A typical water cooling setup)

If you buy a pre-built PC the chances are it is going to have fan and heatsink cooling installed for the CPU. If you build your own machines, or buy expensive enthusiast pre-builts, then water-cooling may be an option you use.

Although air cooling is cheap and effective, it can be noisy and limited depending on how much you want to overclock the chip. According to NEC it is also quite power-hungry.

With that in mind NEC has developed a new CPU cooling solution using liquid CFC. The advantages include up to an 80% reduction in power use over air cooling, 60% reduction over more typical water-cooling solutions, and of course no fan noise. NEC also claim to have reduced the cost of producing such a cooling system by 70% over more conventional water-cooling parts.

The combined manufacturing cost reduction, power use savings, and lack of noise, make for a compelling CPU cooling solution. NEC are hoping to include it with new PCs before the end of the year.

Read more at the NEC press release (translated) and Akihabara News

Matthew’s Opinion

A cheap, silent water-cooling solution is sure to go down well with consumers and business users alike. If it means a reduction in power bills and noise then everyone wins. NEC can advertise their new PCs as greener than the competition, while users can enjoy reduced power bills and not have to put up with the background sound of a fan spinning.

If you’ve used a PC for a number of years then you’ve likely experienced the fan sound getting louder as dust builds up inside your case and the parts start to wear out. You get no such problem with a water-based solution, however, a fault can be disastrous, especially if you get a leak.

NEC must be very confident it’s system is fault-free and will run for many years without failure. Some older gamers among you may remember the first models of Sega’s Dreamcast console shipped with a water-cooling solution in Japan, but it was later replaced with air-cooling. If NEC has come up with a cheap solution then maybe we will see its use spread to other devices like game consoles that currently require noisy fans.