The Era of Water Cooling for SSDs: Is Your Computer a Furnace?

According to reason, with the advancement of technology and craftsmanship, precision electronic devices like computers should only become smaller.

However, in recent years, what we see seems to be the opposite, even becoming increasingly “larger”?

Indeed, compared to the world’s first electronic computer, today’s personal computers can be described as mini.

Von Neumann and the world’s first electronic computer

But as computer performance gradually increases, the issue of heat generation has become the biggest obstacle to its miniaturization process.

Intel Core and AMD Ryzen boxed CPUs have always come with a cooler, although the materials and workmanship are not great, but in the past, running at stock frequencies was usually not a problem.

However, in recent years, CPU power consumption has gradually spiraled out of control, and stock coolers can no longer meet the demand.

Some high-end models from Intel and AMD no longer include coolers.

For CPUs at the level of I9 12900K and R9 5950X, not to mention the stock cooler, even a regular 240mm AIO water cooler may not be sufficient!

The latest Core 13th generation and Ryzen 7000 series will generate even more heat.

This reflects the severe loss of control over heat generation in high-end CPUs.

In other words, larger heat sinks are needed to suppress heat generation, which is exactly contrary to our pursuit of compact cases!

Putting CPUs aside, how well can GPUs perform?

I still remember the graphics cards of the past, although their performance was not outstanding.

But at that time, it was enough to watch a video or play spider solitaire without worrying about high power consumption and heat.

In recent years, although graphics card performance has been continuously improving, the price has been uncontrolled power consumption and heat generation.

Sizes have evolved from compact minis to today’s “bricks”.

Power supply requirements have gradually increased from 300W to 1000W…

Small cases cry out that they are not worthy.

In addition, the standard solid-state drives in computers are also increasingly prone to high heat.

Starting from PCIe 3.0 NVME SSDs, metal heat spreaders have become their best partners; otherwise, temperatures easily exceeding 70 or 80 degrees Celsius are hard to bear.

Now with PCIe 4.0 SSDs, ordinary metal heat sinks seem to be insufficient?

Some SSD-specific air coolers have started to appear!

Hmm, it feels quite like a mini CPU cooler.

This is not enough; Tenstorrent recently introduced an all-in-one dual cooling source water cooler.

Dual water cooling heads simultaneously cool the CPU and SSD…

By the time PCIe 5.0 arrives, solid-state drives might also need standard air and water cooling!

At this rate, computer cases will truly become furnaces in the future.

I want to say that the enhancement of hardware performance should not come at the cost of increased power consumption and heat.

Manufacturers should pay more attention to the improvement of technology and architecture; energy efficiency is the key to measuring whether a chip is advanced.

What do you think about this?