1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods and apparatus for using a circulating liquid to cool heat-generating components on a circuit board.
2. Background of the Related Art
Special expansion cards may be designed in order to accelerate the performance of compute intensive applications. Such special expansion cards may be added to the base compute node to enhance specific types of calculations. For example, NVIDIA makes a special expansion card referred to as a General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) and INTEL makes a special expansion card referred to as Many Integrated Cores (MIC). In order to generate the highest level of added performance, special expansion cards, such as these just mentioned, consume the maximum allowed power through the PCIe spec, which is 300 watts. This high power state presents a difficult cooling challenge, especially in today's server form factors. When the highly processor intensive systems are water cooled, the resulting lower junction temperatures can lead to less energy consumption due to a decrease in wasteful leakage current. Therefore, the systems can be better managed from a temperature and power consumption perspective.
Unfortunately, simply increasing airflow across a special expansion card is a not a total solution. Adding higher airflow rates comes at the expense of noisier system acoustics, additional physical accommodations for handling the higher air flow volumes, and greater power consumption for the purpose of generating the high airflow rates.