Meet Hex: An active CPU cooler when needed, passive when not [Video]

A startup, Phononic, says that it has a new twist on what sounds like a Peltier cooler, using electrical energy to cool a processor in a PC or a data center.

Phononic announced the Hex 2.0 CPU cooler at the Hot Chips conference, which is targeting at the data center. The company showed off while using an AMD Ryzen 9950X for stress testing, however. The cooler, in what the company calls a 92mm form factor, is competitive with an all-in-one liquid cooler with a pair of 120mm fans (240mm total) attached, a Phononics executive claimed.

The Hex 2.0 cooler tries to combine both passive cooling and active cooling in the same device. One side is essentially a passive heat sink, with numerous “fins” for cooling. When needed, however, the other side kicks in, with a semiconductor-based cooling solution that uses a heat pump to push heat to a second set …