Asetek LCLC Takes Liquid Cooling Mainstream

bigwophh writes "Liquid cooling a PC has traditionally been considered an extreme solution, pursued by enthusiasts trying to squeeze every last bit of performance from their systems. In recent years, however, liquid cooling has moved toward the mainstream, as evidenced by the number of manufacturers producing entry-level, all-in-one kits. These kits are usually easy to install and operate, but at the expense of performance. Asetek's aptly named LCLC (Low Cost Liquid Cooling) may resemble other liquid cooling setups, but it offers a number of features that set it apart. For one, the LCLC is a totally sealed system that comes pre-assembled. Secondly, plastic tubing and a non-toxic, non-flammable liquid are used to overcome evaporation issues, eliminating the need to refill the system. And to further simplify the LCLC, its pump and water block are integrated into a single unit. Considering its relative simplicity, silence, and low cost, the Asetek LCLC performs quite well, besting traditional air coolers by a large margin in some tests."

Comments

Liquid Cooling already mainstream

[Anonymous Coward]

Heck, I'm typing this on an out-of-the-box ~4 year old liquid-cooled Power Mac G5....

Re:Liquid Cooling already mainstream

[MightyYar]

Let me know when Asustek sells as many kits as Apple sells computers.

Re:Liquid Cooling already mainstream

[Anonymous Coward]

Asetek != Asus

Asetek makes vapor phase change coolers, Asus makes motherboards and graphics cards. Neither Asus nor Apple makes commercial phase cooling or liquid cooling gear.

You managed to troll the wrong industry entirely!

Re:Liquid Cooling already mainstream

[MightyYar]

If I were to define "mainstream" in terms of quality, then Windows would be a niche product :)

For those of you who don't like stop & go traf

[bobdotorg]

A one page link:

http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?articleid=1128

Liquid cooling for datacentres?

[mrogers]

I'm surprised liquid cooling is still seen as a fringe/hobbyist technique, with water (or oil) having a much higher heat capacity than air I would have thought liquid cooling would make sense for datacentres - instead of huge electricity bills for A/C you could just plumb each rack into the building's water system (via a heat exchanger of course, I don't really want to drink anything that's passed through a server rack). Does anyone know if this has been tried, and if so why it didn't work?

Re:Liquid cooling for datacentres?

[jfim]

As far as I know, that's what project Blackbox uses for cooling. Note the blurb where it specifies the water connectivity requirements.

Re:Liquid cooling for datacentres?

[notgm]

do you really want plumbers called in when your site is down?

Re:Liquid cooling for datacentres?

[ZeroExistenZ]

i would have thought liquid cooling would make sense for datacentres - instead of huge electricity bills for A/C you could just plumb each rack into the building's water system

There are a few things that come to mind:

• - A datacenter might have different clients renting a cage, owning their own servers you can't enforce the use of watercooling. AC will have to be present and running in any case.
• - Water + electricity is a risk. With tight SLA's, you don't want to fry your server with your extra investments in its redundant failover hardware altogether.
• - Available server hardware isn't typically watercooled. Who's going to convince the client hacking a watercooled system on your most critical hardware is a good decision? For defects, a support contract with the hardware vendor is typical. If you mod it, soak it, you're out of warranty and can't fall back on your external SLA.
• - electricity "bills" aren't an issue, you have so much amps you can run on each cage if you rent you keep under it or you'll have to rent another cage (notice an advantage for the datacenter here?) It's always part of the calculated cost, it's a non-issue really for datacenters or for you when you want to rent a part of the datacenter.

Re:Liquid cooling for datacentres?

[greyhueofdoubt]

Because air has some undeniable advantages over water:

-Free (both source and disposal)
-Non-conductive
-Non-corrosive
-Lightweight
-Will not undergo phase change under typical or emergency server conditions (think water>steam)
-Cooling air does not need to be kept separate from breathing air, unlike water, which must be kept completely separate from potable water

Imagine the worst-case scenario concerning a coolant failure WRT water vs air:
-Water: flood server room/short-circuit moboard or power backplane/cooling block must be replaced (labor)
-Air: Cause processor to scale down clock speed

I don't think water/oil cooling is ready for mainstream data farm applications quite yet. I also think that future processors will use technology that isn't nearly as hot and wasteful as what we use now, making water cooling a moot point.

-b

Re:Liquid cooling for datacentres?

[eagl]

The ONLY THING water cooling does is (potentially) provide a larger surface area to disperse the heat. So totally wrong/ignorant... Is this a troll? Water cooling does a lot more than that.

1. Can be a LOT quieter than normal air cooling.
2. Allows for heat removal with a much smaller heat exchange unit on the heat source.
3. Allows for heat transfer to a location less affected be the excess heat being dumped (such as outside a case) instead of just dumping the heat in the immediate vicinity of either the item being cooled or near other components affected by heat.

There are other reasons, but these alone are more than enough. Did you not know these, or were you just trolling?

Re:Liquid cooling for datacentres?

[diablovision]

The Black Box is a complete watercooled data center in a shipping container.

Re:Liquid cooling for datacentres?

[KillerBob]

-Non-corrosive

Air is one of the most corrosive substances there is. Specifically, the oxygen in the air is. It just takes time. Normally, a server won't be in operation long enough for this kind of corrosion to happen, especially if it uses gold-plated contacts, but it will happen.

Air is less corrosive. But depending on the liquid that's in use in a liquid cooling rig, it usually isn't corrosive or dangerous to a computer anyway. Liquid cooling rigs are usually an oil such as mineral oil or an alcohol like propanol, neither of which is particularly harmful to electronics.

Also... while it's a technicality, air *is* conductive. It just has a very high impedance. It *will* conduct electricity, and I'm pretty near certain you've seen it happen: it's called lightening.

Finally... if your server is running hot enough that mineral oil is boiling off, you've got more serious things to worry about than that. (its boiling point varies, based on the grade, between 260-330'C -- http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/M7700.htm )

Re:Liquid cooling for datacentres?

[evilviper]

1. Is a result of the larger heat exchange area. And makes no difference in a data center.
2. No benefit for any practical application. Definitely makes no difference in a data center.
3. Does not affect the cooling costs of a data center in the slightest.

Nothing about water cooling will reduce the cooling and energy costs of a data center IN THE SLIGHTEST. You're doing a lot of magical thinking, with NO experience in the subject.

Re:Liquid cooling for datacentres?

[Have Brain Will Rent]

Not only that but if you attach a Maxwell's Demon to the output you can get cooled water separated out from the hot and then feed that back in to the cooler while sending the separated hot water to the boiler!!!

Re:Liquid cooling for datacentres?

[pavera]

I don't know where you are hosting where "electricity bills" don't matter.

I have systems hosted in 3 different DCs, 3 different companies. All of them raised their rates in the last year by 20-30% in one way or another. One DC includes the electricity in your flat monthly bill, the only incremental charge in that DC is bandwidth (IE you get 100GB of transfer, if you go over its some dollars per GB), they raised their flat rate 20%, citing higher electricity costs.

The other 2 DCs provide metered electricity to the cage, some amount is included in the cage rental, overages are billed incrementally. These 2 data centers have both increased their incremental charges by 100% in the last year, and increased their cage rental rates by 10-15% citing increased electricity costs. Now you can say "they're just increasing their margins" but I live within 25 miles of 2 of the facilities, I know my electric costs at my home have more than doubled in the last year, up almost 250% in the last 5, so no they aren't just marking things up unnecessarily, its all the same electric co.

All in all, this means an additional $5-600/mo in cost for our hosting. from $2000/mo to $2500-2600/mo depending on electricity and bandwidth usage (and a hint, we've only gone over on our bandwidth 1 time for a total charge of $12). I can only imagine if we were grown out (we plan in 3-5 years to have multiple racks in these three DCs and have budgeted in our plan ~75k/mo for hosting costs (based on the prices from a year ago). Well, a 20-30% increase in that turns into real money like 15-25k/mo increase. Being able to save that money would mean being able to hire 3-5 full time engineers at 60k/yr each. I'd much rather have the engineers than give that money to the electric company.

Re:Liquid cooling for datacentres?

[evanbd]

Also... while it's a technicality, air *is* conductive. It just has a very high impedance. It *will* conduct electricity, and I'm pretty near certain you've seen it happen: it's called lightening.

If you want to get all technical about it, you're basically wrong. The resistivity of air is exceedingly high. However, like all insulators, it has a breakdown strength, and at electric field strengths beyond that, the conduction mode changes. It's not simply a very high value resistor -- nonconducting air and conducting air are two very different states, which is the reason lightning happens. The air doesn't conduct, allowing the charge to build higher and higher, until the field is strong enough that breakdown begins.

For materials with resistivity as high as air in its normal state, it's not reasonable to call them conducting except under the most extreme conditions. Typical resistance values for air paths found in computers would be on the order of petaohms. While there is some sense in which a petaohm resistor conducts, the cases where that is relevant are so vanishingly rare that it is far more productive to the discussion to simply say it doesn't conduct.

This is one of those cases. Claiming that air is conductive is detrimental to the discussion at best.

Re:Liquid cooling for datacentres?

[cheier]

Liquid cooling can affect the energy costs in a big way depending on how well integrated the system is. As an example, CoolIT systems had developed a server rack with an integrated liquid cooling system that they had shown off at CES this year. The rack essentially used hydraulic fittings to allow you to hot-swap systems from the chassis, while still keeping the cooling centralized.

They had essentially used the radiator from a Honda Accord, which they found to be able to dissipate between 25 and 35 KW of heat. With a system like this centralizing the area where heat is dumped, fluids can be piped out to a radiator sitting outside, so essentially, a large portion of the heat produced from a rack of computers, can be relocated outside of the data center.

Even without moving the heat outside, you can still save on cooling costs. Because you have the capacity to dissipate so much heat, less AC costs are required simply because you can used a forced air system to move the gobs of hot air out and outside air in. This could potentially save up to 30% in cooling costs alone, let alone if you were to just relocate the exchanger to the exterior of the building.

Re:Liquid cooling for datacentres?

[jack8609]

As someone who makes their living figuring out how to move heat from A to B (in avionics, not datacenters), this comment makes my head hurt for a number of reasons... First off, as others have pointed out, liquid cooling in data centers is a reality and folks like IBM have worked on liquid cooilng for decades. Due to many of the reasons already mentioned, everyone avoids liquid cooling as long as they can and a number of technologies have helped on this. For example, the transition from Bipolar to CMOS around the time I finished grad school put a lot of thermal engineers out of work for a while. However, liquid cooling is used in plenty of places - Cray has done it for a long time on their supercomputers (not on the latest one - at least not for local cooling), F-22 & F-35 have liquid cooling for their avionics (for weight reduction), nuclear reactors (using liquid metal), etc. Every thermal conference held in the last 5 years seems to have had at least one session on data center cooling and most of the work is on implementing some aspect of liqud cooling. The electricity required for data center cooling is now on the order of 30-40% of the total power (don't quote me on that - I'm actually thinking it is higher than that, but as I said I don't work in that market). Air cooling is great for simplicity, but it has limits that we are fast approaching. The simple methods for air cooling involve just dumping hot air into the room and once you do that and are using the A/C on twice as much warm air as the the hot air that you would otherwise be cooling without the mixing, your cooling power requirements shoot up considerably. Liquid cooling has two potential benefits (as well as the numerous challenges already described). As people have pointed out, the thermal conductivity of water is much higher than air (k = 0.6 vs. 0.027 W/m^2K). This is important because it higher local cooling (the convection coefficient is ~20x higher). More importantly, the volumetric heat capacity of water is massive compared to air. The temperature rise (in C)of cooling air is ~(8*W dissipated)/(lb/hr of cooling air). So when you are dissipating MW of power and trying to keep the electronics no more than 20-40C above ambient, you need (literally) tons of air. Water is about 4x better in specific heat and about 1000x more dense, so you reduce the volumetric flow rates by ~4000x and get more effective heat transfer at both the electronics and heat exchanger ends (so they can be smaller). Pumps can generally be much more efficient than fans and the amount of pumping power for a 100% device scales with the density * volumetric flow rate^(1.5) [assuming that I am doing the math in my head correctly...]. If either the price of electricity or the heat dissipation levels in data centers continue to go up (fairly safe bets...), you will see increasing use of liquid cooling in that application. Keeping things leak free, and other related maintenance issues, and dealing with legacy architecures seem to be the biggest hurdles.

Re:Liquid cooling for datacentres?

[Paul server guy]

Y'all are basically idiots.

I just came from NASA Ames research center, (Talk about heavy supercomputing!) and they are heavily water-cooled. Right now they have coolers on each of the processor blocks, and radiators on the backs of the cabinets, but are quickly moving to directly chilling the water.
They use quality hoses and fittings, no leakage.
The efficiency is so much higher than air, and it makes the operating environment much nicer. (They have people in there regularly swapping out drives tapes, whatever.)

Of COURSE water cooling is what you want to use for any high-performance computing. It's purely a matter of efficiency. (And you can use the hot water elsewhere.)

Re:For those of you who don't like stop & go t

[Clay Pigeon -TPF-VS-]

Too bad they didnt compare it to a good air cooling solution like the thermalright ifx-14 or ultra-120.

Re:Also from the article, it doesn't work

[eagl]

Even the article tries hard to tout its benefits but their own stats show its not worth it. Either it's a crappy implementation or its simply not relevant.

How so? They show that it's quieter and more effective than stock cooling, and significantly quieter than an aftermarket air cooling solution. What exactly are you looking for then? You gotta be more specific than just a completely unsupported criticism that doesn't even reflect the test results, let alone explain your personal criteria.

Here, try something like this next time:

It looks like a good/bad item because the performance was/was not what I'd expect from a water cooling system costing [insert price here]. You can get similar/better performance from [insert alternative product here] for less. Tradeoffs with the alternative are it's quieter/cheaper/louder/expensive but based on my own critera of [insert your own priorities here], I think this product is great/teh suck.

Give it a shot, you might like it.

Ummmmm

[Have Brain Will Rent]

Wouldn't "is a totally sealed system" take care of "evaporation issues, eliminating the need to refill the system" without requiring "plastic tubing and a non-toxic, non-flammable liquid"???? I'm just saying....

Re:Ummmmm

[ncc74656]

If you had RTFA, you would've found that making a sealed system apparently isn't enough by itself. The silicone tubing used in most liquid-cooling rigs apparently is somewhat permeable, so water can seep through it and evaporate. Replacing silicone with vinyl fixes that, at the expense of slightly increased rigidity.

Re:Ummmmm

[kd4zqe]

This is very true. I just recently disassembled my system in favor of a Core2 Duo machine. I built the rig because my 1st gen P4 3.6GHz was a pain to air-cool efficiently. I noticed that about a year after assembling the system that the temps climbed rapidly moments after power up. I found that almost all my fluid had gone from the system.

What I thought was fluid was actually UV dye that had permeated the silicone tubing from the cooling solution. Additionally, when I stripped the system, all the tubing ends had swelled dramatically, presumably by the liquid accessing the non-heat fused cut ends of the tubing.

Also, in a rebut to the statements by the article, my system was a WaterChill system from Asetek, and included a CPU block and VGA block in addition to the pump and 120mm heat exchanger, and I found the cost to be quite reasonable at only about $250US. It was very easy to install, and made a nice evening project. Because I transport my system to LAN parties, I decided to reverse the radiator and route the fittings to the inside of the chassis. This took a little common sense, drilling, and planing, but I was very specific in my wants.

Without the cosmetic changes, this still was a very sensical kit to own. I'd recommend for ANYONE to try to build a water rig at least once. If Asetek is trying to move liquid cooling into a more mainstream arena, more power to them.

Re:Overclocking, here we come!

[BLKMGK]

Swiftech makes a system you might be interested in that's also self contained. The pump sits right on top of the CPU and the heat exchanger fits where your 120mm exhaust fan is normally mounted. I'm not using it and would only consider it if I were cooling my vid card too but a friend is using it and REALLY likes it - trouble free install on his box.

Re:Uh...Johnny-Come-Lately

[Paul server guy]

Hell, I've been using a "Consumer grade" easy to use water cooling system in my desktop for over a year in the form of the Titan Robela (http://www.titan-cd.com/eng/watercase/robela.htm or http://www.inland-products.com/singleproduct.asp?search=accessories&partnum=03011)

I have the black Al faced one for longer PSs. It was extremely easy to set the water cooling up, and has kept my machine cool even with two extra blocks for the SLI cards and a chipset cooler. Yes it's not sealed, but then again, is that really a big deal? If it WAS sealed I couldn't have added my extra blocks, and this went together so simply, I doubt I would really have noticed the difference.

This is almost old news by now...