The VapoChill LS, like its predecessor is based on Vapour Phase change technology. This is basically a fancy description for the way any household fridge works, but look at the size of your fridge, and compare it to the size of a vapochill and you will see that squeezing the technology into such a compact unit is no small achievement! The Vapochill is made up of four core components; the compressor, the condenser, the capillary tube and the evaporator. Flowing throughout this system is a refrigerant. The ideal refrigerant would be non-toxic, unreactive, stable for the lifetime of the refrigerator, ozone-safe, but most importantly we need a compound that has a low boiling point. It’s a well known fact that CFCs fulfil all of these criteria perfectly, apart from one - they deplete the Ozone layer. Inside the VapoChill you will find a refrigerant that has an efficiency close or equal to CFCs, but without the negative environmental impact. R507 was developed by a company called Daikin, and is a state of the art chemical which fulfils all of the criteria listed above. The Vapochill XE and Mach II GT coolers actually use R404a, a similar product. R507 is slightly more effective at higher heat loads, however. The LS is therefore able to remove a huge 250W.
In its native warm gaseous form, the R507 is sucked from the evaporator (the section that extracts the heat from the CPU) into the compressor. As its name suggests, the compressor is where the gas is compressed into a liquid form. This is known as change-of-state or phase-change. The liquefied refrigerant is then passed down to the evaporator which is responsible for transferring heat from the CPU into the R507. The energy required to boil the liquid from a liquid to a gas is substantial, and this energy is extracted from the CPU head. To allow this to happen however, the pressure must be reduced on transit to the evaporator. This is accomplished by passing it through a tube with a very small diameter (a capillary). Without the VapoChill attached to anything, this can result in such a substantial drop in temperature that the CPU readout was actually recording -55C in a room with an ambient temperature of 26C. That’s a ∆T of over 81 degrees C – amazing performance.
The heat transferred from the CPU into the refrigerant must of course be removed before the cycle can repeat, and that's where the condenser comes in. This is accomplished by running the warm vapour through what is basically a high-surface area radiator. For maximum efficiency this condenser features copper pipes and a 120mm fan blowing through it.
So we have now discussed how the VapoChill works, and have also determined that the device gets very, very cold. Why is this of use to computers? Two reasons, the first of which is stability. The main cause of computer failure and instability is thermally related. Whilst it might not seem much like of a problem to a home user, in a workstation environment, where perhaps 50+ computers are all kept in one room, with each system enclosed in a desk to minimise noise and maximise space, it's easy to see how a computer that operates stably in an open environment at say 50 degrees C under full load becomes an unstable mess at 70+ once enclosed in a busy office environment. During the nine years that have passed since the first Pentium processor was released, processor speed has increased by neraly 60 times. With this, so has the heat they produce and even a lowly 2.8GHz Pentium 4 processor produces some 600% more heat than the Pentium 66MHz. The VapoChill is approximately sixty times more effective than even the best heatsink-fan solutions at removing CPU heat, and fifteen times more effective than the best water coolers. During sub ambient operation the failure rate of a CMOS device has been shown to decrease by an approximate factor of 2 for every 10ºC decrease in die temperature.
The second reason is all together more interesting, and more than likely the reason you are reading this, is that the VapoChill can allow you to increase the performance of your processor by 35% or more with no reduction in stability, providing you have the correct equipment of course. Buying a VapoChill if you are using something like an Elite or PC-Chips motherboard is a definite No, as they simply do not have the options available to effectively increase your performance. Users wanting to get the best of their vapochill should definitely look at performance brand motherboards such as Abit, Asus, Epox and Albatron. If you are using a Pentium 4 CPU, I would have to recommend boards based upon the Intel 875 DDR chipset, where as for the Athlon 64 platform something based around a Socket 939 VIA K8T800 PRO or nVidia nForce3 Ultra chipset should overclock the best. People have also been having great success with newer socket 754 boards, and the Asus SK8N is well known to overclock very well if you have a Socket 940 Athlon FX/Opteron.
