Hitachi releases water-cooled notebook PC

Phantasm66 · Jul 21, 2002

Hitachi releases water-cooled notebook PC
ITworld.com 7/18/02

Hitachi Ltd. has announced the commercial launch of its water-cooled notebook PC, a 1.8GHz mobile Pentium 4-based machine which uses a patented Hitachi system to aid heat dissipation.

Most notebooks are cooled by air fans, and as processors have grown more powerful and begun to generate more heat, these fans have become more numerous, larger, and have needed to spin faster.

This has also meant that fans have become noisier and might not be suitable for use in places like libraries, Hitachi said.

The new Flora 270W Silent Model uses a water-based solution tank, instead of a fan or fans for cooling down the processor. Hitachi announced a working prototype using this technology in February.

"The efficiency of a water cooling system and the air cooling system are about the same but the biggest difference is the noise the latter creates," said Masayuki Akabane, a Hitachi spokesman.

The water-based solution runs through a flexible tube that is placed over the chips and absorbs heat. The heated water solution is then sent to the display part of the notebook to be stored in a tank where it cools down.

The solution can last for more than five years, the flexible tube can circulate the solution over 20,000 times and the pump works for more than 44,000 hours, the statement said.

Plastic panels separate these water-cooling elements from high-voltage areas, in case of a solution leak from the cooling system. The Tokyo company also offers a three-year guarantee service for the product.

The new products are slightly thicker than existing air-cooled Flora models, in order to show the tank at the back of the LCD (liquid crystal display) panel and hence differentiate the water-cooled machine, Akabane said. The tank also be hidden, he said.

The products are equipped with a 1.8GHz mobile Intel 4 processor, 128M bytes of RAM, a 20G-byte hard disk drive and a 15-inch (37.5-centimeter) color TFT (thin film transistor) LCD (liquid crystal display), and are priced at ¥341,000 (US$2,941). The products can be customized to connect via Ethernet, a modem or an IEEE802.11b interface.

Hitachi started taking custom orders from corporate customers at its online shopping site on Wednesday. The products are expected to be shipped on Sept. 30 in Japan, Akabane said. The company can provide the product for corporate users outside Japan on demand, he said.

The company is still looking at market trends before deciding when to launch the product for the consumer market, he said.

Hitachi has patents for this unique water-cooling system, and is trying to promote it as a standard throughout the industry. Several high-end product makers are in talks with Hitachi for possible adoption of the technology in servers and PDPs (plasma display panels), Akabane said.

Kuriko Miyake is a correspondent for the IDG News Service.

source: http://www.itworld.com/Comp/1345/020718hitachi/

Hitachi creates splash with water cooled P4 notebook
By John Lettice

Hitachi has begun selling a wondrous-sounding water-cooled notebook computer in Japan, according to a report by IDG Tokyo correspondent Kuriko Miyake. The machine runs a 1.8GHz mobile Pentium 4, and has a flexible tube which carries water over the chips in order to dissipate heat.

And then (here comes the best bit) the heated water is run into a visible tank on the back of the LCD in order to cool down. A Hitachi spokesman tells Kuriko that the tank is simply visible in order to differentiate the machine, and that it could well be hidden. But nonsense, we say - if you made it more visible, iMac-ed the lot, maybe, you could have teensie tropical fish swimming round your notebook. Or a lava lamp-type affair.

Well OK, that's maybe a bit far-fetched, but if you were talking the larger real estate of a water-cooled desktop machine the mod people could surely fit a couple of fish in, and still keep them far enough away from the CPU to avoid turning them into breaded scampi.

But we digress. The advantage of water cooling, according to Hitachi, is that it's quieter than air cooling. The efficiency, however, is about the same. So actually it's a possible solution (if you'll pardon the expression) for high-powered desktop equivalents, and if it's longer battery life you want then you really want a CPU that runs cooler.

The machine in question is the Flora 270W Silent Model, and if we were to digress again we'd suggest margarine might be a better cooling substance, but we won't. It's only on sale in Japan, but will be available to corporate customers outside Japan on request, and Hitachi may get deeper into liquids if reaction is positive.

Hitachi, you may recall, was an early Transmeta customer, also selling under the Flora brand in Japan. And you may care to survey some more Hitachi innovation in the Flora range; if you look here, you will see what appears to be the Japan National Soccer Team special edition Flora (Celeron 600, which we feel underestimated the team's actual performance). But that's enough Floras. ®

source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/26273.html

Vehementi · Jul 21, 2002

Wow, Dell must be sooo jealous. Undoubtedly working on one of their own, too

I'd love to see how big this thing is. That and heavy.

The only thing that wavers me from absolutely LOVING this thing is it's longevity. I mean I feel sure Hitachi makes it simple as pie to have it sent in to get the pump replaced in 5 years, but I don't know how much it would cost...

Now, if they included a deal with their laptops to replace it for free, even remind you... Hitachi may just be the new and upcoming laptop company.

I was going to buy an Alienware when I graduated high school, but I dunno now...

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