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."

Comments

This is "interesting news"?

[Weatherman-au]

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?

for myself....

[know1]

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

Advertising for hexus?

[gcnaddict]

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.

Re:Advertising for hexus?

[Wonko the Sane]

Isn't the lesson of Google the fact that advertising doesn't have to be annoying if it is relevant? If this is topic that most of the readers are interested in, then is there reason not to post the "story", other than the fact that it is an advertisement?

Differing definitions of neat...

[mccalli]

From the article:
"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

Great. Yet another thing that can go wrong..

[cculianu]

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.

Neat and Tidy?

[teh bigz]

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.

Why not oil instead of water or glycol?

[bdwoolman]

Okay, the specific heat for veg oil is lower than glycol or water, but better than air. Since oil is an insulator it would not short the board if it leaked. We all remember the guy who dropped his whole rig into an aquarium of oil. And he is still reporting it works fine. That is pretty radical, but it seems to me that a controlled oil system could do pretty well cooling one of these nastyhot P4s. Mine runs warm with no overclocking at all. You might stain the carpet, but you would not have as big a chance of cooking the board.

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.