CPU Cooling with BOILING LIQUID 🔥🔥
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,518 words · ~12 min read
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so the thing with water cooling is there's a few different reasons people do it some do it for performance you
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know getting them over clocks some people do it for looks although that
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clearly wasn't the case here and some do it for silence
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now here's the thing though no matter how
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many radiators you throw at your system like you could put like six radiators on
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this thing you could take all the fans off and it would easily dissipate the
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heat from a CPU and a graphics card you are still going to be stuck with at
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least one moving part and that's your pump now sometimes pumps take the form
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of like a big standalone piece like this like with a custom loop while other
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times you're gonna have it kind of built in or integrated into something else so
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this aio from nzxt has the pump built
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into the CPU block while others i believe ek does this for example build
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it into the radiator but you're always going to have that
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moving part which is a point of failure and a source of noise
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unless you don't
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this right here is a prototype
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water cooler with no pump
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how on earth does that work how well does it work
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i guess there's only one way to find out isn't there
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link in the video description
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so i first got turned on to the idea of pumpless water cooling when i was
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reading a post on extremesystems.org
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that's a blast from the past uh way back in 2008.
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so a user by the name of ocz tony who
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worked at you guessed it ocz at the time was doing some experimentation with
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their upcoming CPU water block which i'm not sure if it ever got released or not
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but it's hardly the point and he posted
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that he had figured out a way to use convection just the natural convection
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of the heat of the CPU warming the water
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causing it to rise up one tube and then get cooled by the radiator causing it to
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fall down the other tube in order to achieve enough circulation to get a
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functional like custom grade water
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cooling loop all without any risk of failing components and without any noise
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whatsoever tony's approach had a couple of fatal flaws though so for one thing
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it wasn't possible to get a ton of circulation so modern cpus like the 18
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core one in here we're going to have no chance of moving enough water to carry
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all that heat away and number two is that it relied on a very
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specific layout of the entire system so that the
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convection action could get started in the first place so the radiator would
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absolutely need to be above the CPU
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socket and then once you started to add multiple heat sources like you know a
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graphics card or something well then life gets really confusing
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fortunately there are other ways to move fluid around inside a closed system take
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this for example this looks like an ordinary pc tower cooler but inside
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these heat pipes are tiny capillaries
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that allow the coolant to flow up and
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down the heat pipe in order to allow it to transport heat much more quickly than
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just solid tubes of metal would be able to do
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that's part of what makes these things so efficient so in a nutshell then
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capillary action is the phenomenon that you would observe if you took a cup of
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water and then something thin like a straw for example and stuck it in you
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would actually see that the water level inside the straw would rise a little bit
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even though the force of gravity is working against it it's partly caused by
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surface tension and it is the exact principle that our cooler here works on
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now i only gave you guys a really brief look at this before but now we're going
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to take a bit of a closer gander so first we've got a bog standard radiator
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i think it's made uh i think it's made of aluminum and then we've got our CPU
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block here which looks pretty normal you've got your flat copper base and
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there's only really a couple things about it that strike me as
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not ordinary so one is this little
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kind of looks like a fill port of some sort that's been terminated by pinching
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it shut kind of like you would do with a heat pipe and two
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the fact that the fittings the block itself everything about this thing is
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like soldered shut rather than using o-rings and screws in
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order to seal it they they are serious about keeping whatever's in here
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inside but will it work
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now this is 10 out of 10 engineering
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sample stuff uh ragin tech sent it over
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but this is like this is not to be evaluated for its
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performance or the packaging or anything like that this is
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just a concept stage device
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which means that mounting this is
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probably not going to be that simple there's no instructions so
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that kind of looks like it goes there
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that kind of looks like it goes there and there
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and there this really does just look like cobbled together from
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scrap metal they found in the warehouse or something
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are these thumb screws or just spacers these are these are thumb screws
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uh well
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you only live once especially if you're this poor CPU this
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is my favorite thing about oh no did it go in the power supply
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a screw in your power supply is a bad freaking time
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one of the nuts appears to have gone missing well
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hopefully we have an alternative nut oh heck yeah the nuts from my test bench
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work that was easy i didn't have to go very far at all
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we're also going to need a couple of cooling fans
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did they say something about it needing to be above trying to remember
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yeah now there's some for sure so because this process is heat assisted
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we're not actually expecting it to start flowing right away like how would it do
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that what would power it so we're actually waiting
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for the heat output from the CPU
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to move the water around we're converting heat energy into mechanical
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energy but that means if there's no load on the
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CPU then it's going to take a while for it to get hot enough down here to begin
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that process i mean you can see here our CPU is clearly not putting out a ton of
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heat and that is a hefty copper block on it
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so it's going to take a while for it to appreciably heat up now that CPU is
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pretty toasty at this point you can actually see we're getting some
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more bubble arch we're getting some real bubble action here there's a big there's a big bubble
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look at it go see that
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it's actually starting to flow now now what's interesting is you actually see
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bubbles flowing out of both sides
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now why would that be
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so you can see we're getting a little bit of kind of jerky coolant flow but
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CPU temperatures are actually well within spec it seems to kind of
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correspond actually to little bits of coolant kind of dripping
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down into the block so i actually may have recalled
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incorrectly this one may rely on some gravity assistance here so
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let's go ahead and
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provided so now this is kind of like having your radiator installed in the top of your
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case oh and CPU temps are way down they were
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up near 90 now they're in this upper 60s and they're more consistent
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okay so theoretically we're all set up properly ish now you can see that our
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CPU temps have settled in at around the
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low 60s and that's not great obviously this is an 8700k by the way that's not
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great for idle temperatures it's not even doing anything right now but you
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got to remember that this doesn't work unless we add enough heat and it's
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clearly working well enough that even though that's a high idle temperature
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we're well within spec so in order to get our coolant flowing
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more rapidly and to get the cooler working better we actually have to hit
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it with a load so why don't we go ahead and do that
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sure small fft 12 thread oh that's probably going to
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crush this poor thing but let's give it a shot whoa okay so our temps
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shoot up to 100 degrees basically instantly but what's interesting is you
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can see there's a lot more action down here at the cooler we're also going to
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want to check out what kind of clock speed we managed to maintain throughout this so we're still at 3.7 gigahertz
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which means we're getting enough coolant flow that the thing's not just like
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gonna immediately die we hope
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now let's have a look at our coolant flow here so what's weird is we've actually got
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liquid returns
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on both of these
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which would suggest that it's turning to vapor to move up to
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this radiator so maybe the configuration
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can be tweaked once more just trying to remember what their
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instructions were i could have i could have looked this up before we started
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but what fun would that be sorry i'm leaving now
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it's possible that the design expects the motherboard to be oriented the way
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it would in a typical tower case so why don't we go ahead
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and do that just hold the board in place there we go
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all right now let's see how she goes
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oh interesting our temps are down in the high 90s range
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now also our speed which had fallen down to
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about 3.5 gigahertz is up to 3.63 we're
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clearly turboing higher what's weird is that it appears as though it's operating
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more like a heat pipe cooler right now with the thick tube
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doing most of both the liquid and gas
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movement why use only capillary action
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when you can use convection as well we could tell that all the action was in
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our top tube here but the top one was the thick one
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so if we were to change it around and use our skinny one as the top instead of
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having those two forces work against each other
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we could hopefully have them work together
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we can't use temperatures to differentiate our orientations here
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because they're all going to hit 100 degrees in thermal throttle
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but what we can see is how far it throttles and this actually throttles
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much worse than our previous configuration
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now we're back up to now now we're up to 3.8 gigahertz
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what is your logic so this is clearly the hot side
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this side is pretty hot too um
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okay so i gave in i consulted the materials they sent over back when they
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provided this unit and it appears as though this was the correct
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configuration with the small tube on the bottom the big one on top and the
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radiator up above so let's go ahead
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and try it one last time
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so this is the best result we've gotten so far we've only got one core that's at
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100 degrees and we're turboing up to about 3.8 mid to 3.8 high gigahertz that
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is not a bad result now it's obviously
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not a perfect result which is probably a big part of the reason that this even
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though they've shown samples of it as long as like
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a year and a half ago hasn't turned into a commercial product
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yet because there's a lot of fine tuning to make this work for one basically
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endless tuning and tweaking could be done on the diameter of the tubes in
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order to allow for better coolant flow for another there's all kinds of
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different fluids with low boiling points which is part of what actually allows
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this rapid movement that could be used to charge a system like this we don't
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know what they're using inside i'm sure once they figured out a formula that
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works they would hold that as a very closely guarded trade secret for another
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thing remember how we showed that this whole
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system was sealed up well maybe they're
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maintaining it at something other than atmospheric pressure that could also
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affect the characteristics of the entire system so
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nothing like this is available from you know
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any household brand that you'd recognize at this point in time but
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i would say that this works well enough
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that there is still potential for this technology and i'm personally very
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excited for the truly silent water
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cooler i mean ignoring that this particular one
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has fans on it and that it'd be very difficult to diy something like this but
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details details details
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oh yeah and the bubbling does actually make noise
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you can probably hear it
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