NEC, Hitachi develop liquid cooling system for desktops

NEC Corp., NEC Personal Products Ltd and Hitachi Ltd have jointly developed a new liquid cooling system for desktop PCs, which reduces PC operating noise to one-third that of current models in Japan.

The new system adopts Hitachi's advanced CPU liquid cooling cold plate and the 'first' hard disk drive (HDD) liquid cooling cold plate, jointly developed by NEC and Hitachi. Tapping Hitachi's advanced liquid cooling technology and NEC's cutting edge PC development design technology, the new system can reduce noise level of liquid cooled PCs from 30db to 25db at maximum operation, a noise level quieter than that of the average home DVD recorder. The new system will be employed in NEC brand consumer desktop PCs for the Japanese market in the near future.

An increase in the heat conduction of the liquid cooling cold plate by over double that of conventional cold plates was achieved by creating multiple fine grooves (about 0.09mm in width) in the heat exchanger fin inside the liquid cooling cold plate. Then, the liquid coolant flow channel design is optimized by adopting a newly developed "down-flow method" and considering the size of the die for pin-point channeling.

The new cooling system also generates less noise through the use of the first HDD liquid cooling cold plate.

Meanwhile, NEC and Hitachi have also developed what is said to be the world's first HDD liquid cooling cold plate. NEC and Hitachi has wrapped the entire HDD in high performance noise absorbing material and vibration insulation as the HDD liquid cooling cold plate enables effective reduction of the rise in temperature of the HDD, achieving an HDD noise reduction of over 10db. A low speed radiator fan (less than 1,000rpm), a low operating noise micro-pump and high performance noise absorbing material made it possible to lower the noise of the whole system.

In recent years, the heat value and heat density of PCs grows along with enhancement of CPU performance and memory capacity; making it essential to not only cool the CPU, but also other devices such as the HDD. Moreover, AV functions are increasingly incorporated into consumer PCs, increasing further the noise levels. With its silent liquid cooling system, NEC and Hitachi aims to address these issues to enable the extremely quiet desktop PCs with greater spread and advanced AV functions.