Innovation
Page Two: Seriously cool
Tuesday 1/7/2003News from NEC: it's launched a water-cooled laptop. Moreover, the technology is applicable to any system, says the company.
Tuesday 1/7/2003
News from NEC: it's launched a water-cooled laptop. Moreover, the technology is applicable to any system, says the company. It's small, thin and just needs five volts to activate the special piezo-electric pump that drives the water around the system. I think they're missing a trick here, especially as chips get faster and use more power. Some of these babies dissipate more than 100 watts at full chat -- and that's a lot of oomph. With case modding becoming more and more popular, and people bolting more and more flashing lightage, extraneous fannage and general look-at-me dooferage into their computers, it can only be a matter of time before all that hot water is tapped off, turned to steam and used to drive a wide variety of Mamod-style reciprocating engines, pistons, and other shiny brass things that move. It has a certain style: the more work your CPU is doing, the faster the gears will whiz, the more steam will escape in an accelerando of chuff-chuff-chuffing and the more impressive the whole device will seem. I can foresee heat generation becoming a bonus, not a problem: expansion cards, hard disks and even external peripherals will come with a common pipe fitting interface to couple them into the system. In fact, the inevitable conclusion is the fitting of some form of powered wheels to the base of the unit and competitive outings to see who can do the Dart Valley run in the fastest time.
News from NEC: it's launched a water-cooled laptop. Moreover, the technology is applicable to any system, says the company. It's small, thin and just needs five volts to activate the special piezo-electric pump that drives the water around the system. I think they're missing a trick here, especially as chips get faster and use more power. Some of these babies dissipate more than 100 watts at full chat -- and that's a lot of oomph. With case modding becoming more and more popular, and people bolting more and more flashing lightage, extraneous fannage and general look-at-me dooferage into their computers, it can only be a matter of time before all that hot water is tapped off, turned to steam and used to drive a wide variety of Mamod-style reciprocating engines, pistons, and other shiny brass things that move. It has a certain style: the more work your CPU is doing, the faster the gears will whiz, the more steam will escape in an accelerando of chuff-chuff-chuffing and the more impressive the whole device will seem. I can foresee heat generation becoming a bonus, not a problem: expansion cards, hard disks and even external peripherals will come with a common pipe fitting interface to couple them into the system. In fact, the inevitable conclusion is the fitting of some form of powered wheels to the base of the unit and competitive outings to see who can do the Dart Valley run in the fastest time.