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

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?

[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?

[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?

[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: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.