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Full Immersion Cooling Comes To Desktop PCs
mr_sifter writes "After three years of research and around £100,000 of R&D costs, UK-based Armari has unveiled its XCP prototype. It's a full immersion liquid cooled PC which supports standard ATX components. Unlike conventional liquid cooled PCs, the components are all easy to swap in and out as they're swimming in liquid, rather than under waterblocks. It also looks amazing, pumping around 70KG of electrically inert cooling fluid (salvaged from an old Cray) around its military grade perspex shell."
No offense, but this just seems like an elaborate waste of money. We've seen immersion pc's before ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M80eUcUVrmw ). Other than a fancy case and a waterfall, what makes this any different? Why is it worth £100,000 versus a fishbowl PC that'll set you back $200? Give us some decent benchmark results at least; as of now though, I see nothing really original other than a cool case mod here.
"so the XCP is filled with FLUAHRGHPT." Huh?! What's that again? I can't hear what he is saying. What liquid did they use?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Was I the only one who read it as " Full Immersion Coding Comes To Desktop PCs" ?
I had a picture in my head of a waterproof system. Perhaps it's a metaphor for coding while drinking a microbrew....
I am happy that I do not work for the geek squad anymore... can you imagine asking grandma to bring in her 300lbs pc?
Flourinert is readily available from 3M in a variety of different compositions. It is the only exotic portion of this type of project and it's cost is the main reason why we don't see more full immersion cooling. I don't know about the rest of Slashdot, but I'd prefer not to spend several hundred dollars per gallon on cooling liquid in exchange for saving myself a little hassle removing cooling blocks from a [more] traditional closed loop contained coolant system. Not a whole lot to be gained from going to full immersion. Also, IIRC, California recently added Flourinert to it's list of potentially cancer causing chemicals, which IMHO makes it less than ideal for a warm LED lit water fall in your living room or office...
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
After the Sony rootkit fiasco why in the HELL would anyone name a computer product "XCP"???!!!
I'm not sure I'd want one. I don't care how quiet it is or how far I can overclock it. If they're dumb enough to screw up with its name, well...
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Mmmmm, tako...
*drool*
Is never happening ever for the average person and thus makes it just a novelty item. Their design is excessive and cumbersome, not to mention has excessive weaknesses such as cost to maintain, cost to purchase, time to maintain, etc.
It was tough to decipher their speech as well. Word use and pronunciation were a bit distracting. It's tough when your target audience are distracted by your speech instead of focused on your product.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Let me know when they make one that uses beer as a liquid. And dispenses it too. Then I will be impressed.
Obviously, the overclockers will rejoice, being able to crank up the speed on motherboards, cpu, etc..., and keeping the temp down! But even for people who don't want to speed things up, a nice setup with this liquid means that your hardware will stay cool, no overheating in normal wear and tear at all, that translate into a much longer hardware life. Now, the question is.. How much does will it cost to get this setup for a home PC?
What a load of bullshit. There's howto's all around the net on how to do this, and has been for a long time.
. . . to link to an ad-filled TFA with bandwidth-consuming cheesy music. I hope their server fries.
My Bissel Spot-Bot steam cleaner looks like that...
Been done, ages ago...
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=802563
Talk about the pot calling the kettle... I sure hope you were trying to be funny by using such bad grammar. If not, then please go back to school before you attack others.
So, you spend $10k on a top of the line rig like this, overclock your CPU to double or even triple normal... which, according to Moore's law means you may have gained 3 years of non-obsoleteness. Don't get me wrong, it's really cool, but is this really more economical (in terms of flops per dollar or some such) than buying a $3k machine, a $3k machine 3 years later, and a $3k machine three years after that?
no doubt.
Wake me up when they put a pc in a high vacuum. You could even put the turbo pump in a different room.
You desktop jockeys have no idea.
Datacenter workers are far more aware of the demands and complexity of cooling.
1. It's a commercial pursuit, which is meaningfully different than one-off's from the lab. They must have some customer in mind. If they don't, well, their investors will get burned.
2. I can easily imagine a commercial application where, perhaps cooling needs overwhelm a building, this may come in as a cheap alternative.
Get back to us when you've figured out how to cool a rack full of blade servers working near capacity. This may do it more elegantly than air.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Bring one of these puppies to a LAN party, and the babes will be swarming all over you... wait... has anybody ever been to a LAN party where babes were actually present?
You can do this with Mineral Oil. Cheap and found everywhere. I remember reading about a guy that overclocked his P2-400 to like 650MHz at the time using a homebrew cooling rig. Dr. Freeze or something was his name (freeze spelled strangely).
Though, I want to see the look on the Best Buy Employee's face when you go to return a video card that has been sitting in this goop.
rumored to be about 8$ per gallon.... This is just proof that we're in the last few years of VC funding for "amazing, innovative, and revolutionary computer design" instead of something that works.
I can see this for extremely dense packed server blades in a rack. Where today our problems are electrical and heat and not compute power. This would solve one of those problems at any rate.
It's like the good old days of TCM mainframes with massive 400psi chiller pumps.
This has been done before with fluorinert and mineral oil. In fact, there was a posting here on Slashdot back in 2000 where the guys did liquid nitrogen-cooled fluorinert. Definitely more cool-points (pun intended) for that.
Fluorinert is definitely a better choice over mineral oil if you ever intend on being able to upgrade or fix the PC, since fluorinert evaporates without a residue, but it's a bit pricey.
Read the HardOCP forums, and you'll see several people had talked of using Flourinert, it's just too damned expensive.
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.. when we have fully baptized and oil-annointed CPU's.
And get much better performance. All you need to cool on a PC for top performance is the CPU and the northbridge, maybe some of the voltage regulators, and the GPU if you want to overclock that.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
"See that waterfall? That's what makes my computer so snappy and frothy. Yes sir, my computers are the only ones cooled by waterfall in the whole world. And you can take that to the bank."
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
That's an incredibly small R&D cost. That would employ a newbie junior engineer for no more than 4 years. Let alone costs of materials, furnishings,...
Hardly expensive, really. If they sell a million units they only need to make £0.10 per unit to get that cost back.
Couldn't stand the weather
A KG doesn't exist. Neither a prefix of K nor a unit of G exists.
Aside from it looking cool when new and polished, this will be an overpriced piece of junk in 3 years. Given the rate, my Wristwatch will have a stronger and faster CPU by then.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Water has the highest heat capacity of any common liquid. It takes more energy to raise the temp of a given amount of water one degree than for any other substance. High heat capacity is one reason it is so efficient for power generation and cooling.
For example, one BTU of energy raises one pound of water one degree F. In metric units, the specific heat of water is about 4185 J/kg/K (15C). Whereas the specific heat of Flourinert is about 1049 J/kg/K, or 24% of water. OTOH, Flourinert is about twice as dense as water (1.85). This means that the flow rate would have to be 2.25 (1/(1.85*.24)) times that for water to remove the same amount of heat, given the same temperature drop. I would have guessed that Flourinert would be a better heat remover at such a high price. It's utility comes from its inert nature in an electronics environment.
Deionized water is also a good electrical insulator as well as the best heat transfer agent. But with the wide variety of materials in a pc, some would dissolve and cause water to be conductive. Shorts.
I wonder if it has his voice and attitude too?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
http://www.parallax-tech.com/fluorine.htm
only $2450 for 3 gallons..... it wouldn't be exotic if the liquid was cheap.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
I seem to remember a /. article 'round 'bout the time that overclocking PII's became popular. A young man with a webhost in The Netherlands took his PII/233 and overclocked it to 618MHz by dumping the motherboard in mineral oil and using a fishtank pump to circulate the fluid over a window-mount room air conditioner condenser coil (approx 4k BTU's). His styrofoam cooler was the housing, and he had some condensation problems, but it worked. Total cost of mod: ~ 300US. Meh.
That's like $40,000 worth of engineering in your post. Perhaps you should think about selling your services...? I hear there's more openings for that sort of work lately...
I'm not sure density would be a good trait. The problem is, the denser your fluid, the more difficult it will be for convection currents to carry the heated fluid away.
I was thinking of ethanol. It's got about half the heat capacity of water, but it's a non-electrolyte and non-conductive.
It's been a long time.
Cooled PC and a zen meditation fountain in one?! wicked! wait... ok, that noise is making me need to pee...
Load it up with Jolt brand coolant. Half the heat - twice the Hertz
I did a proof of concept on this for myself several years ago. I used inexpensive mineral oil. Distilled water is non conductive as well, but most likely would be easier to short out with contaminates.
Although I never found out the heat dissipation efficiency of the oil, It did work.
That fluorinert-based cooling apparatus comes with a PC.
yep, we need mass production of another greenhouse gas~
And besides - Given the cost of living in London (consistently one of the two highest in the world), and the rest of England it is not unreasonable to expect that 100,000 pounds would be only barely enough to employ a team of two-three entry/mid-level engineers for a year. Weird that they bothered to point that out at all.
Simply having the deionized water exposed to air will cause it to become conductive as CO2 dissolves into it and forms carbonic acid.
With improved power efficiency in chips lowering the heat generated, and better fans and case designs, we're already at the ideal place of a serious desktop computer being silent and cool-running.
Recently I've built two computers following Ars Technica's guide for the Hot Rod. There's no noise at all in a quiet room, and when I periodically check on the temperature, it's lower than older computers--typically 30-35 degrees on the CPU, when older computers are in the 40-50 range. That's with four fans, three of which are stock: the stock 120mm case fan (Antec Solo), a special heat sink for the CPU with a 120mm fan, the PSU's 120mm fan, and whatever is on the graphics card.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
A company local to me, Puget Systems, has a PC that is cooled by mineral oil.
Nonconductive, cheap and easy to set up.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
Yawn..... This "amazing" technology can be reproduced with a plastic tub and couple quarts of mineral oil.
, as the creator of the thinktank , which is AFAIK the very first actual 'PC' computer case designed for submersion cooling . Not a production model or anything , but an actual 'case' not just a fishtank or styrofoam cooler. A picture of the thinktank was published in the book PC Modding For Dummies , in 2005 !! 100,000 Pounds and 3 years for R&D ? Epic Fail on the google-fu.My first public showing of the thinktank predates the start of thier 'research' by a year. Anyways.... It's very well done . Kudos to the builders , it is a masterpiece to be sure. ----- Thinktank revision 2.0 will be out at a forum near you right away. =P ------- *BrainEater*
$400 ? I'd love to see a link.
ebay.com, search for "Vapochill." Used ones go for about $400.
then you still have to gut your chassis to fit the ginormous cooling.
It's a small hole on the bottom of the case and I'm handy with a Dremel. If you want extreme cooling, you've gotta be willing to do some mods. It's a lot easier than making your rig liquid-tight and filling it with fluid! Then again, you can just leave the side of the case open if you don't want to cut your case.
Plus it's noisy as hell.
Vapochills are a lot quieter than the hairdriers they call fans on modern video cards. I have been using a (heavily modded) Vapochill in my bedroom as my main rig for three years. It has different fan settings, and the compressor is about as quiet as your minifridge's. Have you heard how noisy the fans are on some aftermarket heatsinks?
Now my custom, dual cascade, that's noisy.
It would require substantial improvements in both areas before ever being considered for general use in PCs.
Well I use one on my main rig, as do many people. Besides, the fans help drown out ambient noise and help me sleep. Seriously, on the low fan settings, it's as quiet as any air-cooled rig with a modern video card (I water cool my video cards since *that's* noise I can't handle.)
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
I've had the pole transformer explode next to my house twice now. Two different houses & transformers, not the same one twice.
Not only are they tremendously loud and bright, they shake the earth when they blow, too.
Warning signs to watch for: It'll buzz loudly for months before exploding, and sometimes they will leak PCB-laden fluids down the sides for weeks.