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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*-
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.
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
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.
since when do computers get twice as fast every 18 months? That hasn't been true for a couple years.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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.
.. when we have fully baptized and oil-annointed CPU's.
After the Sony rootkit fiasco why in the HELL would anyone name a computer product "XCP"???!!!
Because most people have never heard of the rootkit fiasco (let alone "XCP"). Additionally I don't think most people who have heard of the rootkit would be dumb enough to confuse a bad copy protection system with a liquid cooled PC. Besides, a lot of acronyms double up for different things, there's only so many TLAs available in this world.
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.
$400 ? I'd love to see a link.
True phase-change cooling usually costs a grand for the kit, then you still have to gut your chassis to fit the ginormous cooling colon^H^Humn. Plus it's noisy as hell. It would require substantial improvements in both areas before ever being considered for general use in PCs.
This fluorinert jobby is probably whisper quiet, but I don't see anyone racing to order one. In a Cray, the liquid made sense because they were huge machines and it wasn't realistic to even try to cool them with air. Today's computers are reduced to a single board, with a few very localized heat sources.
Having a big body of liquid will actually hinder the heat dissipation, because the liquid moves far slower than air, and your CPU is putting out 100+ watts of heat in a tiny area, or in my case 350 watts, turning the area near the CPU into a mini deep fryer - definitely not cool!
Given how today's air coolers can run whisper quiet (at stock speeds and voltages), I just don't see where immersion cooling could possibly fit in the PC market. It doesn't work any better than a high-end air cooler (Ninja or TRUE120), doesn't overclock anywhere near as well as TEC+water setups or phase change, and costs 50 times more.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
That fluorinert-based cooling apparatus comes with a PC.