Sorry, Californians, you can't have this: Asus to build WATER COOLED notebook Asus has unveiled a gaming notebook that comes with its own water cooling system. The GX700, shown off by the company ahead of the IFA conference in Berlin, connects to an external cooling system that pumps water through the notebook to cool off its overclocked Intel Skylake CPU. Asus GX700 laptop with dock Is it still a …
ASUS typically offer a very comprehensive range allowing you to pick the right features at a reasonable price, so they are hard to resist sometimes. That said all of the ASUS stuff I've purchased had issues out of the box. Anything from something simple like needing to reset the BIOS before use (or no boot at all) through to a completely dead memory channel, I have never had an ASUS motherboard without some kind of issue out of the box.
Admittedly that is a small sample size of a few boards - but after 3 or 4 completely different boards all having issues there's a reason the sample size isn't getting any bigger! Would probably buy Abit if they hadn't packed up years ago, so I'm generally using ASRock at the moment and find them to be just as good, with an equally comprehensive range of board types and features. Generally a little cheaper as well, which doesn't hurt.
I also have a liking of Asus products, but I (and a lot of other people) have discovered a small flaw with the Asus MemoPad HD7 ME173X, whilst it's a good tablet with a great screen, accidentally dropping it can cause the touchscreen to stop working properly/altogether.
Why? Because they engineered it with tight tolerances, so any flexing of the unit can cause the touchscreen ribbon cable to be pulled out of its sockets.
It's easy to fix, simply pop the back off and re-insert the cable, but this leads into another potential problem, if you forget to remove the MicroSD card beforehand it can irrepairably damage the socket when prying the back off.
If you want really scorching showers, try playing Minecraft for a few hours.
It's amazing what the poor vendors will do for eyeballs. I would expect the next announcement to involve molten sodium heat transfer - do not use within 100M of flammable structures.
try playing Minecraft for a few hours.
Given the graphics of Minecraft are worse than the original Wolfenstein on floppies, I wouldn't have thought that the processor would break a sweat on it. But the point is moot, because now Microsoft own Minecraft, it will soon diminish to nothing.
Another news article on this particular laptop says that only the GPU, which is an as-yet-unreleased chip from Nvidia, is cooled by the water-cooling system.
I do have to agree this is overkill, and will have limited appeal. However, a few people with severe space constraints may well find this laptop to be preferable to a desktop. Apparently, also, some laptops already exist that use heat pipes or closed-loop liquid systems for extra cooling; that might be less exciting, but it would perhaps have been more reasonable.
"... some laptops already exist that use heat pipes ..."
I think most if not all of them do. My old Dell laptop (it died ten tears ago) had a heat pipe inside, as I found when I dismantled it as a matter of interest. The thing about water cooling is that water is cheap and safe and you can take the heat outside of the laptop and then use a big radiator/fan system to dump it. A major limiting factor in laptop heat dissipation is the volume of air that you can force over the radiator fins and the size of the fins themselves.
Water is safe except when it comes to electricity, not so much because it can itself conduct electricity but because it can readily dissolve stuff that can (it has high potential as a solvent, particularly under certain conditions such as high temperatures). So you always have to be mindful of a potential leak. Thus you usually need to be able to get inside the machine in case something like that happens.
Not only that, pure water doesn't stay that way for long because it's an excellent solvent and only gets better as the temperature goes up. That's one of the reasons you have to be careful with water-cooling a PC: there's a risk of it finding some weak point and dissolving the pipes or seals, causing a leak.
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"pure water doesn't stay that way for long because it's an excellent solvent and only gets better as the temperature goes up."
Which is the primary reason why using it as the primary coolant/moderator in nuclear reactors is a spectacularly bad idea. You'll find the others once it finishes dissolving things - like pipework.
Wrong. Even pure water will conduct electricity. H20 ionises to H+ OH-. At any given time a small fraction of water will exist in the ionised form, allowing it to conduct electricity. Furthermore, more water will ionise in the presence of an electric current.
"A major limiting factor in laptop heat dissipation is the volume of air that you can force over the radiator fins and the size of the fins themselves."
And the tendency of said fins to catch dust particles.
I've had to deal with a sizable number of overheating laptops over the years which when dismantled appeared to have a block of felt between the fan and the heatsink fins - which wasn't there when shipped from the factory.
When you find out how felt is made (or used to be at any rate), the similarity shouldn't be overly surprising.
The Sandia cooler can't come to market soon enough.
External GPU ? I can't believe that performance is not going to take a hit for that. And frankly, lugging that humongous box around plus the laptop is rather ridiculous, but if it rocks your boat, good for you.
I'll stick to upgrading my desktop box. Watercooling that is not a problem, there are no more space constraints and besides, LAN parties are in the past for me. Much easier and more practical to game with my friends over the Internet.
Not everyone uses their portable PCs while actually on the move, some use them mostly at a limited number of fixed locations - quite possibly involving a desk at each location and a car as transport. For this use just having one or two boxes and minimal cables is sufficient portability, it doesn't necessarily have to be light - what used to sometimes be called a luggable is enough.
A couple of example use cases:
1) LAN parties. Yes games can be played over the internet these days, but everyone in one room with beer and snacks is more fun.
2) My work laptop spends almost all of it's powered on time in a docking station at work connected to multiple external monitors. It does however get undocked most evenings in case there is a need to work from home the next day. Given everything except the laptop itself stays in the office I'd not turn down an extra bulky docking station that gave a performance boost (though I can't see work going for this particular model).
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"2) My work laptop spends almost all of it's powered on time in a docking station at work connected to multiple external monitors. It does however get undocked most evenings in case there is a need to work from home the next day."
We recently had a complaint from one our users with such a setup.
He'd left his laptop at home and was complaining loudly that the docking station wouldn't boot up.
It might some day be a collector's item, if you don't mind waiting 30 or so years. I'd love to see a benchmark compared with a Dell Precision or Alienware mobile workstation or some other high-end laptop to see if all the hype amounts to anything though.
It's obvious that it was done just to ignite interest in Asus' product line. And frankly, Asus stuff has always been good to me. The last several motherboards I've used were Asus, I have an Asus tablet which I'm very happy with, etc. But this is a farce, like when you see someone's vision of the future at an auto show.
Re. water and conductivity, I'm sure this would use distilled water or some kind of hybrid coolant to prevent clogs/corrosion.
Gaming laptops are actually the only innovative and well built products in an otherwise featureless desert of sub $1000,- landfill laptops and other cheaply manufactured IT stuff.
The amazing engineering of my MSI GT70-2QE is just magic, this kind of equipment rekindled my passion for hardware. The ASUS machine is interesting, the new 4K display standard is a challenge for current graphics hardware due to the required frame rates for gaming. The required NVIDIA 980M class cards in SLI mode will probably generate considerable amounts of heat, so water cooling might be necessary, specially when also a power guzzling I7 is thrown in for good measure.
Don't be an ass.
Water heating is not a totally unreasonable solution to getting heat out of a GPU and/or CPU. ASUS gear is solid. I use an ROG laptop for dev work - few "business" laptops will go up to 32GB RAM/17" at 1920 screen for that price and I need multiple large VMs. This thing will only heat under load, efficiency is likely quite good at low revs.
If you don't like gaming hardware or their price, that's totally OK.
If you think gaming contributes significantly to emissions, as opposed to cars, planes and other inherently high-emission items, then you need lotsa basic remedial math.
(Flames, because)
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