The bottom line is that effective cooling can have a tremendous impact on the performance and power of a modern microprocessor. Based on academic studies and real world examples, water cooling can easily improve performance by 5% and performance/watt by 15-20%. The benefits are likely to be even larger for high power GPUs and server processors. Enthusiasts and overclockers have plenty of justification for an obsession with cooling; lowering the CPU temperature with liquid nitrogen or a Peltier to around 5C could yield even larger gains than the ones documented by Fujitsu. Reliability is an additional benefit of lower temperatures and one of the reasons that IBM mainframes have been water cooled for decades.
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