In an attempt to bring to the mainstream market the thermal advantages offered by liquid cooling, Sunon has developed a unique Liquid Circulation Cooling System, under the brand name Waturbo. The five key components of the traditional liquid cooling system are still represented: a pump, heat exchanger, radiator, fan, and reserve tank. In the Sunon Waturbo system, however, four of those components (everything but the fan) are packaged in a single, sealed liquid-holding radiator device. This radiator device is sandwiched between the fan (the active cooler, which also drives the pump) and the CPU (the heat generating device in the system).

What is missing is all of the rubber tubing that connects the different components in the traditional liquid cooling system. By eliminating the rubber tubing, and all of the connection joints with the different components, the risk of leakage has been drastically reduced. The only possible sources for leakage now are the top and bottom of the radiator device, which interface with the fan and CPU respectively. These two junction points are more easily sealing with the use of standard O-Rings.

The Sunon Waturbo system works as follows:

The exterior fan (item 4) drives the interior pump (item 1) which circulates the cooling water inside the sealed liquid reserve tank (item 5). This circulating water allows the heat exchanger (item 2) at the bottom of the reserve tank to efficiently remove the heat from the CPU. The corresponding temperature increase of the cooling water is dissipated to the outside through the radiator fins (item 3).

The fact that the Sunon Waturbo system uses the fan motor to drive the liquid pump is significant. This dual-action of the fan motor eliminates the need for a separate motor to drive the pump, as is used with the traditional liquid cooling system. On the Sunon Waturbo, the driving torque of the fan impeller is transmitted to the liquid pump through a magnetic coupling. This means that no pump motor or other electronic parts are required in the cooling water. All of this results in a lower risk and lower costs of the Sunon Waturbo system, when compared to the traditional liquid cooling system.

In a conventional air cooling system, the distance between the heat source (CPU) and the heat dissipater (radiator fin) is critical. In practice, a fin that is located at a further distance from the CPU heat source will have a lower fin temperature, resulting in a less efficient thermal system design.

In contrast, the Sunon Waturbo system utilizes forced liquid convection to transfer the CPU heat to the radiator fin. Therefore, there is no significant distance effect between CPU and radiator fin and it is possible to keep the fin temperatures stable and obtain an overall increase in thermal efficiency.

Sunon has currently developed and tested the Waturbo technology in desktop computer liquid cooling systems. Similar Waturbo applications are currently under development for both notebook and server applications.