Noctua gives pumpless Thermosiphon water cooler a cautious introduction date

When you say Computex, you say a visit to the Noctua stand. Every year the Austrian company provides a glimpse into its R&D pipeline, and one of the projects is the Thermosiphon. This water cooler without a pump has now progressed so far that Noctua dares to make a provisional introduction forecast.

You can start saving in advance (and you will probably have to save, because this won't exactly be cheap), because the release is tentatively scheduled for Q3 next year. Then you can buy the Thermosiphon cooler: a water cooler that works without a pump and is based on natural convection. We explained how that works in a preview last year, but in short it works as follows.

The CPU heatspreader is hot and heats a special fluid in the cooling block of the Thermosiphon. The liquid boils at a low temperature, absorbs the heat from the heat spreader and transports it in the gas phase to the radiator. The 360mm radiator is actively cooled by three fans. This cools the gas, making it a liquid again. It sinks back to the cooling block due to gravity, where it exchanges heat with the CPU. The whole process starts again.

Improvements since last year

In this way, a pump that simply pumps a liquid around is unnecessary. The Thermosiphon would therefore have a much longer lifespan than a regular AIO water cooler. Ten years is the estimate: the limiting factors are the flexible pipes and how quickly the liquid escapes through them.

This year's demo showed a few improvements. For example, the cooling block had been greatly improved, allowing much more power to be dissipated: roughly 200W compared to 100W a year ago. The internal structure of the cooling block has been adjusted so that the liquid circulates better and cooking bubbles are removed more quickly and do not hinder heat exchange.

One of the factors why development is a bit faster is the rapid prototyping process: Noctua can now produce four 'evaporators' per day instead of one per month, which makes iterating much faster.

More later

All this means that Noctua dares to give a date of Q3 2027, although the company makes it clear that this is a work-in-progress and that the date can therefore still be pushed back. Next year during Computex we will undoubtedly see more and the project should be a little more crystallized.