This Perfectly Silent Fan Took 300 Years to Make

This is an ionic cooling module. It moves all the heat away from your device completely silently with zero moving parts. That sounds impossible. And yet, that's exactly what Ventiva claims. That a 300-year-old physics principle is going to revolutionize PC cooling. And I wouldn't believe them except that they brought receipts. Their booth contains numerous real world examples of both the space savings and the cooling advantages that their technology can deliver in everything from handheld gaming consoles to VR headsets to this highowered stricks Halo laptop reference design that was built in collaboration with AMD and is running silently. Are you kidding me right now? Here's another demo. This is just a module in a 3D printed housing. All I can hear from this is the whoosh of about 1 CFM of air. I can more feel it than hear it. It doesn't even buzz or vibrate like competing fanless coolers from Fore. And even better, this ain't no carbon nano tubes someday technology. According to their CEO, the production challenges are already behind them and they're ready to manufacture millions of units at scale like now. and even at prices that are competitive with good old-fashioned spinning plastic. Let's dive deep after a good old-fashioned spinning segway. To our sponsor, SY, their eSIM is the easy and affordable way for you to stay connected while you travel. Just download the app, install the eim, and get straight to sightseeing. Save 15% with code LTT at checkout. The phenomenon of ionic wind was first observed way back in 1709 by Francis Hawkby when he rubbed a glass tube creating a charge that generated a subtle force on his cheek. Then the technology sat mostly unused for like hundreds of years. But no more. Here's how it works. This tiny wire that you can barely see gets energized, which forms a plasma that strips electrons off of nearby molecules. Those now positive ions race towards this negatively charged grill at the backside of the cooler. On the way, they collide with inert air modules, creating a subtle but consistent flow of air through the module. It's not a ton of air flow, only about 1 CFM, which compared to a typical laptop fan that might be rated for 5 CFM or more, sounds like a problem. But see, there's a lot more to life than bigger number, more better. See, fans are generally rated in open air, and by the time you put them in a laptop chassis, with all the airflow restriction that that entails, those numbers fall off a lot. Let's go straight over to the most impressive demo. This Ventiva X AMD reference design that lines up three ionic cooling modules along the backside to cool a Stricks Halo SOC that's running at 28 W. So, yeah, the power has been reduced a little, but we're still talking about a 16 core Zen 5 CPU with up to 128 gigs of RAM and raw GPU power that is not that far off of the PlayStation 5. It's running right now and it's completely silent. For contrast, here's my stricks Halo daily driver. Can you like really hear that now? Yeah, now she's ramping up. Meanwhile, over here, dude, I bet you can hear that one over this. Hold on. I'm going to turn that off. absolutely nothing, just heat. But the silence is just part of the story. And to really understand the value of these ionic cooling modules, we've actually got to go a little bit deeper into laptop design. This is a pretty typical laptop motherboard. The CPU or SOC goes in the middle. VRMs and RAM go around it. And your fans go here and here. This creates a lot of challenges for designers. First and foremost of all is the waste. See, nobody makes a PCB that is this shape. So, the valuable copper here and here gets taken out and sent to the recycler. Bye-bye, money. Nice knowing you. Also, this region right here is referred to as a pinch point because high-speed IO and charging goes where? On the sides where the user can plug into it, right? But it needs to connect to what? the processor here. So to get all of the necessary power and data traces through here often requires costly many layered PCBs in order to maintain signal integrity. The last big one is particularly relevant in light of Nvidia's recent RTX Spark announcement. High-speed memory must be physically close to your processing. And if you can create more room around the processor, that means more potential for massive local memory to run more useful AI models locally. All in, Ventiva estimates that by using their cooling modules, they can return as much as 7,200 square millm to board designers that they can use however they see fit. Less costly PCB, sure, bigger battery, more storage, the sky's is the limit. And Ventiva already did the heavy lifting for you to make their coolers easy to integrate. For instance, an ionic cooler, as you guys can probably imagine, doesn't exactly run off of a standard 4 pin 12vt fan header, right? No, it doesn't. Which is why they created these. This is a microcontrollerdriven power supply that handles everything. So standard four pin PWM goes in and airflow adjustments to your ionic cooler go out. It can either be integrated directly into the motherboard like we saw in that AMD system or maintained as a separate module. And it handles some other key functions as well. One of the key dangers to the longevity of an ionic cooler is dust. So, the microcontroller can run periodic cleaning cycles where it actually runs a tiny little slide across the wire to clear it of any contaminants. And, okay, this one's really cool. It can also detect dust and then report through software to even do things like let your IT team know, hey, building B has a lot of dust going into the laptops. Do you want to look into that? Like, holy crap. The microcontroller is firmware flashable, so if Ventiva ever needs to fine-tune its operation, that can be done out in the field. And each power supply module can do up to three ionic coolers. Another piece of the ease of use puzzle is modularity. So far, we've focused on the widest module, but you can clearly see in this Nintendo Switch 2 mockup that they're using a much narrower one. Well, they've actually got a whole range of them, and all are designed to be stackable depending on what fits best in a given device. So cool. So, at this point, my biggest question was, if this stuff is so great, then why has nobody ever done it? And in the simplest terms, the answer was because no one has ever done it. See, fans are pretty good, pretty cheap. And if you want to make one, there's a thousand books that you could read on design, manufacturing, stress testing, failure analysis, you name it. Nobody ever got fired for building a laptop with a fan. By contrast, to make ionic cooling a reality. They had to write the thousand books, and there was no guarantee that there would be a mass-producible product that anybody wanted at the end of the rainbow. There's a lot of secret sauce that they won't really get into, like the material of the wire or how exactly their microcontroller manages voltages and currents across the wire. But the bottom line is through a combination of fine-tuning those things and the actual physical configuration and spacing of the modules, they figured out mass production. But even that doesn't guarantee success. The tech industry is a low margin, cutthroat industry, which has created a very riskaverse culture. And convincing OEMs to throw out these and adopt these required a better pitch than well, it's quiet and it cools your thing cuz they already had that. They had to show the space savings and the benefits for cutting edge SOC's like stricks Halo and RTX Spark. And sounds like things are going pretty good right now. I mean, to be clear, it's not going to be perfect for everything. This ASUS Nook mockup is probably about the limit of what would make sense given that it needs six total modules in triple stacks on each side, two power supply microcontroller combo things. Any bigger than this, and it might be better to just stick a fan in it and call it a day. But still, this is first gen, baby. And I'm excited to see what's coming in the future. Like, ah man, I'd love to build like my ideal handheld with something like this. Silent gaming in the palm of my hand. Yes, please. And segue to my sponsor. Yes, please to that, too. Sy, it's summertime, which means it's the perfect time to kick up your feet, relax by the pool, or maybe even explore a new part of our world. Except you don't want your mobile carrier punishing you with those ridiculous roaming charges every day just to stay connected, do you? That money is much better spent on a bowl of ramen or your fourth fruity drink on the beach. 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