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Oil-Immersion Cooled PC Goes To Retail
notthatwillsmith writes "Everyone's seen mods where someone super-cools a PC by submersing it in a non-conductive oil. It's a neat idea, but most components aren't designed to withstand a hot oil bath; after prolonged exposure materials break down and components begin to fail. Maximum PC has an exclusive hands-on, first look at the new Hardcore Computer Reactor, the first oil-cooled PC available for sale. Hardcore engineered the Reactor to withstand the oil, using space-age materials and proprietary oil. The Reactor's custom-manufactured motherboard, videocards, memory, and SSD drives are submersed in the oil, while the dry components sit outside the bulletproof tank. The motherboard lifts out of the oil bath on rails, giving you relatively easy access to components, and the overall design is simply jaw-dropping. Of course, we'd expect nothing less for a machine with a base price of $4000 that goes all the way up to $11k for a fully maxed out config."
Bulletproof? Seriously?
RTFA - Drives are in separate bays for easy access. HDD's would not fare very well in oil, even proprietary super secret oil. Quite the impressive piece of hardware. - Your not on trouble shooting does raise a good point though. Seriously, what do you do when you have a problem with this thing? And redundant PSU's? They must know that these will be the first to go, and a tremendous pain to replace.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
So my first worry is upgrade path. Which my scanning of the article's many usages of the words "custom" and "proprietary" leads me to believe there really isn't one.
Kryo's problem was that while you could buy a bad-ass refrigerated system for a mere 2x the cost of a top-end system that got a good 30% more performance -- they broke the 1 GHz barrier when air-cooled athlons were still running at around 600-700 MHz -- but then six months to a year later that system was merely "top of the line", and then of course soon after that "sub-optimal". Air-cooled athlons hit 1 GHz, and of course Kryotech came out with even faster systems, but it was obvious that the advantage you were getting was temporally speaking not worth the price.
Now with a slide-out motherboard and all it seems that upgrading this thing is at least -possible-, so perhaps if the company stays in business, you could at least purchase a compatible upgrade from them. Assuming there isn't a huge premium for the upgrade parts, that could be reasonable. The main thing is to have the re-usable oil cooling system. If they could make it so it can use off-the-shelf parts, and just sold the case itself, then that would be the ultimate to me.
The enemies of Democracy are
I read TFA and was waiting for all the reasons this was a good idea. Like why all Buicks have three holes in each side. Or why glad bags are so much better with yellow and blue zippers. I expected to read that the machine was like, totally silent. Or that things ran, well, slicker. Maybe I missed a whole page of pluses? There gotta be a whole lot of pluses for a $4K box that you can't change the motherboard.
I'm just wondering what the advantage of this thing is versus non-submersed liquid cooling.
1) Noise? They said it's quiet "for so much hardware." Yeah well considering what a normal three GPU system sounds like that's not saying a whole lot. A good pump-and-block cooled setup can run around 25 dBa which is something like a whisper at 6 feet. In both cases you still need a couple of fans running, so I imagine non-cooling factors will dominate noise.
2) Performance? The article says cooling probably won't exceed the best liquid cooled setups that focus on the CPU/GPU.
It certainly is a cool idea, but I think I'd rather pay for a normal liquid cooled setup.
This is from a now dead startup I did from 2002 to 2005. 100% totally silent High end PC's.
http://www.silentcomputing.com/i.html Look at the last photo.
We had an all aluminum design as well as a water cooled design. I also came up with an advanced Carbon Fiber material with 4x the thermal conductivity of Copper that was light weight.
These systems provide much more cooling then oil could ever do.
The system was sealed, 100% total silent and easy to disassemble and re-assemble. Even easier to work on then a regular PC...
We even had the hard drives in a thermally conductive rubber allowing them to run cooler then in a normal system with fans.
The main system was sealed and designed to run with a descant and dry gas like argon inside so when overclocking using peltier thermoelectric coolers on the CPU where wouldn't be any condensation. Condensation is a major problem for overclockers that up the voltage and have to supercool the CPU.
We are still planning to open source the designs.
We never were able to raise the money to start production of these. To be honest 1/2 our problem was management wanted to court Intel,HP, SUN, and they just didn't get it. The large companies really weren't interested in something that didn't conform to what they already were doing.
We never did talk to enough small investors, and finally we ended up with a bad apple in the company that try to do a hostile take over and killed the company when he failed...
Finally the last 20 polished heat sinks I had were stolen out of my garage 2 weeks ago :( Some idiots problem going to get standard aluminum recycling prices for them too, considering each one cost me over $100 each!
I always felt doing oil was just idiotic and still do.
Too bad being an entrepreneur isn't as easy as programming.
If anyone is still interested in this tech, let me know. I have 3 years invested in it, and we were partners with NASA for much of it.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
I know that this will disgust most folks here but afaic, the best market for these will be for receptionists and folks like that at high end customer service applications. If you're looking to build a reception desk for a boutique hotel then three or four of these in an open frame aluminum enclosure puts you well on your way to looking cool and rich for your snotty customers. In an application like that they don't even have to work very well. Back in the early nineties a company sold insanely expensive custom paint jobs for tower Macintosh CPUs and monitors and my friends and I all looked at them at the trade shows, drooled, and told each other that nobody would buy them. We were wrong. To a SoHo art gallery a thousand dollar cpu paintjob was cheap at the price and I can tell you that I kept spotting those puppies, some of them not even turned on, at various front desks at ad agencies, snotty law firms, and the like for at least seven or eight years after that.
Mark my words, these will be bought for high-profile uses at these kinds of places and almost certainly will get featured in at least one televison show or movie, probably several. All they need to do is a seed a few at Rodeo Drive stores or the offices of some casting agency and they'll be in like Flynn.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
elevator controls. I know where there's a 3 stop basement traction elevator in a private home that was installed in 1917 and still in operation with all stock components where the control relays are immersed in a tub of oil. The relays are mounted to the lid which can be raised up via a small chain hoist.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Problem 1: Fire codes. To date, nobody has come up with a non-flammable insulating oil to replace PCBs (carcinogenic, nasty stuff). Oil is flammable and, in combination with electrical equipment, a very bad idea. Generally, it is not allowed within occupied ares outside of fireproof vaults.
Problem 2: Specific heat content of oil. Its not as good as water by a long shot. So, for equipment that operates below 100C, water can transport much more heat than oil. CPU and GPU water coolers are common technology. So what good is oil?
Problem 3: This doesn't eliminate fans, pumps, heat sinks, etc. that eventually move the heat into the surrounding air. That stuff still makes noise. Apart from some custom systems that plumb coolant to remote heat exchangers where the noise isn't a problem, this thing will still have fans. So what did we gain?
Problem 4: How much power do those kewl blue LEDs consume? Here's an idea ....
Have gnu, will travel.
We made something like this some years ago. We submerged a MB in oil and put the whole thing in a freezer. It worked great, until the oil penetrated in between the pci card slots (yes, it was an old computer)and MB. This also affected the ram slots. This made the electrical connection between ramMB and pciMB pretty useless after a while, effectively shutting the thing down. We soldered the ram and pci cards to the motherboard, and this solved the problem.
I'm the Engineering Manager for the company that makes the oil. Because of a NDA between my company and Hardcore Computers, I'm posting anonymously and I'm not at liberty to discuss the oil specifically, but I can tell you that it's a modification of another of our products; a very high grade synthetic hydrocarbon dielectric fluid that's been used for years to cool electronic components. It's highly biodegradable, nontoxic, and nonhazardous. It's not a vegetable oil or a halogenated hydrocarbon. And it's not made by 3M.
Why bother with a moisture proof wrapper when you could just dehumidify the freezer itself and keep it sealed tight? Honestly though there are plenty of refrigerant type phase change cooling products on the market.
In Soviet Russia meme tires of you!