There are many exotic forms of chip cooling in the wild, such as immersion cooling and liquid nitrogen cooling. But one cooling paradigm you might not have heard of is spray cooling, used by some supercomputers. Famous German overclocker Der8auer showed off the capabilities of spray cooling in a recent video, cooling a Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU by spraying a non-conductive mist right on top of the IHS.
Spray cooling functions just as it sounds; nozzles are placed above a CPU or GPU that sprays mist right on top of the chip itself. Depending on the coolant used, the mist will evaporate after hitting the chip (while the chip is active and running warm/hot) and returns to the cooling loop, where the vapor cools off, turns back into a liquid, and cycles back toward the CPU. If this sounds familiar, vapor chamber coolers use the same phase change principle.
