Get a load of this thing. This Noctua Thermosiphon prototype cooler has
boiling coolant inside the CPU block and uses physics magic to circulate said
coolant around the system without a pump. It's not exactly a new idea.
Derbauer showed off this phase change cooler prototype 6 years ago, and
Raentech made enough progress on their pumpless concept that they even sent me
an early sample to test. Neither of those designs ultimately made it to
market. But it shows that companies have been hard at work on this for a very
long time. But why? Well, because every
pump on Earth has two things in common. One, it makes noise. And two, it will
eventually die. So, going back almost 20
years now, the holy grail of silent, reliable PC liquid cooling has been to
find a way to circulate the coolant with no moving parts. Cool, you might say.
But why should I get my hopes up this time? Because this time, Noctua says not
only is it going to happen, but they believe that with some science, they can
actually achieve performance that is on par with an actively pumped AIO liquid
cooler. I need to take a closer look at this after this close look at our
sponsor, Corsair. Their Platform 4
Elevate is anything but a generic sit-to-stand desk. It stands out, pun
intended, with its modular T-channel rail system that allows you to mount a
whole variety of accessories. Check it out using our link down
below. Right away, Noctua was careful to disclaim that this unit is non-final, so
they can't give any raw performance numbers. But it's also clear that it
can't be that bad. Under that boiling fluid is a Ryzen 9 9800 X3D CPU running
a live gaming demo without overheating.
I mean, this is not quite the same as running a 100% CPU load in a real case,
but what it shows is that Noctua has gotten at least as far as anybody else
in achieving pumpless water cooling, or
should I say fluid cooling. Noctua is
collaborating with Calios, the same aerospace cooling company that helped
design StreCom's passive cooling case that we checked out recently. And while
Noctua was quick to point out that their implementation is different and
shouldn't have the uh weird noise issue,
Calios's specialty is two-phase passive cooling systems where they leverage the
evaporation of a liquid to transfer heat
and force coolant to circulate to a heat exchanger or a condenser where fans can
cool it back to a liquid state before it makes its way back to the heat source.
So then it all looks great, right? What's holding them back? Well, boiling
a liquid, it turns out, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it
dramatically increases the thermal energy that the coolant can capture and
take away to the condenser. But on the other hand, it creates pockets of gas on
the copper surface of the cooler that act as an insulator, making it hard for
the liquid coolant to ever make contact with the heat source. And the hotter the
heat source, the more vigorous the bubble formation. Adding another layer
of inconvenience is the fact that CPUs do not heat up uniformly. There are hot
spots right above the dyes where the most heat is generated. And these are
the areas where ironically it's also the most important to maintain excellent
thermal transfer. So you've got this
more vigorous boiling occurring right where you need your cooling the most.
Noctua says that if there was a perfect CPU that heated up uniformly, they could
be finished development on this already. So what can they do? Well, first they
had to try to fix the uneven distribution of heat coming up through
the CPU's heat spreader by both trying to speed up thermal transfer in the cool
spots and slow it down in the hot spots,
which flies completely in the face of conventional cooling dust practices
where for forever the goal has been to bring heat pipes and water block fins as
close to the hot spot as possible. After
that, the next goal was to improve the effective cooling surface area. Now, in
a normal water block, this was achieved by using ever thinner surface
structures, which eventually resulted in coolers that literally created their
fins by shaving the top of the copper and then folding up the slices in a
process called sking. The issue with this for this application is that the
smaller the surface structures, the more little tiny nooks and crannies exist to
trap bubbles, destroying any hope of efficient thermal transfer. Now, one
solution to this problem is to use impingement jets that accelerate the
liquid before it hits the copper surface, which will dislodge any bubbles
and also increase turbulent flow, which aids heat transfer. that uh small
problem. You may or may not have noticed this, but there's no pump to provide the
necessary head pressure. And we don't want a pump because then a we would risk
accidentally circulating the fluid too fast, which would throw away the
advantage of evaporative cooling. And also then we'd have a pump, which was
kind of the whole point, right? Counterintuitively then, the prototype
thermosiphon is using much, much taller
copper structures than a typical water block would in an effort to leave enough
space for the bubbles to escape and then for liquid to be able to penetrate all
the way to the base of the block. With those challenges out of the way, the
last big one is to find the optimal shape that maximizes coolant flow. They
don't need nearly as much flow as a traditional AIO water cooler, but more
is still generally more better when it comes to heat transfer. There's no word
on case compatibility or exactly when this thing will launch, but hey, Noctua
has a mostly pretty good track record for actually launching the things they
show off. So, uh oh, I guess I'm in the Noctua booth,
so I should probably talk about the fans on the condenser. Thanks to its high
torque motor and progressive bend impeller, the A12X25 Gen 2 excels in
high resistance applications where Noctua found three and a half degree
better temperatures at the same noise level compared to their last gen or the
same performance for a 1 to 3 decel difference in noise. Pricing is expected
to be the same as Gen 1 at $34.90 and
who the knows US dollars due to the ever evolving tariff situation. I was telling
Nacha they should get into crystal balls. Then they could give me an answer
on that. There will be two versions, a slightly faster one and a slightly
slower one that will help to counteract the undesirable harmonics of having two
identical speed fans that operate right next to each other or on a pushpull
cooler. These same fans were present on a variety of products around the booth,
including Noctua's upcoming AIO liquid
cooler. I um am not the only one who was
surprised to see this and for a number of reasons. For starters, Noctua has
always maintained that a heat pipe air cooler is capable of equal or even
better performance compared to an AIO. And for another, instead of designing
their own pump, they actually opted to partner with ASET on a design that uses
the same Gen 8 platform as other vendors. Like what? You guys literally
make motors and impellers for a living. But according to Natua, water impellers
are a lot less similar than you would think to air impellers. And after a year
of trying to tune the performance and acoustics of the pump, they determined
that there just wasn't much that they could do to it. Which isn't to say that
they're just slapping their logo onto a Gen 8 reference design. The special
sauce is in this cover. Instead of a screen or several screens, Noctua has
designed a three layer acoustic blocker that acts as a tuned mast damper,
helping to reduce vibrations, at least in one direction. There isn't really
much that they can do about any vibrations that will pass through their
secuer mounting system into the motherboard. But in total, they are
expecting a few decibel reduction in noise, especially uh compared to
competitors who have large plastic structures on top of their blocks that
actually serve to amplify pump noise and vibrations. The last innovation in
typical Noctua fashion is to put a fan
on it using guiding fins around the AIO
cover. This magnetically mounted 80mm fan is designed to cool down your
motherboard VRM and your system memory. The whole setup comes with a 6-year
warranty and will be available in 2026. As for pricing, they literally said,
"Don't worry about that." So, I'm doing the exact opposite and worrying a lot.
The final element of the Noctua booth is actually probably the most exciting to
me and it was all of the non Noctua products that they were showing off.
Noctua has really ramped up their partnerships over the last few years and
they were showing off everything from the Noctua equipped power supplies that
we saw over at CIC to a refreshed 50 series Noctua edition GPU to this
incredible looking Anttech case to a Pulsar gaming mouse that has an
integrated 40mm cooling fan. I generally
love Noctua's engineering first approach to product design, and I'm always happy
to see their unsightly brown and tan fans, making other people's products
just a little bit cooler and a little bit quieter. I'm also happy to see our
sponsor, MicroEnter. Rated number one in
PC Mag's 2024 Reader Choice Awards, it's clear that MicroEnter is the place to
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MicroEnters's May desktop deals and to make sure you get your free flash drive
when you check out their new Santa Clara location. If you guys enjoyed this
video, why not check out the time we covered that one infamous product that
Noctua never managed to bring to market. It really did look really cool. Had
active noise cancellation on a heat sink. Like what?