we're here at CES 2025 to look at this
Dell Pro 14 premium now it looks pretty
standard from here although if you look at it from this angle you can see that
it's Slimmer than any other one that has ever been made and that is because this
particular example does not have a single fan in it but it's not fanless
well it is but it also has ice as in an
ion cooling engine let's have a look at in this is the ventiva ice 9 and if you
look really really close there is a super tiny wire right here and across it
they put 5,000 volts now before we get
into the science of that you might be a little bit concerned about having 5,000
volts just in your laptop but don't be concerned the current limits are super
super small so if you touch it you'll get a tiny bit of electric shock but it
will not be harming you what that 5 th000 volts does is ionizes the air
giving it a positive charge and then this area in the back is grounded which
is effectively a negative charge this means you know positive attract to
negative air goes out the back of your laptop and becomes nice and cool this
guy right here is capable of about 8 CFM
which is similar to what you would find in a typical thin and light laptop fan
now I did ask them if it's possible to just throw More Voltage at the the
problem and get more air flow out of it but it turns out that the limit of this
is actually the breakdown of the air so
at a certain point this stops becoming ionizing air and you get lightning in
your laptop which is obviously not very ideal so physics kind of has them a
little bit constrained but fortunately space doesn't necessarily they have a 40
W solution right here because of the size of it it actually works really well
with typical heat sink designs like you think of it a fin stack is always thin
long that sort of a shape a fan is a
square so if you can instead have a little ion driver chummy that is there
instead it's much more convenient for the design of your thermal solution one
problem though is that the static pressure of these is uh not not good at
all it's very very bad the poor air flow
though is not really vena's problem in this case it is Dell's so they have been
actually working with Dell and Intel to help Design This which is incredible I
cannot believe that oems are already on board with this but basically they've
redesigned how the vents are put in the bottom of the laptop to optimize for
very low static pressure and high air flow which allows us to have very
similar performance to a laptop that has traditional fans in it and it also even
means that can be thinner because you don't need the air gap that a
traditional blower fan does need over top of it very cool now why would you
want to do that well very simple sound a
typical laptop like this might be somewhere around 28 DB around there is
whereas with the ventiva ice it's able to get down to
14 I can almost guarantee you that whatever room you are in right now is
way louder than 14 DB for some context
of how absurdly quiet 15 DB is we have
put a bunch of work into creating an acoustic chamber at our office and that
is able to get about like an 18 D noise
floor meaning that even with as much
isolation as we can put into that little room we still would not be able to hear
this thing it is so quiet only the air moving through the fins creates a noise
two problems though if they want to make this an actual product first of all
powering the thing it's 5,000 Vols so
that can be an issue and the second is it might be a bit toxic we'll get to
that in a bit first of all the power so this right here is a pretty typical
stepup converter basically you go from 5 Vols to 5,000 using just a whole bunch
of little Electronics in there this one
as it stands is about 60% efficient and
that Nets you compared to a normal fan something like minus 20% efficiency now
Dell says currently that's about a wash for power because since it is smaller
than a traditional fan they can add in more battery but at the same time
theoretically this could be more what like 80 to 90% efficient and they do
think that they can get up to around there which would bring it just about
even with the efficiency of a typical computer fan the second problem toxicity
and speaking of which dbrand is very toxic on Twitter that's the segue to our
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sponsoring this video okay back to the toxicity thing now when we are ionizing
air one of the things that is in air quite an important part of it is oxygen
and oxygen is two oxygen molecules that are together you ionize it boom they go
apart now you have oxygen and another oxygen just o1 the problem is is that
sometimes it likes to create o03 which is Ozone and which is not particularly
good for you now in higher quantities ozone can be toxic you could never
create a toxic amount of it out of one of these guys but at the same time it
smells you only need a very tiny bit of
it for it to be smelly cuz our noses are excellent at their job to combat the
ozone they have actually coated the fins in the heat sink with maganese dioxide
that acts kind of like a catalytic verter in your car which takes the ozone
and allows it to easily go back into the O2 that it wants to be even if you just
have ozone normally in your house it will break down in 25 minutes or so that
is the halflife so you don't really have to worry about it but you don't want
your laptop to be smelly one other thing that I was a little bit curious about
though is dust it seems like that if you have just this tiny little wire in there
it could be very prone to getting clogged up and of course it is not
impervious to dust but interestingly it
can also detect dust now they won't tell me exactly how it works trade secret
crap but apparently the electrical characteristics of this wire will change
as dust gets attached to it and they can actually create a report of how much
dust your laptop has in intake and also
Dell apparently will just not make a laptop if it gets dusty and stops
working I asked them about how they do it and I guess they have just a chamber
that is filled with cat hair and dust and they just shake a laptop around in
it for quite a while and if it stops working they don't sell you that laptop
makes a lot of sense another thing you might be concerned about is
upgradeability but fortunately that's very simple there's a screw right here
and a screw right there and then you pull on this and it doesn't come off cuz
it's glued down in this prototype but in theory you could just take this top
cover off swap out this component right here and then boom you have a working
not fan fan once again and another thing is just the cost now of course they are
absolutely nowhere near the economies of scale that you have with fans fans have
been around for a very long time and unsurprisingly people have gotten very
good at making them for cheap but that said these right here are very uncom
licated it is a wire and a little bit of stamped metal so this portion right here
should be quite cheap although that said you do still need a PCB and a bunch of
electronics to get it up to 5,000 volts so they don't expect it to ever get
below the cost of a fan but it should be able to get pretty darn close and again
I just want to talk about how absolutely
stoked I am about this not just cuz I have a cool engineering sample thing
here I've seen loads of weird engineering samples and again the thing
that makes me the most excited about this is the fact that ventiva aren't the
only ones that are excited about it this is a real proof of concept that was made
in collaboration with Dell and Intel has also been putting a lot of engineering
behind getting it integrated and just generally testing it with their designs
that means that it isn't just them looking for it but there's a good chance
that you might actually have a Dell laptop in the future that has no stands
but still has forced induction what
would you call it but still has air flow still has air flow sure we'll call it
that now one final thing here you guys get to decide who is correct the Dell
inventiva Engineers have been arguing of
what they should call this phenomenon there's a couple names so we can either
go with kulic Force electrohydrodynamic
flow ion drag or Corona wind put down in
the comments below which one you think should win just like you should have a
great old day huge thanks for watching this video hit like get subscribed and
I'll see you later