Hitachi has announced the commercial launch of its water-cooled notebook PC, a 1.8-GHz mobile Pentium 4-based machine which uses a patented Hitachi system to aid heat dissipation.
Most notebooks are cooled by air fans, and as processors have grown more powerful and begun to generate more heat, these fans have become more numerous, larger, and have needed to spin faster.
This has also meant that fans have become noisier and might not be suitable for use in places like libraries, Hitachi says.
The new Flora 270W Silent Model uses a water-based solution tank, instead of a fan or fans for cooling down the processor. Hitachi announced a working prototype using this technology in February.
"The efficiency of a water cooling system and the air cooling system are about the same but the biggest difference is the noise the latter creates," says Masayuki Akabane, a Hitachi spokesperson.