Tom's Guide to Water Cooling

Aaron Cherrington writes "Tom's Hardware Guide has a pretty impressive rundown on how to setup a fairly sophisticated water-cooling system for your ever-growing heat problem in your proc/foundry. The guide even includes a movie! Funny how computers are beginning to develop like the early automobile industry."

Comments

good lord this an economical disaster!

[lingqi]

for the time and effort spent on this -- get some flourinert and just full-submerge your PC. a gallon is ~500 bux, cheaper if you buy more. Or hook up with somebody with access to some and buy used liquid for cheap ;-) -- it's used in all sorts of high precision equipment(s)

Watercooling not so great?

[PhysicsGenius]

I'm a geek. I like fast cars, fast women and fast computers. However, I'm also concerned about the proliferation of pollution and greenhouse gasses.

Let's take watercooling as an example. Heating water breaks the molecules apart. This is OK (up to a point) for pure water, but nobody actually uses pure water. Instead we use tap water, full of lead, acidophilus and other harmful toxins. When the heat from the overclocked PC causes those toxins to be released into the air--whoa nellie, we have ourselves an EPA Superfund site in a bottle.

Of course, anybody who's even slightly concerned about the environment knows all the above already. The trouble is self-centered morons like this guy who think the rules don't apply to him or that "just one more overclocked PC won't hurt anything". So please, Slashdot, quit glorifying this destructive pasttime and instead advocate the right solution: a new PC every six months.

Oh great...

[Zen Mastuh]

Funny how computers are beginning to develop like the early automobile industry

Great. I guess we'll all be anxiously awaiting the arrival of Ralph Nader's new book, Uncoolable at Any Clock Speed.

To think that IBM spent millions to get rid of it

[SysKoll]

It's rather ironic that IBM and other large systems makers have spent millions of $$ to get rid of water cooling in their systems. The good old water-cooled TCM (Thermal Conduction Module) of IBM's 1990 mainframes was a very impressive piece of mechanical and thermal engineering. If you worry about the heat generated by a single CPU, imaging what it was like to cool one of these babies.

TCMs included spring-loaded copper pistons to maintain good thermal contacts on the chips. The thing was a plumber's nightmare. I remember an IBM field engineer who had to improvise a pipe soldering the night before a computer show because 1) there was no water cooling at the stands (geez, what an oversight), 2) IBM had to require a fire permit to let the plumber light a soldering torch, 3) by the time the fire permit came in, the unionized plumber was home while the on-salary, no-family-life engineer was getting ready for a looong night. Those were the days, when computers were freakin' huge and had to be watered like thirsty dinosaurs.

As a side note, the need for TCM was considered a nuisance. Customers released a collective sigh of relief when IBM dropped their fast but power-hungry bipolar technology in favor of cheaper, easier to cool CMOS chips. It's a shame that Intel's sloppy designs force an entire industry to go back to watering the dinos.

-- SysKoll