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Corsair Demos Easy Watercooling PC Rig
Steve from Hexus writes "Trying to lure more people into watercooling their PCs, Corsair have created the Nautilus 500. It consists primarily of an external unit housing the radiator, reservoir and pump, which sits atop the PC's case. Installed inside the PC is the CPU water-block, which can be fitted without removing the motherboard. At HEXUS we've got pictures from CES of a system with the cooler installed."
Steve from Hexus is the same bloke that posted the pictures of the car heater attached to the side of an Xbox and said it was a water cooling unit. Come on, guys. Is this news, or advertising?
i wouldn't consider buying one of these unless the warranty covered replacing my whole system if some water leaked out and futzed the inside. and whether i'm right or wrong, i would think most of the general public would feel the same. mind you this is for more of a geeky crowd at the minute
This may be slightly off topic, but I find the fact that hexus is trying to advertise their site somewhat problematic. It seems to be an increasing trend here at Slashdot, and I hope the editors can pick a new set of cue-cards and reject the advert/story hybrids.
As for the story itself, meh. Its nothing new.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Once again the hoses come straight up off the CPU block. The one place that water coolers would be insanely useful is in 1U rackmount servers (1.75" tall). The hoses would have to come off the block at an angle to accomodate that though.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Watercooling in a rackmount solution, especially one which may me mission critical, would be fairly risky. Failure of the watercooling system would result in loss of the server and possibly loss of other servers.
:) At least there's less risk.
I think rackmounts will be fine with aircooling for the time being
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Is it just me or this watercooling setup looks terribly ineffectve and a waste of money? *Note: I have never installed a watercooling kit before*
Anyone else find it ironic that a company named corsair makes water-cooling units?
"Most of the cooling system is external, sitting neatly atop the PC's case"
Also from the article:
A picture of this 'neat' set-up.
Even by an utter slob's standards, though is no way in hell that thing can be considered neat. Not on this earth, not on any other earth either. I'll try to restrain obvious Apple fanboy'ism, but it's interesting they've attached to an already G5-a-like case. With the exception of the latest quads, which are apparently a bit messy internally, you can see what 'neat' actually means when applied to water-cooling by looking at the Power Macs. I'm sure people on the PC side can point me to considerably more aesthetically pleasing installations than this too.
Cheers,
Ian
I wouldn't trust a premade water-cooling setup. There's a certain ease-of-mind to putting it together yourself and knowing the parts are all good quality inside.
--
United Bimmer - BMW Enthusiast Community
i couldnt find any content on that hexus site, all i could see was adverts, spyware and product marketing
perhaps somebody could find a tech site who isnt so desperate for cash
If one takes a look at the system specs of the the comp that they demonstrated the cooling system on; it NEEDS water cooling due to the 3.73 GHz Intel CPU. That's why its best to buy an AMD64 at the moment: so that you do not have to spend extra money on water cooling. Water cooling should not be necessary. CPU's should not emit any more heat that cannot be taken away by a simple heatsink and fan. I personally can't imagine any rational human being wasting thier money on water cooling or on something that needs water cooling. Even when I was a foolish teen who thought about building the latest and greatest PC all day long, it never occurred to me to set up water cooling.
It isn't enough that this morning I got into my car, was about to put the key into the ignition when I noticed the funny smell. I looked down on the floor under the dash and saw a nice green puddle. A familiar sight, to be sure.
In the 10 years that I have been driving crappy cars I have experienced the puddle of lovely green disappointment twice. And no, I am not broke -- I can afford a new car but when you live in NYC, buying a new car when you are going to park it on the street is insanity.
At any rate -- now I can look forward to the same lovely green surprise from my COMPUTER? No thanks! Computers are getting complicated enough without having a puddle of green liquid-kryptonite potentially spilling all over my desk and carpet, thank-you-very-much.
Liquid cooling systems break down. Hell, for that matter all systems break down eventually. That's what happens with man-made systems. Funny things. Even God-made systems break down, just much slower.
Anyway, my point is that keep it as simple as possible if you want to avoid catastrophe. A little fan, an aluminum heatsink, and a motherboard sensor to tell you when the fan stops a-turnin'. What's so wrong with that? Why do people have to go and make things so complicated? Putting green liquid and water pumps and tubes and the like inside a computer is just an ugly, nonsensical thing to do in my book. You're basically asking for trouble. And as other people pointed out -- as the technology hits mainstream it will only get more crappily made and lead to a higher failure rate.
And for what? A few extra MHz? Before +200 MHz goes and makes that much of a difference in your life, you need to examine all the parts in your computer from the RAM to the motherboard chipset to the freakin' BIOS firmware version before you should think about that +200MHz.
Take an example from engineering/consumer history:
The VW Beetle was a car reknowned for reliability. One of its key features was its extremely simple mechanical design. It also happened to be air-cooled (I am not sure for the motivation for that design choice but I bet it had something to do with simplicity).
Keep is simple, and less things can go wrong.
It amazes me how often marketing people are monumentally stupid. In the sentence that begins "Most of the cooling system is external..." in the Hexus.net article, the words "cooling system" are green and underlined twice. When I mouse over the green, I see an ad for Sears. Is Sears selling radical computer gear now? No, it's an ad for heating and air conditioning.
The only way I can imagine that Sears could profit from that ad is if I were willing to pay Sears not to be annoyed.
In this day and age of more efficient CPU's (AMD) and quiet components (Fan, PSU, HDD, etc). Water cooled will not be needed as much, and will remain a niche...with the associated danger.
Even those looking for the high-end of the performance curve have multi-core without the space-heater effect.
The VW Beetle engine was not air cooled. The engine was oil cooled. The oil was air cooled. There are many, many engines which are air cooled, typically motorbike engines, mowers, chain saws etc. but the VW Beetle was not one of them.
The key to long Beetle engine life was frequent oil changes moreso that anything else.
OK pedant mode off now!
Sunday afternoon, not totally focused, and the headline arrived in my brain as
"Easy Watercooling RC Pig"
which would have been a marginally more interesting story.
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
I didn't know that. But the fact of the matter is that the VW Beetle lacked:
1. A water pump
2. A radiator
3. A water pump belt.
All 3 of those components, at some point have broken down for me. In the beetle, those were just 3 fewer things that can go wrong.
And yes, I know the VW may have had some radiator-like device -- but water+antifreeze rusts metal faster than oil does.
That has to be one of the ugliest watercooling set ups I've seen for a while. What about cooling the video cards too - X1800XTs make quite a bit of noise, so what's the point in this device when high performance custom build watercooling loops will perform much better if it's a CPU-only loop? I admire Corsair wanting to get into the watercooling market, but I think they need to go back to the drawing board again.
Interesting link. Thanks.
It seems like a cool setup but why does the case need to be upside down?
"NEED? Even the Itanium2 can get by with air cooling, there's no need for water cooling with any microprocessor, just properly designed heat sinks and fans."
Heh! Properly designed consists of a block of finned metal so large that it needs a metal backplane to keep it from destroying the motherboard (AMD 939). Or the earlier AMDs (Thunderbirds) that required a leaf-blower to keep the CPU cool.
I don't know. Talk to anyone that has owned lots of air/oil-cooled engines and I think you will hear a different story. They break down all the damn time. Bad design. Liquid cooling works much better and more reliable dispite being a little more complicated. Why do you think that 99% of modern cars use liquid cooling? The failure rate on air-cooled engines is much higher than the chances of a little leaking fluid.
I'm just wondering if watercooling, given the increases in performance and decreases in die size will be avoidable. Would it be environmentally friendly to leave thousands (or millions) of gallons of water in millions of computers (assuming they all need it)?
Yeah you're probably right. Hell I am not really a car guy. And I do know air-cooled engines do run hot, which is never good for an engine -- so that must limit how hard an air-cooled design can 'push' the engine heat-wise. (I guess it is a direct parallel to why air-cooling limits how hard we can push CPUs).
Anyway I just like the fact that mechanically computers are pretty simple. Just about the only thing I ever have problems with on my machine is the moving bits -- the fans and the hard drives. If we add yet another moving part that's one more thing that can go wrong.
AFAIR, the (original) beetle also missed a gas-meter. Instead it had a backup tank that could be emptied into the main tank by a lever, so you knew when you only had 5 litres (or whatever) left.
Sigs are bad for your health
I seem to remember the VW bugs in our family growing up. Cold as hell in the wintertime, but they never seemed to break down. Routine maintenance goes a long way.
Common sense never goes unpunished. People ALWAYS get more respect finding 5% more gains out of the most power hungry machines. Well, with electric cars and RISC chips being commodity items these days, there might be a day when we don't have to deal with radiators in our computers OR in our cars. And they look at us funny...
There's a growing movement to optimize and find minimalist designs, not just for saving power, but for the reliability reasons you mention. My ARM computer draws 1/100th the power of my desktop, but seems much faster. Why? Because time was invested to clean the whole system.
And do we really need all that power driving the backlight on the LCD display? It was kind of bright at the lowest setting. There's another mod I don't hear about...
Just to think I could have wasted my time on a huge heatsink for minimal gains and suffer more points on my 8 cents/kilowatt hour bill every month.
Back in the day the mainframe got shut down if the temperature in the computer room went over 85 farenheit. The temperatures these newfangled computers run at is downright frightening. I'd like a system that keeps them cooler and does it quietly. I'm seriously considering liquid cooling or a heat pipe solution (Or both) on the next rig I build. The Zalman reservator looks marginally less hideous than this one does, though.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I was all for liquid cooling right up until the point where I had the liquid freeze in the tubes while I was transporting the computer. It worked afterwards but weakened the system and it broke a few months later. Reguardless, I don't think it's worth the hastle yet. Also, I went to rack mounted systems so they'd all be together and out of the way.
I do security
ATH
NO CARRIER
What are those LED-looking things in the pics? They appear to have some RAM designation on them....
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Uh, no. The oil does very little cooling, about 20%. The balance is direct heat transfer from the cylinder walls and cylinder heads to cooling air via cooling fins. If it was truly oil cooled, there would be oil passages throughout the heads and cylinder walls. But the oil passages only go to bearings and other wear surfaces.
The main reason for the oil cooler is to keep the oil temperatures down so the oil doesn't break down and lose its lubricating properties.
The Beetle needed oil changes no more frequently than other cars of the era (3000 mi), but was less tolerant of extended intervals due to a lack of filtration and the aforementioned heating.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
The VW motor was designed to be entirely air cooled, including the crankcase, that's why the cylinders have all those fins and stuff on 'em with a big fan blowing over, but the oil overheated, so they added an oil radiator external to the crankcase in the blower housing, just like you see on some high performance,four stroke air cooled motorbikes.
I fail to see how this adds up to being oil cooled, or at least any more so than a water cooled engine with an oil cooler is oil cooled.
One could, in fact, argue that subsequently the #3 cylinder was oil heated, as the heated exhaust air from the oil radiator blew over it and the cylinder was designed to be air cooled.
Changing the oil regularly is the key to keeping any engine going. The VW Beetle isn't in any way special in this regard, and it doesn't matter how many times you change the oil (which doesn't change the heat transference properties of the oil) that #3 exhaust cyclinder is going to pop its little head off sooner or later.
Because it gets too hot, because it's air cooled.
KFG
Meaning, the heater didn't work at all or only in those situation where didn't want the heater to work (+25C).
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
. . .that #3 exhaust cyclinder . . .
.that #3 cylinder exhaust valve. . .
. .
When it's peak hours on my web site and I'm playing xlander and gtk-gnutella's connected to a zillion ultra-peers, and some douche is reloading a page every instant with some firefox plugin (basically I'm trying to say the cpu's 0% idle constantly), will this keep my chip cool and calm like the shine on a radiator grill so my box doesn't start beeping with the kernel giving me annoying overheating messages and slowing down the chip's speed in response? That beeping's so annoying and no one in #debian will tell me how to turn off that part of the kernel.
Still, I've done both internal and external watercooling setups, and internal is definately easier and neater, even if it does take maybe another half-hour to set up nicely (unless you're doing some heavy case-modding to fit the parts, in which case you know what you're doing).
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Although you have a point, I also think there's a market for more upgrades (water/air cooling, etc.) with people who's computers are off warranty, and want to get them up to par again.
Not many regular users would consider overclocking their brand new system, which hopefully runs everything fine out of the box, but a year or two later it starts to seem like a better and better idea. By then the warranty has expired, and maybe the computer has gotten handed down from Mom and Dad to Junior, and there aren't as many downsides to experimenting on it.
Actually I think the timing on this is good -- right as a new MS upgrade is set to come out and people start to think about the "buy or upgrade" decision.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
While I get your point, the fact that the machine shut down when the ambient air temperature reached 85 degrees F says nothing about the internal temperature of the machine.
If you were in a room where the only heat source was a big computer, and the temperature in the room started to rise appreciably, up to where it started to become uncomfortably warm (I consider 85F "uncomfortably warm") you had better bet that there are parts in the machine that are a LOT hotter than 85 degrees!
So really they were just using a very indirect method of temperature monitoring; or perhaps someone had determined that the mainframe's heat-dissipation equipment couldn't achieve break-even when the ambient temperature was above a certain level. Either way, there were parts in that machine that probably would have hurt your hands to touch.
I don't know whether computers today are hotter or cooler than machines with equivalent processing power in years past, but if they are hotter than it's at least in part to the dependence on air cooling and small form factors. The big iron in years past was physically larger (so smaller concentrations of heat) and often had plumbed-in cooling systems or at least dedicated HVAC systems. Now we expect a system to run at similar temperatures, in an unventilated closet.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Watercooling a PC is a great idea; but only watercooling the CPU is just plain crap.
In the photos in the linked article, there were enormous heat sinks and fans on the graphics cards, and still a case fan, and no doubt a power supply fan.
I don't want to take the heat simply out of my computer case, but completely out of my house. I have 4 computers in my office and 2 more in my lab, and my air conditioning bills are truly heinous, not to mention that even with the quietest case and CPU fans I could find, the noise is still a problem.
I would really like to see a complete water cooled setup, with heat exchangers on the GPU, on the power supply, whatever other hot parts on the main board, disk drives, and (of course) the CPU. Then I could plumb every bit of it to a heat exhanger with a big loud fan outside...
Curiously, IBM water cooled mainframes for a long time, then stopped when they started making CMOS-based mainframes. Now they are offering water cooling accessories for blade racks.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Watercooling a PC is a great idea; but only watercooling the CPU is just plain crap.
In the photos in the linked article, there were enormous heat sinks and fans on the graphics cards, and still a case fan, and no doubt a power supply fan.
I don't want to take the heat simply out of my computer case, but completely out of my house. I have 4 computers in my office and 2 more in my lab, and my air conditioning bills are truly heinous, not to mention that even with the quietest case and CPU fans I could find, the noise is still a problem.
I would really like to see a complete water cooled setup, with heat exchangers on the GPU, on the power supply, whatever other hot parts on the main board, disk drives, and (of course) the CPU. Then I could plumb every bit of it to a heat exhanger with a big loud fan outside...
Curiously, IBM water cooled mainframes for a long time, then stopped when they started making CMOS-based mainframes. Now they are offering water cooling accessories for blade racks.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Looking at the picture the system seems devoid of harddisk and the CD rom cables seem to be non-existant. I didnt quite make out a physical network connection so how is this thing booting? Or is it simply not?
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Wonder if you could simply replace the antifreeze in one of these stock hydro systems with peanut oil and see what happens. Or maybe someone has already made a proper oil cooler. Tell me if you know of one... I'll be interested to hear.
Oh, by the way, the old VWs threw the engine oil into a heat exchanger where air blew across it. So, strictly speaking, they were were oil cooled.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Right now, you can get low-cost (and low performance) WC rigs, and ones that potentially cost more than the whole PC.
Where is this one going to fall?
OK, so they got a water cooled radiator on the top. And maybe it's easy to install.
I don't think water cooling computers is that big of a deal anymore. It's been around long enough that it's close to becoming a mature product.
I think the important evolution that needs to happen before water cooling is of any main-line significance is noise. If it sounds like a jet engine then you've gained nothing in comparison to standard convection air cooling. The majority of computer owners don't notice their thermal properties of the computer as much as the acoustic properties. Even overheating has been well addressed by the more reputable computer manufacturers or is easily addressed by third party companies.
But there are so many of these water cooling products out there that are just too damn noisy to be of any advantage when compared to fan based cooling.
I water cool. Why? Because I got tired of the jet engine that was my CPU/GPU cooler setup. I could barely hear myself think. Not only that, but after a few hours my system would get extremely hot all over as the heat spread around. I went to water cooling, and i'll never go back. The system I run is very very quiet, and remains pretty damn cool for about a day if i'm gaming a lot, or many days if i'm not. Yeah, there's the risk of it getting a leak, but so far so good, and I'm very happy with it. I'm water cooling my CPU/GPU/RAM and 3 scsi hdd's.
Steve:
Either you're such a newb that you don't even realize that this Nautilus 500 is very nearly a carbon copy of the original Koolance Exos from several years ago, or you're NOT a newb, know full well how un-innovative this product is, and yet chose to hype and pimp it anyway.
Which is it?
Mark