Over the past couple of years we’ve worked on everything from a few hundred watts per board with dense air cooling to multi-kW liquid-cooled nodes (direct-to-chip and immersion). The copper heat-pipe + aluminum fin stacks you see here are pretty much at the practical limit of what air can still do reliably. The other set is a copper cold plate with integrated DLC jets that has now been running 24/7 at full load for over 18 months in the field — temperature control has stayed solid.
The questions we get asked most often:
How much more can we still squeeze out of an air-cooled chassis of a given size?
When moving to liquid, how do we keep the total cost of ownership and service complexity within reason?
Where is the real crossover point between air and liquid for a given power density?
We don’t have universal answers, but we do have a growing pile of real measured data (and a few expensive lessons). In the last year alone we’ve helped customers push average heat dissipation from ~220 W/dm² to close to 380 W/dm² on air, and on the liquid side we’re comfortably holding single-card loads above 1.5 kW under 45 °C delta-T.