RSSHardcore Computer intros total-immersion liquid cooling desktop
By Angela Gunn | Published October 21, 2008, 10:14 AM
Case modders know all about water cooling systems for their overclocked CPUs, but how about dunking the thing? Enter the Hardcore Reactor, which officially debuted on Monday.
Yes, desktop PC components submerged in liquid...please stop twitching. The Rochester, Minn.-based startup has two patents for submersion-cooled electronics, including a circuit board designed to operate in the depths of what a company representative describes as "a mineral oil-like substance." (She also says it's potable, but this reporter will not be testing that theory.)
Here's how the cooling system works according to the documentation: The "dielectric cooling liquid," as the patent puts it, indicates that tests have been run with an engineered fluid of the 3M Novec sort, but the patent provides for various other liquids such as mineral, silicone, or even soybean oil.
The liquid fills a self-contained interior space that also includes the heat-generating electronics (e.g., the circuit board) along with a pump. On the outside of that interior space, there's a heat exchanger into which the pump moves the hot liquid; it moves along a cooling path and re-enters the enclosure to continue its work. An entire circuit takes about 30 seconds, and it's estimates that the oil can disperse an order of magnitude more heat than mere air can.
Submersion designs aren't unknown, and the patents list plenty of prior art predating Hardcore's founding in 2006. And submersion designs are already in common use in certain kinds of extreme environments (such as deep-water submersibles) where traditional cooling methods aren't appropriate. But such units have, aside from cost, certain problems of upgradability and access.
The Hardcore design ameliorates those by using pass-through connectors (between the motherboard on the inside of the enclosure to the rest of the machine outside) to allow for hot-swapping of SATA hard drives. Still, much of the unit appears to be proprietary; upgrade and even repair options remain to be seen.
And then there's the price -- this is not a low-end unit. On the site today, the basic system we configured weighed in at $6,058, and the seriously tricked-out model was well over $8,000, depending on our willingness to let our ugly old monitor, keyboard and such (not to mention Vista) touch the stylishly blue-glowing Reactor tower. And never mind service on older machines down the road; shipping alone raises questions like, "Can the same delivery services that can't manage to deliver shirt.woot.com purchases intact handle a machine that gets cranky if it tips on its side?"
Deep thoughts for deep pockets -- and Hardcore will doubtless be hoping for those profound and cash-flow-positive thinkers to flock to its inaugural offering.
1. Um, can't you just OPEN THE CASE FOR AIR COOLING? I heard that works pretty well too. (and not too much uglier either)
2. No upgrading the components?! I guess the "upgrade path" is "another one of these buggers"! I bet they planned it that way!
3. If you have enough money to either buy a really cool looking tricked-out nitro Toyota OR "just" a "regular" Lamborghini, which would you get?
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|Water and Electronics is bad ummkay...
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|But good cooling oil and electronics is good. most of the electricity transformers that provide your house with electricity contain cooling oil inside.....
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|"shipping alone raises questions like, "Can the same delivery services that can't manage to deliver s***.woot.com purchases intact handle a machine that gets cranky if it tips on its side?""
as somebody who works at ups, this made me lol. good luck to those whoever orders this.
"arrows go up? who knew?"
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|Now it just needs an aquarium aerator for some bubbles and it will be the coolest looking PC ever.
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|This is an executive desktop toy. If putting it under the desk is an option (or in a rack, where systems that have to run "nonstop" belong), then for close to the same money, one can throw together a quad-processor quad-core AMD/Opteron or Intel/Xeon system or small cluster with better performance and still have enough left over for a very nice Lava Lamp.
Prior art seems to cover everything in the patents pretty thoroughly, so I'm wondering what's left other than commercialization of a lot of hobbyists' experimentation in thermal management with liquids and immersion, and overclocking. I'm not sure you can patent "but it's purty."
Bah. Humbug.
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|And yet the readers are crying WOOT WOOT! -- the one place I'm willing to bet you never, ever, ever see this thing.
Re the patents, I'm curious to see what wider scrutiny reveals. Heaven knows that the USPTO has awarded patents before that shouldn't have been awarded, but when I read through the filing I thought Hardcore was pretty scrupulous about prior art... and that there was indeed a good bit of it. So what's the patent award mean, right? The world may never know...
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|Woot woot!
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|And now for a version rated 5,000 ft in salt water. May be handy?
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|I wonder if you pump Red Bull through the cooling system if it speeds up the processing.
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|reminds me of the article i read years ago where they submerged the computer hardware in I think vegetable oil as a way to keep it cool
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|and it probably made it less fattening.
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|*laughing*
Just one question:
Why?
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|This technique was explored in the user built home brew niche in several of the consumer PC mags and on Tom's Hardware over the last couple of years.
Novel, nifty, but for most users utterly beyond their ability to manage.
So, if you want a user unfriendly design, you have found it.
Simple liquid heat sinks function almost as efficiently and are much more easily managed.
So, bottomline, you have novelty versus near equal efficiency with additional user-serviceable friendliness. A simple choice for me. It would be the add-on liquid heatsinks. And that would be the case if prices were equivalent!
But factor in the price of this novelty and the entire concept becomes an absurd novelty.
But then, each has their own criterion.
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|Can I take a guess that "Novelty" is your word of the day?
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|For this product, yup.
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|WOOOOOOOOOOOOOT !
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