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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.
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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
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"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
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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