Liquid Cooling?

Laptop Liquid Cooling Help?

• So, I've noticed that my laptop gets rather warm when I am using it to play games, such as Tribes: Ascend, Call of Duty, or other CPU intensive games. Already i can't complain, considering it is a LAPTOP, but i feel like the heat is making it run slower. I currently have my laptop sat upon a cooling rack, the sort you use for letting cookie-sheets cool. This is better than the hard wood desk, but I dont think it does all that much. My idea was this- Go to the store, get plastic tubing, a cheap water pump, and a box-type compartment to hold ice water in, and assemble the tubing such that it coils around underneath the laptop while i pump ice-water through it, sort of like cooling a machine gun in WWI. But here is my real question...Will it work? This is going to be an EXTERNAL device, which means it will (in theory) cool the bottom of the laptop, not the insides. Also, is ice-water + plastic tubing good at cooling? Is plastic a good enough heat conductor that it actually pulls in the heat, or will the water simply rush through unchanged? Anyone with good Thermal-stuff experience should be good at answering this question. Also, if i do build this, what should i cover it with? Should i simply have a coil of tubes (taped together of course, or at least SOME structure) or is there a good heat-conductive material to cover it with. Lastly, this will likely cover up the fan on the bottom of the laptop. Now, thats fine by me if the liquid cooling works BETTER than the fan does. If it works worse than the fan, i'm really losing out here. The bottom of the laptop is where it gets REALLY hot, so I figure, FIGURE, that my idea will have at least some positive effect. In short- How good is plastic as a heat conductor? Will cooling the bottom of the laptop DO anything? What should i cover it with? Is there something I could do differently to make it better? Will it work? Thanks so much for your time, I appreciate all answers I get here (except for trolls obviously)

• Answer:

  Ideally, if you're going to be building some sort of cooling solution like this, you'll want to take cues from commercially made ones. Don't use plastic, use copper, which is an excellent thermal conductor. Cooling the bottom of the laptop will help draw away some heat - potentially a lot depending on how hot the machine gets - but you aren't going to want to block the computer's fan, otherwise you'll completely negate the benefit. For the best result, you want the fan working together with the plate to cool the computer. The way I have this pictured in my head is that you have the box with your pump and ice-water, and in one corner you have the copper pipe coming out of it, where it coils in an 'S'-type shape all the way to the opposite corner, where it goes back into the box. Depending how sturdy the box is, you might not need to reinforce it at all, and can put the laptop directly on top of this pipe, which has the added benefit of not blocking the fan at all. But if the setup seems unstable, you can weld an additonal wire frame onto it. The only problem with something like this is that the flow of water is going to be impeded with each bend in your pipe, so you might actually need a second pump along the middle to keep it going at a steady rate. Condensation isn't something I'd worry about with this, since the plastic on the bottom of the computer isn't permeable and even if the fan ingests a little water it'll be largely mineral-free and vaporize instantly on the internal heatsink. In fact, that might even be a bonus. You could take it one step further by welding copper or aluminum fins onto the sides of the contraption and then sticking some fans to them to make a sort of radiator, keeping your ice from melting for just a little bit longer than it would otherwise. Edit: Gentle Typhoons are really quiet fans, if you're concerned about noise levels. And uh, don't tape your pipe together. Join it correctly, or the only thing you'll be cooling is your table after your water spills all over it. Edit 2: Depending where the laptop's fan intake is located, adding fins onto the pipe directly beneath it (and potentially another fan underneath that [depending how much clearance you have between the pipe and box] which would be pushing air into the laptop) will cool even better by ensuring that already cold air can hit the heatsink at a rate much faster than the laptop could manage on its own.