When we talk about desktop PC cooling we have several alternatives: from air- cooled heatsinks to custom liquid cooling systems, passing through closed-loop AIOs. However, if we go to the ecosystem of laptops we have no choice, since all of them are only air-cooled. Why aren’t there liquid-cooled laptop options? The answer is because you can’t, and we’ll explain it to you below.
Being able to cool a laptop with liquid cooling would be a great innovation, since a big problem with laptops and especially those designed for gaming is that with the little space they have inside, the cooling systems are usually quite ineffective. and in the end almost all laptops suffer from temperature problems. However, if at this point they do not look portable with this type of cooling, it is for something, and we are going to tell you about it.
Why is liquid cooling not possible in laptops?
Essentially because of size. You can create (and in fact, as we will tell you later, it has already been tried) blocks of water that are flat enough to fit inside a laptop without increasing its thickness too much, but the biggest problem is that the pump does not can miniaturize so much, just as the radiator cannot be reduced so much since its efficiency in dissipating heat depends largely on its surface (for this reason, for example, an AIO with a 240 mm radiator is generally more efficient than one with 120mm radiator).
Essentially, if you wanted to integrate a closed liquid cooling circuit in a laptop, its size would have to be enormously enlarged to accommodate both the pump and a radiator that has enough surface area to be able to dissipate heat using fans, and if so, the laptop it would lose its reason for being because it would literally lose almost all its “portability”. With the technology we have today, you cannot integrate a complete liquid into a laptop without making it gigantic.
And hybrid solutions?
Already in the past we have seen some hybrid solutions that integrate a traditional cooling in the laptop but that in turn have the possibility of connecting them to a dock that integrates a liquid cooling circuit, as for example we already saw in the famous ASUS GX700VO.
However, if this famous laptop sounds familiar to you for being the first in the world to integrate a similar system, you will remember that it was a tremendous fiasco and that, in addition, it proved to give many problems due to the connections of the tubes and the liquid (you had to fill the deposit constantly). In addition, the equipment had considerable dimensions and weight, not to mention the docking that had to be fixed because there was the pump, two radiators and the rest of the circuit, making the laptop not so “portable” precisely.
Not long ago the famous overclocker der8auer mounted a homemade liquid cooling system on an Acer Predator gaming laptop with considerable success, since it managed to significantly reduce the operating temperatures of the equipment. The problem is the same, we need to have the water blocks inside the laptop and the inlet and outlet of the cooling liquid in self-locking tubes to connect the rest of the circuit.
Although these hybrid liquid cooling systems for laptops prove to perform better than any conventional air cooling system in laptops, in the end you are again losing the essence of what a laptop is, since you will have to have a place fixed to which to connect the “dock” with the radiators, the pump and other components necessary for a liquid cooling to work.
Will we see liquid cooling in laptops at some point?
As we have shown, approximations have already been made but in all cases with a hybrid system that takes the most bulky components out of the laptop. With the technology that we currently have, it is impossible to integrate the entire system into a laptop without increasing its size too much, since with the thickness that they now have, there literally does not fit a pump and a radiator in conditions, so unfortunately it is not something that we go Let’s see, at least not in the short or medium term.
To be able to integrate liquid cooling systems in laptops, we would need the way of moving the liquid and dissipating the heat to evolve in some way, especially not to need a large surface radiator in which to dissipate the heat. How to do it? Surely there are research teams that will be investigating it, but for now it is neither possible nor knows how to do it.