Advanced Liquid Cooling Technology Evaluation for High Power CPUs and GPUs

Increasing thermal design power (TDP) trends with shrinking form factor requirements creates the need for advanced cooling technology development. This investigation proposes multiple innovative water cooler technologies to achieve higher thermal performance liquid-cooling (LC) solutions addressing the limitations of air-cooling (AC). High performance water cooler design options will also meet the miniaturization trends of computing market by providing scalable solution to address smaller board real-estate. This investigation serves multi-fold advantages: 1) introduces four water cooler technologies employing different fin base plate designs, diamond fins, micro-fins, skived micro-fins, and twisted diamond fins, along with an optimized flow distribution path design accompanying each cooler, 2) provides scalable thermal solutions, 3) addresses particle clogging via fin base plate as well as flow distribution path optimization, 4) addresses galvanic corrosion by eliminating the use of two dissimilar metals and introducing acrylic housing, 5) introduces acrylic housing for weight management. Results show that twisted diamond fin, micro-fin and skived micro-fin coolers provide up to 5°C performance improvement resulting in lower pressure drop across water cooler compared to diamond fin cooler and about 37°C improvement compared to air-cooled active heatsink solution.