I've just been getting into PC gaming, trying out Steam here and there, and the worst aspect so far has been my laptop's fan. It must be seriously out f shape, because anytime I try to run a game, it wheezes like nobody's business.
Anyway, it seems my anguished screams of pain have not been unheard. General Electric has responded with their own design, and let me just say, it's cooler than anything else on the market.
General Electric has unveiled what seems to be the thinnest, high-performance cooler for the next-generation of ultra-thin tablets and laptops (pictured above). While this cooler obviously allows for slimmer designs (or more space for other components), it also uses just half the power of a comparable fan, granting a significant boost to battery life. Oh, it’s almost silent, too.
...GE’s cooler is roughly the size and thickness of a credit card, but the press release states that the complete cooling solution (presumably including a heatsink/pipe) is 4mm. This is apparently 50% thinner than existing fan-based solutions, and obviously rather significant as we move towards tablets and laptops that are sub-8mm.
Perhaps most importantly, though, according to GE VP Chris Giovanniello, “DCJ can be made so quiet that users won’t even know it’s running.” This is partly because the tech is fundamentally different from a fan — there’s no blade whizzing through the air at thousands of RPM, and thus no buzzing or vibrations — but it’s also because DCJ supports verylocalized cooling. Instead of a complex heat pipe and fan assembly, GE suggests that you might instead have a bunch of smaller, more efficient DCJs directly attached to components that need cooling.
Fun fact: this was originally designed for commercial jet engines before being shrunken down to size. No wonder it's about to take flight.
While it's still a bit away, this is an encouraging development, allowing our technology to continue shrinking further and further. Plus, not having to worry about the whirring blades of fans piercing your gaming experience is a pretty awesome bonus, too.
Traditional producers of fans (or fannies, as I like to call them, because butts) should feel the chill in the next couple of years or so.