the world was absolutely Blown Away pun intended when fro systems came out of
stealth after 4 years of building a
solid state cooling system that sucks
sucks a lot of air look at this thing
and here we are 6 months later with everything basically fully uncovered
they've got multiple solid state cooled PCS torn down airjet minis for us to
peek inside and they're even teasing a more powerful version with double the
cooling capacity and here's double the segue to our sponsor segue to our
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nice 69% off your first purchase or subscription at risk of sounding
offensive it doesn't really look like much they've got a flat copper bottom
that sits on your CPU or S so any heat generating component on the top you've
got these kind of paper filters over the intake flexible PCB that goes into their
drive system and then at the back there's a tapered section that leads to
a skinny little exhaust and it's there
that the unimpressed completely disappear I mean this thing hauls butt
they are blowing air at over 200 km an
hour through those filters and Blasting it onto the copper plate but here's the
thing moving air is just a means to an
end it's only part of the battle we don't really want to move air what we
want to do is remove heat let's take it
apart to see if we can get a better understanding of just what's going on
here I cannot believe they're letting us do this here's the completed cooling
module which I've shown you already and here it is completely torn down into its
constituent components it starts with
yeah this really is just a sticker four little paper filter Windows in it okay
and then we get into what I would call the cooling engine it uses pzo electrics
and we did a full video about this recently but basically a pazo el
electric material vibrates when you apply an alternating current to it so
what you're looking at in the top is these intake slits that pull air through
those filters okay then out the bottom
they've got all these little jets that blow down onto two here's the last
component this kind of crappy flat
copper spreader I mean okay I get it you
want to keep this thing thin it's just 2.8 mm and that's critical for getting
the design in thin and light devices like like laptops but every cooling
plate that I've ever seen that doesn't totally suck has got fins or other
structures to help increase the surface area what is going on here to find out
we need to go back to the cooling engine or the cooling chip as they call it on
the underside there are 80 small openings called impingement Jets they
were only willing to let us open up an older prototype that has twice as many
but you should still be able to get the idea here and these jets are a huge part
of the Special Sauce that makes this cooling solution so unique we've shown
many times in the past that there are diminishing returns as you blow air
faster and faster over a heat sink this is because of something called called
The Boundary layer check out this illustration from Wikipedia see no
matter how fast your air is moving sort
of near a heat SN fin the speed of it is
always going to approach zero as it reaches the actual Fin and this is due
to friction what happens then is this
creates a blanket of insulating air that
prevents heat from being removed from the fin efficiently well what FR has
done is they've used these bets of super
high velocity high pressure air to completely obliterate the boundary layer
this increases effective heat dissipation by about five times for the
same air flow and functionally saturates the air with heat bringing it up to
nearly the same temperature as the copper heat spreader now an airjet mini
is good for about 5 watts of cooling at room temperature assuming the dye is at
about 85 degrees so naturally I ask them
well could you just take a bunch of these throw them on a vapor chamber
and and of course they've already done
that this Samsung thin and light right here has been modified with three airjet
minis for a total of 15 watts of active
cooling on top of the passive dissipation through the chassis now they
could have put a fourth one on here but this machine wasn't designed in
collaboration with FR so they had to improvise a little bit and as you can
see there's some PCB there that wouldn't very much like to be chopped off this is
such a good demo here because they've got their four modified laptop here
running right next to an unmodified one showing some key benefits so first up
check this out using our thermal camera we can actually see that if we look at
the exhaust temperature behind the system our fro is at about
41° while the regular cooler is at about
35 five this can be partially explained
by the heat saturation of the air like I talked about before but part of it is
also that our FL laptop is running about
10° hotter wait but that's a good thing let
me explain in many laptops the
performance limitation is actually not the temperature of the CPU or the S so
rather it's because of the external temperature of the device anything above
about 45° c will eventually burn the
user so thin and light laptops will already throttle performance if the hot
spot on the bottom exceeds this level
that is where the air Jet's second big party trick comes in aside from not
needing a fan it is extremely high
static pressure Roar systems claims that an airjet mini manages about 10 times
the static pressure of a MacBook Pro cooler over 1,700 pascals that allows it
to suck air through restrictive openings
much more effectively than a conventional fan which improves cooling
not just of the CPU that it's installed on top of but of the entire system so
because the skin temperatures of our two laptops are so different the floor
system CPU is actually operating at 33%
higher power that is going to have a dramatic impact on
performance that's why the chip is running hotter another advantage of the
high static pressure is dust resistance typically a laptop can't be both
actively cooled and dust proof unless you create a separate compartment for
the fan and heat sink kind of like what they do in some rugged machines that is
not a great solution for a thin and light but with the air jet there's the
dust filter that's on the air jet module itself and you can also use that
pressure that that suction ability to install dust filters on the intake of
the device without trashing your air flow so you could have it pull air
through a filter here put air through another filter here and blow it out the
back cooling the entire device and the best part they built in a reverse like
blast out cleaning solution for the filters so they should Last 5 Years and
Beyond without getting gummed up even though they're just basic paper dust
filters this dust resistance is what made the airjet perfect for their first
commercial product the Zotac ZBOX Pico with airjet this Mini PC is intended to
be used on Factory floors where dust and debris could easily clog up a normal fan
cooled device now in the past Zotac got
around this by just passively cooling the CPUs in these devices but that
limited them to a 5 watt Celeron Processor with this dual airjet mini
solution though they can now use a 15 W core I3 which takes them from two cores
to eight that is a massive performance uplift and we can see the difference
right behind me where they've got one of these systems running passively this is
with the core I3 showing how it's thermal throttling to hell and then
they've got the for systems cooled model where you can see the performance is a
lot better and this is still early stages they're expecting to be able to
get CPU power up a fair bit by improving the efficiency of the rest of the device
that is all really impressive and changes my question from why did you
guys need to be in stealth for 4 years to how did you do this at all as we saw
in our pazo electric fan video ensuring that you hit the resonant frequency can
have a huge impact on performance and
the thermal expansion of the vibrating membranes is enough to knock it out of
whack meaning that they have to constantly change the input frequency
between 23,000 to 24,000 Herz to ensure
that it's always operating at Peak efficiency that brings the full power consumption
of each chip to just one watt at Full
Tilt that's not bad for 5 watts of cooling each for context that would
allow you to handle a 15 watt system with two air Jets and would cost you
only about 2 watts of power for heat dissipation that's almost identical to a
small fan like the one on the steam deck which is 2 and 1/2 watts and takes up
more space but hold on a second here lonus when you guys showed off that
expensive pazo electric fan a while back it had low power consumption sure and it
was dust proof but it had none of these other benefits where was the high
pressure okay I'm getting there you've heard me a couple of times refer to the
air jet as a chip well I asked them what
makes it a chip like does it have some onboard processing or something the
answer is no but that doesn't make them
big Liars achieving the kind of oneway
value valve operation that gives this cooler such high static pressure it
takes a lot more than just a vibrating tongue depressor like we saw last time
so like a chip the airjet is precisely
manufactured using photo lithography the same process as you would use to build a
CPU or a GPU you coat the cooling engine
layer by layer with photo resist then
expose it to light and etching chemicals and remove the unneeded material this is
inherently a two-dimensional process so the air jet gets built up one layer at a
time until we have our final little air Blaster now the manufacturing process is
a big part of the reason that the air jet is only going to be found in premium
devices at least for the time being where you can justify that additional
cost with the additional performance that it can unlock cuz see the thing is
while photo lithography is a well understood and fairly mature
manufacturer ing process especially at a relatively macro scale like this F is
working with entirely new non-silicon
materials that required extensive R&D and brand new Machinery to manufacture
at any sort of scale and high cost isn't
the only bad news while their demo here does a really good job of showing how
the for system outputs less overall
sound than the conventional fan I found that the quality of the noise that is
that it's at a bit of a higher pitch made it significantly more noticeable
the good news is that there are clear paths to resolving at least some of
these problems in the future while the airjet mini outputs laminer airf flow in
order to make it quieter this laptop wasn't designed with the airjet mini in
mind and it's blasting that air at the bottom of this hinge and the bottom of
the screen increasing turbulence and increasing noise they can actually
adjust the nozzle in a device that's built for their cooler to help alleviate
this issue and there's more the road map
these guys are showing looks extremely promising when they went out of Stealth
at CES they showed what the airjet mini
but there's more even at their current manufacturing node so to speak they can
already build higher performance solutions the airjet pro is twice the
size and manages to remove twice the heat about 10 watts at only 1.7 times
the power consumption so divice like laptops could easily have a bank of like
four of these sitting along the back cooling up to a 45 watt chip as long as
you've got a vapor chamber to spread the Heat and oh the best part man you
wouldn't even like need a bottom intake anymore so you can put your laptop down
on your bed and it's not going to overheat cuz you could just draw air in
from anywhere that is so cool and it can
be used on just about anything aside from computers they're showing off LED
lights fixtures at like oneth the overall volume they've got uh oh check
this out actively cooled ssds that are
operating it ow okay that one's really hot the the not for a cooled one uh
smart like iot devices like want to
overclock your ring doorbell with an airjet mini they figure you could do
about eight watts compared to the 3.3
Watts that is allowed with the passive stock configuration I mean what's next
I'd love to see this thing modded into an Rog Ally or a steam deck two Min
should do the trick right Alex oh yeah is that a project you guys want to see
oh what about in a phone I mean there's gaming phones with fans and water
cooling in them already why not this black shark RG phone team you guys up
and what's really wild is this is all just with the current gen their Material
Science folks do see a path to doubling their performance per unit area every
couple of years for the next little while we could see thin and light gaming
PCs with 70 class NVIDIA Graphics in
just a few short years and I'm not talking the cooling limited ones that we
see today I'm talking full performance the main levers that they're
going to be using to do this are higher amplitude vibrations and higher
frequency vibrations which makes sense
and so that combined with if they can bring costs down I mean they wouldn't go
as far to say it see they're not going to say it right now but when I asked are
you guys trying to make fans just obsolete I caught one of their technical
guys nodding in the background huh yeah
it's not impossible that they could even get the cost competitive you see the
thing is a motor Hub is always going to have a fixed cost because of like
magnets and stuff but if they're able to scale in a Mo's law kind of way well let
me put it this way the hard drive industry thought it would always be safe
from low capacity ssds and they cost so
much and where are they at now for says
that their process is similar to TV panel manufacturing where the larger
they can get the motherg glass the bigger the panels they can build at
lower costs well that sounds pretty good
given TVs have been one of the only thing that's been inflation proof lately
so right now yeah the costs are high but
that's because they're operating at a very small manufacturing scale because
it's so new but that could all change if
you guys enjoyed this video go check out our video on the pzo electric fan that
cost us $1,100 how far we've come in like six months was that six months ago
a year wow