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

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BirdofPrey

Standards Guru
Sep 3, 2015
797
493
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

Lord of the Boards
Original poster
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May 9, 2015
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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.
 

Phuncz

Lord of the Boards
Original poster
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May 9, 2015
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I believe so too, it seems promising for passive loops like this. No pump noise is the future !
 

iFreilicht

FlexATX Authority
Feb 28, 2015
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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

Virtual Realist
May 11, 2015
1,578
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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

FlexATX Authority
Feb 28, 2015
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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

Lord of the Boards
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May 9, 2015
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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

Virtual Realist
May 11, 2015
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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

Lord of the Boards
Original poster
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May 9, 2015
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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

FlexATX Authority
Feb 28, 2015
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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

Virtual Realist
May 11, 2015
1,578
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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):
 
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