Insane Cooling: For when you have a MIGHTY NEED to cool something!
Every CPU needs a form of cooling to keep it from cooking itself to a crunchy silicon death, and the easiest way to do that is the tried-and-true heatsink.
If you want to kick that up a notch, chucking a watercooling loop on, a TEC cooler, a bubble cooler or even liquid metal cooler (though this has been discontinued for terrible performance) are all alternative ways to get it done - but this is still pretty common.
The next level is dry ice or liquid nitrogen (LN2), but this needs constant monitoring to get the right temperature, and it's not permanent in any sense of the word. This is where phase change comes in.
Similar to a beefed-up airconditioning unit or fridge, a phase change cooler uses changes in pressure and states of matter to cool to incredibly low temperatures - a single phase can reach -52°C.
Not content with this, UnRockStar over at Extremecooling.net has put together a custom five stage phase change unit, assembled onto an entire trolley and containing an intricate system of copper piping interspersed with wires.
While the site is in German there are more than enough pictures there to give a great idea of what the thing is, just how complex it is - not to mention expensive.
There isn't any performance info there, but we'll give a thanks to Tweaktown for the heads-up on this hardcore cooling.
Now if we only had the time and skill to build one...
Issue: 133 | February, 2012