The design of the first liquid cooled laptop
It's been a transformative year for gaming laptops. We've seen PC-grade processors and graphics chips, dockable desktop GPUs and even mechanical keyboards make their way into mobile gaming rigs in 2015.
But liquid cooling takes the cake for the craziest new implementation in gaming notebooks.
We never thought it possible, but the Asus ROG GX700 truly is the world's first liquid cooled gaming laptop. Aside from the sheer absurdity of the idea, the system Asus has put together is brilliantly insane.
Instead of stuffing the entire cooling system inside of the laptop, making it incredibly thick, the GX700 is a roughly inch-thick machine that plugs into, and works in tandem with, a massive, alien-like pod filled with the extra hardware.
When fully connected, the system's extra heat dissipation allows you to overclock the GX700's components and reach all new levels of performance not yet seen in even the most powerful laptops. That shouldn't be too hard even at base clock speeds, as the 17-inch gaming laptop comes packing an Intel Core i7-6820HK processor and, most notably, a desktop-grade Nvidia GTX 980 graphics processor.
In an interview with techradar, Asus ROG Global Marketing Director Derek Yu said Asus approached Nvidia in early 2014 for a new GPU with unprecedented overclocking capabilities to match the power of a desktop. The Taiwanese electronics firm wanted a graphics chip for notebooks that could handle overclocking up to 180-watts – by comparison, the Nvidia GTX 980M tops out with an energy draw of 157-watts without overclocking.
"The intention was to challenge people on what they envisioned a mobile GPU could be," Yu said. "At the same time, we have to come up with a thermal solution that matches this kind of requirement, so having a liquid cooling system has been part of the project from the get go."
Custom fittings
Typically, liquid cooling systems are large and heavy, even with some of the smallest all-in-one solutions found in desktops. They all require multiple parts, including a pump and piping to circulate the liquid in addition to large, fin-style radiators to dissipate the heat. It's not at all surprising that there hasn't been a liquid cooled laptop before the GX700.
Asus tackled this problem by splitting the liquid cooling system in half. Rather than trying to fit all the necessary components inside of the notebook itself, the GX700 only has a few extra components built into it, including water-channels and water for the coolant to pass through. Meanwhile, the majority of the liquid cooling system's components, such as the pump, radiators and 90mm fans, are all found inside the dock.
"The water cooling section interacts with the existing heat pipes thermal system inside the laptop, so those two work in tandem together," Yu explained.
"It actually utilizes the current heat pipes that are connected to the important critical parts," he continued. "But now the water cooling part will take away, [and] offload the heat away from the system toward the radiators [on the dock]."
On top of cooling the laptop's most crucial components (such as the GPU and CPU), the system also helps put the entire system on ice – down to the storage modules and RAM. Naturally, the liquid cooling only kicks in when the laptop is docked with its massive pod.
A closer look inside
A closed loop system
Water interestingly is both one of the most effective solutions for cooling computers and something that could completely fry your system with a few drops. And so, in most cases, liquid cooling setups usually are completely closed-loop, water-tight systems.
However, given the mobile nature of laptops, a completely self-contained system wouldn't work with the GX700. Instead, Asus had to come up with a completely leak-proof design that would allow the gaming laptop to undock regularly.
"We designed a base that's stable enough so [that] when the pipes go in, it lines up perfectly," Yu said. "If something is crooked on one side or tilted on the other side, you're going to start to see spills."
When attaching the GX700 to the dock, the laptop sits on multiple metal posts, positioning the laptop vertically and horizontally. Meanwhile, when you push down the massive metal arm to extend the connecting elements, it creates a water-tight seal replete with two hooks that firmly attach the cooling base to the notebook.
Maximizing the footprint
Beyond creating a system that actually worked, Yu said it was important to design a system that was thin, too.
From its PC-grade components to the traditional heat pipes and the extra liquid cooling channels, the GX700 has a lot of components bumping around inside its interior – yet it measures roughly an inch thick. By comparison, top of the line gaming laptops, like the MSI GT80 Titan and Alienware 17, measure 1.93 inches and 1.35 inches thick, respectively.
"[There are] all of these are extra pipes, extra water blocks, extra mechanisms that secure all these water components, so it was very difficult to fit everything in yet trying to maintain the performance," Yu explained.
In the end, it all came down to carefully arranging all the disparate parts of the laptop and improving the thermal performance. Regardless of the whether the liquid cooling system is in use or not, Yu explained the notebook can take advantage of its desktop-grade GPU up to 105-watts, even with just basic air cooling.
"You can undock it, so it can actually be portable; and when you're not looking for portability anyway, that's when you dock it in," Yu expounded.
Going internal
Now that we know a liquid cooled gaming laptop is even possible, the most logical progression is a system that's completely internalized and does not require a dock. However, Yu suggests that this wouldn't work in reality because of two key issues.
"This was always one of the areas that we're investigating into, but right now the plan is still going external," Yu said. "The key lies in how do you not only transfer the heat, but to dissipate it with air."
As it's currently designed, all the heat is drawn away from the GX700 through water pipes and exhausted externally through the radiators built into the dock. Trying to put everything inside of the notebook itself would make the cooling system less efficient, not to mention make the whole device much thicker, too.
"Once it gets too huge, then you kind of lose the point of being a laptop," Yu said.
He went on to explain how the GX700 offers the best in both worlds, with portability when you want it and performance when it is docked.
Aside from liquid cooling, Yu said Asus is researching other systems, including a 3D vapor chamber that it recently introduced in its ROG G752 laptop. There are also older iterations of the GX700 that are still on the drawing board.
"We actually have several iterations of a quad-cooling module," Yu said. "Some of our earlier ones were even bigger than what it is right now, but we are trying to constantly tweak it to get to the right size with the right performance."
If there's one thing to liquid cooling, it's that you're never done tinkering with it. That ethos seems to be alive throughout Asus, and it isn't done refining its systems for laptops just yet.
- It's time to get ready for CES 2016
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