BUT WHAT ABOUT THE COOLANT?
As for coolant, the development in this field has been a mix of two different angles. It’s well known that one of the most efficient coolants out there, particularly for DIY customers, has been deionized or distilled water. Certain refrigerants are available, but these are typically reserved for top-tier enterprise-grade machines that require significantly greater thermal capacity than with the likes of any consumer PC.
Because de-ionized water is so readily available and affordable with such high thermal conductivity, the need for any advanced coolant, at least in the
DIY PC space, has been fairly minimal.
For the longest time, Mayhems, a British company, set up by a slightly eccentric ex-army officer called Michael Wood, was the go-to brand for any would-be liquid cooler. The company famously developed its Aurora line of particle coolants that held suspended metallic flakes within a glycol-based coolant to not only sufficiently cool the components inside, but also produce a mesmerizing visual effect. It took a number of iterations to develop a composition that didn’t build up internal gunk within the blocks themselves, though.
There were two variants available on first launch: Aurora 1 and Aurora 2. Aurora 1 was specifically designed for show-builds with larger particles giving a far greater dynamic effect in the loops in question, while Aurora 2 was a longerlife variant with smaller particles that lasted for a few months before the reflective flakes fell out of the fluid. Mayhems also produced a line of opaque coolants, known as the Pastel line, which provided a completely opaque solution for your coolant, instead of the transparent mixtures available at the time.
Mayhems also worked closely with the University of Cambridge to develop a 6nm 2d particle coolant (which you may have seen in our November 2020 issue) that had significantly better thermal conductivity than water, and actually improved the performance of some water blocks over time by filling in the imperfections in the CNC’d metal internally.