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."

Comments

Bulletproof?

[derfy]

Bulletproof? Seriously?

Re:so much for quick repair

[Gat0r30y]

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.

I see a few problems

[PPH]

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 ....