Cooling tech

has cooling tech peaked?

no, because it doesnt bling enough yet. It needs more LED's and the word "GAMING COOLER" written on every cooler in red illuminated text. Also it will only peak when some shithead creates a cooler that is bigger than their house

I thought RGB gave you more fps

Is that a stiirling heat engine running a fan?

That’s adorable

Not worth it, they should instead use blue LEDs for additional cooling.

CM V10
its a TEC cooler I use it every day.

Not a bad idea actually.
The question is if that thing is fast enough for efficient cooling.

depends what it is cooling because its not the cpu on the pic

Nah. There's plenty more to be done in both the SFF (small form factor, uATX/mITX, < 20L) space and LFF (large form factor, ATX/E-ATX, 55+L) space.

SFF could benefit a lot with more creative uses of empty space, and with combined component cooling (like heatpipes that touch both CPU and GPU and lead to the same heatsink, similar to a custom water loop). These would have to be more custom just by necessity, but imagine a case with a radiator built in that has heatpipes leading to the mounting points.
You take the cooler off the GPU, and mount half the heatpipes onto it using some sort of 1D-flexible system and precise machining. Then you could do the same thing to the CPU. Attach one 140mm fan to a heatsink like that, assuming it's more than 4cm thick, and you have enough cooling for a midrange system (65w CPU + 150W GPU). With further optimizations (thicker heatsink, 2 fan system, etc) you could have a case 10L or less with cooling fit for an ultra-high spec system with just 2 ultra quiet fans.

LFF just needs more creative cooling systems, like a small compressor cooler, or peltier to move heat to a more manageable place. There's lots that could be done with the space they have; silence for them should be prioritized over all else. Hell, you could probably get a case with a 360+mm radiator that passively cools the system just by convection.

They already have pretty much everything your post right now that you can make/buy.
There are semi-custom SFF cases that use heatpipes to direct heat from CPU and GPU to a large external heatsink (one uses the exterior of the case itself)
For LFF we have already had cases with compressors and even a CPU cooler with a peltier and people basically have made cases out of almost nothing but radiators and the only moving part is a water pump and it's enough to cool a high end system.
The issue with all of these cases and cooling systems that at the end of the day traditional heatsinks and fans and water cooling do there job and are just plain easier

Yeah, we do have those in very niche spots (the Streacom DB4 comes to mind), I'm talking there's more to be done in that space. The DB4 is nice, but it's still bigger than necessary and has throttling issues. Those could be solved by a better heatsink (more convection channels etc), or even a different design that focused all the heatpipes into a traditional heatsink like I talked about in my post. The addition of a single fan could direct the heat away from the user while still remaining almost totally silent.

In the LFF space, you're right, but again, very niche products with issues of their own; you're right that traditional stuff does its job fine enough, I'm just saying that there's certainly better ways of doing things that *could* have mainstream appeal. If a compressor was just to chill the air, for example, making it smaller and quieter, I can imagine lower RPMs and faster components could be advertised very effectively.

But, yeah, you're not wrong, the mainstream products are pretty much optimized to their maximum; I just think other options could be brought in that could beat them in several markets.

If more motherboards came with MXM support and there was somewhat of an agreement of where the socket and MXM GPU was mounted you could have some really simply engineered SFF cases where heatpipes could route over the CPU and GPU and then route into a large heatsink at the top and since where using MXM where the GPU lies flat installation would be just as easy as any normal CPU tower cooler.
So yeah there can be some stuff done but the issues I see is making a case that works with all the various motherboards and GPUs

Yeah, I really see the industry moving more towards SFF, and I hope that means MXM or some similar data/power slot takes off into a standard part for SFF motherboards. I also wish there was more cross-industry support for sub-mITX motherboard form factors, like STX, but so far that seems limited to pretty much exclusively Intel 6th gen processors.
My ideal setup would be something like an STX AM4 motherboard with an MXM VEGA Nano-style card, with heatpipes connecting both to a single 140x140x80mm heatsink with a 140mm fan slapped onto it, in a case that's sub-10L. It'd likely have enough cooling capacity to cool a Ryzen 7 chip with the VEGA card, as long as both were undervolted and perhaps underclocked a bit.
What we really need is standardization and mainstream adoption for SFF parts; with that, sub-20L could become easy and the "standard" way of doing things, even without these wacky setups we're discussing here.

No, the material science is there, but thats not going to filter through to the consumer market for decades.
There are materials like PGS being used in mobile phones, they might be utilized in thin laptops, but they won't have any tremendous effect there.

Unless you pay for a heatsink made from silver, you're stuck with copper and aluminum. You don't get thermal transfer efficiency better than that without looking at exotic expensive materials in most all cases. When it comes to those two theres only so many factors involved in making a decent heat stink. Thermal mass, surface area, etc. We're already at the point of tremendous diminishing returns with large heatsinks like the Noctua 14 and 15.

One of the reason why SFF parts for sub-itx and even mini-itx sometimes is so few and far in between is they don't appeal to a mass market and motherboard/case OEMs just haven't put in any effort into some standardization.
ATX/mini-ATX are still a super large majority of sales even if most people never populate there system with anything more than a GPU (I'm even guilty of this).
Sub-20L could very easy come if the money was there

the solutions exist to perform truly retarded amounts of cooling, as in your entire system, ALL of it, being maintained at 0C, but they require custom, careful engineering, fluid thermodynamic simulations from Dassault being used to determine specifics, and liquids such as Fluorinert FC-770 which are INSANELY poisonous and carcinogenic and which cost something like 18,000 USD per gallon. these systems can even be cost-effectively miniaturized and ran virtually silently. but it's expensive.

Is that a sterling engine?

Thermal dynamics would suggest its probably not effective.

It's using waste heat so it works, for sure. It's also a self regulating system. The hotter the chip gets, the faster the fan spins, the faster the fan spins, the more heat it dissipates which will cause the fan to slow down, so honestly it's running at the perfect efficiency for it's dissipation limits at all times.

Is that a fucking sterling engine?

yes

if the only addition a company can make to its product is RGBs, it has peaked

Who's the fucking retard that put giant stickers on the fins to block half the air flow?