Phase Change Cooling Overclocks Nvidia’s GTX 580 Past 1GHz

Finding new and innovative ways to cool down hardware has always been a hobby for computer enthusiasts and recently a company that is known as PowerQuest showcased a phase change cooler that enabled it to overclock an Nvidia GTX 580 GPU past the 1GHz mark.

Popular among enthusiasts a few years back, phase change cooling relies on a compressor that liquefies a gas loaded in the cooling system, which is then used to cool the CPU (the liquid evaporates basically changing its phase).

While this type of cooling has the advantage of keeping the components at freezing temperatures, usually under 0 degrees Celsius, one of its downsides is that the compressor used is particularly noisy for day to day operation.

This is however were PowerQuest LLC enters the stage, as the company has developed a near-silent phase change cooling solution for both CPUs and GPUs.

Patrick Zulli, co-founder and CTO of the company, explained to VR-Zone that the company is enjoying a “meteoric rise” in the workstation and server market, the US Army being one of its most important clients.

To showcase the power of its phase change cooling systems, at this year’s CES fair CompuCold has demonstrated a system that was running a 5.2GHz overclocked Intel Core i7-2600K processor paired together with an Nvidia GTX 580 graphics card featuring a shader clock of 2,016MHz (1GHz GPU).

Despite the high overclock, the GPU temperature seemed to settle at just 16 degrees Celsius while the system was running the PCMark Vantage benchmark.

To put things in perspective, Nvidia recommended GPU frequency for the GTX 580 is set at 772MHz (1,544MHz shaders).

PowerQuest hasn’t said if it has any plans to release its near-silent phase change cooling solution in the retail market anytime soon, and for now it seems to concentrate its efforts on the server space.

Posted in: News, Preview