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I already had it completely worked out.
Also with tons of science and data collection and research.
http://www.silentcomputing.com/i.html

I also ran the largest CDN in 19967 and have tons of data gathered from that. that lead to my design.

John

2.) The components use more power at higher temperatures! This is from increased leakage currents in the silicon.
Below is a graph from Research My Startup company did! http://www.silentcomputing.com/tech/market2.gif

May I point out the obvious: not only the higher power consumption comes from increased leakage currents in the silicon, but it also comes from the fact that power supplies are less efficient at higher temperatures, so they need to pull more current from the wall socket to maintain the same output current.

However what you and I just said is irrelevant. As your graph shows, the difference in power consumption is very minimal: 2% for each 10C due to leakage currents, and maybe ~5% for each 10C in decreased PSU efficiency. These few percentage points are nothing compared to the amount of power you would save by making the AC work less hard. Indeed, if without AC the datacenter would reach 140F (333 Kelvin), cooling it down to 60F (289 Kelvin) requires removing 44 Kelvin of heat, whereas cooling it down to 100F (311 Kelvin) only requires removing 22 Kelvin of heat, therefore running it at 100F would roughly reduce the AC power consumption by 50% ! So the point made by TFA still holds: overall you still are saving energy by running a whole datacenter at a 10C higher temperature.

As to the higher component failure rate: as it was proven by 2 independent studies last year (Google and CMU), higher temperatures do not even correlate with higher hdd failure rates. In fact, strangely they observed a slight reverse effect: hdd tended to fail less often !

Yes there saving money on cooling cost, or at least they seem to believe that and I am sure when they fail to take everything into account this is true.

The reality it the server room still has to pull that heat out. Increased Delta T is just lost energy.

Here is really why it's a terrible idea.

1.) Component failures. Of all parts from bearing in the drives, and fans to the silicon itself has a much higher failure rate.

2.) The components use more power at higher temperatures! This is from increased leakage currents in the silicon.

Below is a graph from Research My Startup company did!
http://www.silentcomputing.com/tech/market2.gif

They really need to used ducted air or any other technology to reduce the Delta T! By this I mean bring the cooling as close to the components as possible.
Right now server rooms need to run internally at 10C to 15C to keep the CPU chips below 60C.
If they just brought the cooling directly to the cpu's and let that cool spread from there they could use out door passive radiators! 0 air conditioning cost and the most power savings.

This is what my start was doing till someone tried to steal the who damb thing and sunk the company.

http://www.silentcomputing.com/i.html

Is this cleaner then mineral oil submersion?

Mineral oil is a complete mess. A friend of mine wanted to do it and that's how I got into coming up with alternatives.

With mineral oil it's a disaster waiting to happen. Imagine a gallon of that on your carpet?
What about fires? Yes a few gallons of flammable oil in your bedroom is just genius. Then run electricity through it.
  Why don't you just keep a full gas can under your bed while your at it.

Mineral oil also tends to wick up the cables and dissolve some plastics.

What if you want to work on your PC?

Oil is just not professional.

This is from a now dead startup I did from 2002 to 2005. 100% totally silent High end PC's.

http://www.silentcomputing.com/i.html Look at the last photo.

  We had an all aluminum design as well as a water cooled design. I also came up with an advanced Carbon Fiber material with 4x the thermal conductivity of Copper that was light weight.

These systems provide much more cooling then oil could ever do.

The system was sealed, 100% total silent and easy to disassemble and re-assemble. Even easier to work on then a regular PC...

We even had the hard drives in a thermally conductive rubber allowing them to run cooler then in a normal system with fans.

The main system was sealed and designed to run with a descant and dry gas like argon inside so when overclocking using peltier thermoelectric coolers on the CPU where wouldn't be any condensation. Condensation is a major problem for overclockers that up the voltage and have to supercool the CPU.

We are still planning to open source the designs.

We never were able to raise the money to start production of these. To be honest 1/2 our problem was management wanted to court Intel,HP, SUN, and they just didn't get it. The large companies really weren't interested in something that didn't conform to what they already were doing.

We never did talk to enough small investors, and finally we ended up with a bad apple in the company that try to do a hostile take over and killed the company when he failed...

Finally the last 20 polished heat sinks I had were stolen out of my garage 2 weeks ago :( Some idiots problem going to get standard aluminum recycling prices for them too, considering each one cost me over $100 each!

I always felt doing oil was just idiotic and still do.

Too bad being an entrepreneur isn't as easy as programming.

If anyone is still interested in this tech, let me know. I have 3 years invested in it, and we were partners with NASA for much of it.

As computer get warmer there power consumption goes up.

http://www.silentcomputing.com/tech/market2.gif

Using Intel mother boards we found for each 10 Deg C temperature increase there was a 2% power increase.

I spent three years trying to get a company off the ground after I solved how to fix the heat problem.
I realized, they don't want to fix it, unless it's going to make them money.

I spend three years working on a server solution that used various oil's, solvents and water in tubes to cool servers, we also had a silient computer http://www.silentcomputing.com/ http://www.silentcomputing.com/i.html
There is also some Super high thermal conductive Materials we called Bridges in there. All stock Motherboards and cards.
If you get any ideas from the Photo's please remember to credit me.

In 2001 to 2004 No investors would touch anything with fluids in the server room. Also the Corperate IT guys were also rejecting it outright.

Ducted Air was getting more promise.

At this time there is no reason to Wet all of the electronic with Oil, talk about a messy unmanagable solution. I friend of my actually built one, but you still have problems with the hard drives and you still need to circultate the oil just as with fans. Also beyond a certain point, you would still need to have heat exchangers (radiators) to cool the oil with outside air, and possible a compressor based chiller too.

At Nisvara, we had developed and prototyped systems with Fluid cooling, phase change fluid cooling, ducted air and chilled water as well as a total silent desk top system that didn't require any moving fans cooling components and just based on thermal conduction using High termal conductivity materials.

We had figured out how to build a fluid cool server room that wouldn't need any air conditioning even in 130F outside air tempteratures.
Again using all off the shelf computer components and could be 100% sure of no fluid leakage into the system. So everything stayed cool, quiet and easy to service, even easier then the conventional designs used now.
Almost had a contract with NASA Ames ARC center to build a 1000 server clusted that use the technology.

Anyhow the company is mostly dead at this time, I'd be happy to collaborate with anybody interested in still persuing this technology.

I spend three years working on a server solution that used various oil's, solvents and water in tubes to cool servers, we also had a silient computer http://www.silentcomputing.com/ http://www.silentcomputing.com/i.html
There is also some Super high thermal conductive Materials we called Bridges in there. All stock Motherboards and cards.
If you get any ideas from the Photo's please remember to credit me.

In 2001 to 2004 No investors would touch anything with fluids in the server room. Also the Corperate IT guys were also rejecting it outright.

Ducted Air was getting more promise.

At this time there is no reason to Wet all of the electronic with Oil, talk about a messy unmanagable solution. I friend of my actually built one, but you still have problems with the hard drives and you still need to circultate the oil just as with fans. Also beyond a certain point, you would still need to have heat exchangers (radiators) to cool the oil with outside air, and possible a compressor based chiller too.

At Nisvara, we had developed and prototyped systems with Fluid cooling, phase change fluid cooling, ducted air and chilled water as well as a total silent desk top system that didn't require any moving fans cooling components and just based on thermal conduction using High termal conductivity materials.

We had figured out how to build a fluid cool server room that wouldn't need any air conditioning even in 130F outside air tempteratures.
Again using all off the shelf computer components and could be 100% sure of no fluid leakage into the system. So everything stayed cool, quiet and easy to service, even easier then the conventional designs used now.
Almost had a contract with NASA Ames ARC center to build a 1000 server clusted that use the technology.

Anyhow the company is mostly dead at this time, I'd be happy to collaborate with anybody interested in still persuing this technology.

I spent 3 years from 2002 to 2005 working on a silent computing company, Nisvara. We had offices at NASA Ames, Moffet Field in Mountain View California. It seems like everyone loved what we had, Intel, Sun, ATI, HP, Siemens to name a few. None the less it ended up falling apart.

It's now dead, as one of the people we invited in to help manage thought he would just declare himself the owner just a week before we were to get a $500K grant from the California Energy Commission. When he failed he just trashed the company realizing founders (including myself) were left with nothing. He even managed to get GoDaddy to take the domain out of my name with forged corperate papers, it's been wedged since...

It really breaks my heart. We developed so many very cool prototypes and inventions for cooling computers.

One was using the Ionic Breeze technique to provide just a slight air flow, but it increases the efficiency of the heat sink but a large amount. Problem that they fail to mention is the heatsink really attracts dust, just like the ionic breaze, so you need to get in there with a brush quite often.

Below is a link to many of the prototypes I built. I don't have a photo of the ionic version, but it was just the desktop unit with the large aluminum heatsinks with a plastic duct/ shield was added and a set of fine wires was run across the bottom of the large aluminum heat sinks with -6000V DC on it.
The aluminum heat sinks were grounded.

  Worked great, but you wouldn't' want to stick your finger in there.

Also in the picture are water cooled prototypes, Carbon Fiber "bridges" that had a much higher thermal conductivity then copper and other misc stuff.

  I am planning to add many more photo's, papers, data and schematics and open source the designs at this point...

http://www.silentcomputing.com/i.html