News Calyos' Fanless High-End PC

No fans, no pump, high-end components. Everything is cooled by a passive loop filled with refrigerant and the huge heatsink on the side. Color me amazed.

CALYOS Fanless PC / Workstation combines the best electronics and the most innovative cooling solution based upon Calyos Loop Heat Pipe.

Specs:
Processor: Intel Core i7 5820K
Motherboard: MSI X99S SLI PLUS
Memory: Kingston DDR4 HyperX PREDATOR
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX Titan X
Hard Drive: SSD Samsung Serie 850 EVO
Power Supply: Super Flower Golden Silent Fanless Modular
Casing: Lian Li Case – PCO7S - Customised

Read more.

 

[BirdofPrey]

That's an interesting product to see from a company that mainly focuses on datacenter cooling.
If they are looking at the desktop market, maybe they might start selling a couple of cooling products optimized for desktops separately to the user market. Especially notable that, despite calling this a workstation, the specific components they chose seem more gamer market to me.

 

[Phuncz]

I'd guess the Titan X is more a demonstration of how much TDP they can handle, but it is indeed not configured as a professional workstation.

 

[iFreilicht]

Lovely. I guess this passive loop works the same way that Rajintek cooler does?

 

[Phuncz]

I believe so too, it seems promising for passive loops like this. No pump noise is the future !

 

[iFreilicht]

Longevity is still a concern, but now that systems like this start to appear on the market, we will get some real data on how long they can perform without refilling.

 

[EdZ]

I would have guessed at using Novec 7100 or a similar low-boiling-point fluorocarbon like the Raijintek demo cooler, but those heatsinks have very obvious filling nipples sealed off, similar to low-pressure heatpipes and vapour-chamers that use water as a heat-transfer medium.

 

[iFreilicht]

Do you have any good links that explain how such a system works with water? I understand how it works when the stuff boils at 30°, but I don't know enough about fluid dynamics to have an idea of how this could work when the water never starts to boil at all.

 

[Phuncz]

Under higher pressure, liquids evaporate at higher temperatures, lower temperature at lower pressure. If my noob knowledge of physics is not wrong.

According to Techpowerup, it uses R-245fa which according to Honeywell boils at 58.8°F or 14.9°C at 1 Atm, which is our atmosphere at sea level. Most likely it has a higher pressure to raise the boiling point to something above 30°C.

 

[EdZ]

If it's R-245fa, that's a really weird choice for a passive loop. Lime you say, the entire loop would need to be pressurised in order to allow for ambient cooling back to a liquid without the aid of a compressor except for in cold environments. They specify 73°C/74°C as the CPU/GPU temperature, so the effective boiling point would be at or slightly below that.

 

[Phuncz]

Good point about the 73/74°C. Maybe they choose that refrigerant because of its leaking (or lack of) properties or heat transfer rate across larger distances ?

 

[iFreilicht]

the entire loop would need to be pressurised in order to allow for ambient cooling back to a liquid without the aid of a compressor except for in cold environments. They specify 73°C/74°C as the CPU/GPU temperature, so the effective boiling point would be at or slightly below that.

What kind of pressure are we talking about here? Anything between 2 and 8 bar seems reasonably implementable, but it makes me feel like the leakage could be a lot higher, depending on how well the loop is sealed.

 

[EdZ]

What kind of pressure are we talking about here? Anything between 2 and 8 bar seems reasonably implementable, but it makes me feel like the leakage could be a lot higher, depending on how well the loop is sealed.

I couldn't find a published pressure/boiling point curve for HFC-245fa, but using this partial table of values, I extrapolated the boiling point at 75°C to be about 5.7 bar gauge (6.7 bar absolute):

 

[aquelito]

First ITX iteration of the Calyos cooling system by SuperMicro :

http://www.fanlesstech.com/2017/04/supermicro-fanless-gaming-cube-prototype.html