A new standard for cooling fans?

Heat is one of the biggest problems of a modern computer: they produce a lot of it.

The processor is the main culprit, although the graphics card can often challenge it for the title. As processor speeds have risen so has the amount of heat that needs to be safely taken away.

This may change as a new design has been created by a man called Jeffrey P Koplow at the Sandia National Laboratories. Read on to find out how it works.

Traditional processor cooling systems rely on a large metal heatsink, often made of copper, which is cooled by a fan. The new system does away with the static metal block. Instead the heatsink spins around creating the air flow to move the heat away. The design makes it less vulnerable to blockages from dust. This can be a real problem; I once found a half centimetre mat of dust completely blocking the fan outlet of a notebook.

I was first curious how you attach a moving heatsink to a processor but on reading the design report it appears that you don't. It spins over the processor with around 0.03mm between them. I wouldn't dare think of doing that but the gap is small enough that the air behaves differently. Using the same principles of hard disk heads the gap is also self regulating. Any change in distance changes the air pressure and brings the cooler back into position.

You can read the full report here - beware it is a 48 page PDF with lots of equations and graphs.

It's early days but it's an exciting breakthrough. My only experience of setting up water cooling ended with four of us holding the bits in position, nearly losing a finger in the massive fan and a wet motherboard.

Thanks to Ecogeek for the lead