CapTherm Multiphase CPU-Cooler Revolution?

I've searched on youtube if I could find a bit more video footage of it and found two quite interesting videos:





8 years of development, dang. And it's supposed to hit the market at the end of Q1, beginning of Q2!
 
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Thanks for those videos powerpuncher, really interesting. I just hope either the price comes down (well a little bit at least) or they add a dual rad version.
 
Boil boil toil and trouble! It looks very unique, It will be interesting to see temperatures between other coolers further down the line. Plus the welding looks plain awesome.
 
So in effect it's the same principle as exhaust tubing in a vapour chamber... should be quite effective at shifting heat faster than liquid or fan cooled, I'm actually really looking forward to hopefully seeing one of these hitting Toms desk for a damn good benching.
 
If this comes in green it shall be mine ^_^

I've emailed the company asking if this comes in any other colour than blue, Here's hoping they respond :)

*EDIT*

Amazingly I already got a reply from Captherm only 1 hour after sending an email and I quote -

It will have an RGB LED controller :)
Apparently they managed a heat load of 220 Watts without any throttling on an AMD FX 9590, Temperatures are expected to be about 6C better than an AIO unit, If true that's very "Cool"

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Photo from another angle -

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Bit More Info -

Captherm is a new startup aiming to revolutionize the way we cool our CPUs. Rather than using air cooling, or even water cooling, Captherm are bring phase change cooling to the masses with a small and unique cooler. The cooler uses an ether based coolant in a pressurized loop. For those of you who haven’t studied thermonamics, liquids and gases are complicated and there is no such thing as a fixed boiling point. Instead the boiling point depends on pressure. For example at sea level water boils at 100 degrees celsius. However at the top of mount everest the pressure is lower and so the water will boil at a lower temperature. In a dumbed down way you can think of high pressure gas as making it harder for the liquid to change into gas.

So in a sealed system when heat is added the proportion of gas to liquid will increase. This change of state from liquid to gas is a very efficient manner of absorbing heat. Whenever something changes state this is the case. For example think of when you sweat. It’s not the fact that your skin is wet that cools you, but that the water evaporates and turns into gas. This is why hot and humid is so much worse than hot and dry, because the evaporation is reduced by the humidity. So a system that can utilize phase change should be able to achieve much better cooling than a system that doesn’t e.g. standard liquid cooling. Now let’s finish the cycle. Once the liquid has turned to gas, it rises due to gravity and moves up to the radiator section where cooling is applied in the form of cool air provided by your fan that you’ve attached. As it cools it again changes equilibrium in the sealed system and so the gas turns back to liquid in order to maintain the basic laws of thermodynamics.

Captherm have used this to create a small enclosed and sealed system that has no pump or moving parts and requires no topping off or maintenance (except dust removal and the addition of a fan of your choice). Now these guys are so crazy that to seal this thing at high pressure requires the use of C4 explosives. Yes I am not kidding. The cooler like some new star is literally exploded into life. This explosion welds three different metals together, Copper, Titanium and Aluminium.

The nice part is the addition of a window above the copper that attaches to the cpu core. This will show bubbles as soon as any heat is applied to the copper.

Here you can see the bubbles in action -

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This not only is a cool effect that modders will love but also shows that everything is working just fine. Temperatures are expected to be about 6C better than an AIO unit which means it should be comparable to a high end water cooling system but without any of the maintenance. Presumably with a larger radiator and more work on the base improvements could be made further. Current MSRP is expected to be $250 with the real launch coming in the summer.
 
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Thanks for the extra info, Dicehunter! This thing is much more clear to me now. I'm really excited about this, now and I hope it will keep the promise!
 
From the info I was able to get there might be 2 versions, 120/140 and a 240/280, They weren't very clear on the exact measurements but that's all the info I was able to get :)

Ahh a dual radiator version would look much better. Lovely symmetry :)
 
I don't think there will be symmetry since the gas can't go down.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I meant there could be a radiator on each side, just like it is now but mirrored on the other side. I don't see why that wouldn't work if the current version works. It seems like the liquid evaporates and the gas goes through the radiator or whatever, and then returns once it's cooled and condensed back to a liquid.
 
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I meant there could be a radiator on each side, just like it is now but mirrored on the other side. I don't see why that wouldn't work if the current version works. It seems like the liquid evaporates and the gas goes through the radiator or whatever, and then returns once it's cooled and condensed back to a liquid.

Yes, but if you mirror the radiator on the other side, that radiator would be on the bottom of the middle piece. And since the gas naturaly goes to the top, it won't even make it to the bottom radiator, even worse, the fluid would go into radiator rendering the cooler useless.
And If you flip it 90° it doesn't work either since the liquid would accumulate in the bottom of the radiators.
All that assuming you have mounted it in a common tower case.
 
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Yes, but if you mirror the radiator on the other side, that radiator would be on the bottom of the middle piece. And since the gas naturaly goes to the top, it won't even make it to the bottom radiator, even worse, the fluid would go into radiator rendering the cooler useless.
And If you flip it 90° it doesn't work either since the liquid would accumulate in the bottom of the radiators.
All that assuming you have mounted it in a common tower case.

I see why you thought it wouldn't work now, but I'm pretty sure I saw them using it with the radiator at the left hand side, so I'm sure it would work with one on the right.

Edit: Oh no apparently not sorry mate. I just looked back at the videos and they did all have the radiator at the top. I just assumed I'd seen one at the side for some reason, my bad :)
 
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I see why you thought it wouldn't work now, but I'm pretty sure I saw them using it with the radiator at the left hand side, so I'm sure it would work with one on the right.

Hmm, my common sense tells me that's not possible. Maybe they made some modifications to make it work in a 90° angle, or I could be just wrong.

Edit: Oh no apparently not sorry mate. I just looked back at the videos and they did all have the radiator at the top. I just assumed I'd seen one at the side for some reason, my bad :)

No worries, mate :)
 
Hmm, my common sense tells me that's not possible. Maybe they made some modifications to make it work in a 90° angle, or I could be just wrong.

Nah I just checked back and I was wrong, it was at the top in all the videos. Well at least it doesn't need to be made vertically symmetric anymore as it already is lol.
 
Speaking of the orientation, I just thought of a huge problem. The heat exchange is basically driven by gravity (Vapor goes up, water goes down). But what if you had it lying flat like in a HAF XB? Sure it would probably still work but wouldn't it dramatically reduce thermal performance?
 
Speaking of the orientation, I just thought of a huge problem. The heat exchange is basically driven by gravity (Vapor goes up, water goes down). But what if you had it lying flat like in a HAF XB? Sure it would probably still work but wouldn't it dramatically reduce thermal performance?

I think it would still work fine, the radiator is at an angle after all, rather than parallel to the CPU block.

Welcome to the forums :)
 
Speaking of the orientation, I just thought of a huge problem. The heat exchange is basically driven by gravity (Vapor goes up, water goes down). But what if you had it lying flat like in a HAF XB? Sure it would probably still work but wouldn't it dramatically reduce thermal performance?

They have probably done tests for all this stuff, I doubt they would release it if they didn't otherwise the return rate would be huge, We'll see when they launch though :)

The person I spoke with from their company said it performs better than a lot of the current AIO's which if true is awesome, Guess we'll see when it finally comes out.
 
Speaking of the orientation, I just thought of a huge problem. The heat exchange is basically driven by gravity (Vapor goes up, water goes down). But what if you had it lying flat like in a HAF XB? Sure it would probably still work but wouldn't it dramatically reduce thermal performance?

It matters very little as to which way you have the vapor chamber/condenser oriented so long as the refrigerant remains in contact with the block.

Details from Captherms website:
Multiphase cooling is an upcoming technology still undergoing immense research and development efforts across the globe and is poised to eventually replace most air and liquid cooling applications. Water and pumped- liquid- loops suffer several severe drawbacks which make them unsuitable for most high reliability and mission critical applications. The addition of a second mechanical device (the pump) in liquid cooling devices further reduces overall system reliability over air cooling, which requires only a single mechanical part (the fan).

Multiphase cooling is the only cooling system that takes advantage of a phase change (from liquid to vapor) thus harnessing the raw power of latent heat of vaporization.



Multiphase cooling improves on existing technologies by:

Increasing Thermal Performance
Improving Ergonomics – Smaller, lighter and quieter
Vastly improved Reliability
Improved Energy Efficiency of the Cooling System and Electronics Component
The thermal energy/dissipation figure in the multiphase technology can no longer be defined through the specific heat, as all energy is absorbed when the refrigerant changes its state from liquid to vapor (uptaking heat inside the evaporator), or absorbing heat by phase change from vapor to liquid (rejecting heat inside the condenser). It does not change the temperature of the substance.

The heat of vaporization for 1 Kilogram of Water equals 2,257 Kilojoules per Kilogram. That is simply the energy required to completely vaporize (boil) the 1 Kilogram or Liter of Water (H2O).

Effectively, even with the temperature rise of 1 degree that air and liquid cooling had to their advantage – Multiphase cooling is still 2000x more efficient than air cooling and 500x more efficient than liquid cooling.
 
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