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First Retail Water-Cooled DDR2 Memory Tested 132

Posted by CmdrTaco from the everything-is-better-wet dept.
Twistedmelon writes "We've all heard of water cooling for processors and even graphics processors, in today's high end PCs. However, a water cooled memory module is something that hasn't been done until now. OCZ Technology recently announced their line of Flex XLC Water-Cooled RAM, with its integrated heat-spreaders that can be connected to any standard water cooling system. The memory operates much cooler under load with tight timings at DDR2-800 speeds. For those with water-cooling setups, these DIMMs could easily be tapped into an existing system allowing for quiet and robust cooling for your system memory as well."
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First Retail Water-Cooled DDR2 Memory Tested More

First Retail Water-Cooled DDR2 Memory Tested

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  • zap... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mastershake_phd ( 1050150 ) on Wednesday March 07, 2007 @10:37AM (#18261642) Homepage
    Ive heard of water cooling CPUs, GPUs, and even the Northbridge, but never RAM. Still I guess they are getting hotter too. The only thing I got against water cooling is it uses water, no thanks. Though I would consider using a non-conductive fluid. There is this stuff called fluorinert made for just such an application. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorinert [wikipedia.org] Its extremely expensive though. Ive heard Mineral oil works, then if you get a leak you just get a mess, instead of a fried PC.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by FredDC ( 1048502 )
      The only thing I got against water cooling is it uses water, no thanks
       
      Amen brother! I also think putting water inside a pc is a bad idea... Water can do too much damage if it leaks, I know the chance is extremely small but I would prefer another material that will cause no damage if it ever leaks.

      • Not so (Score:4, Informative)

        by Gazzonyx ( 982402 ) <scott.lovenberg@gm a i l.com> on Wednesday March 07, 2007 @11:51AM (#18262478)
        Clean (Distilled), water is an insulator. In fact, toms hardware inmersed a computer in water in their article Strip Out The Fans, Add 8 Gallons of Cooking Oil [tomshardware.com]. Just used distilled water, and not tap water - as you shouldn't be using tap water, anyways since it eats away at the parts of a water cooling system.
        As long as you don't have free electrons, you won't be passing current.
        • To be fair, they ran a computer immersed in distilled water and it did crash after 5 minutes or so, IIRC. They added the oil after that and it booted just fine, so the water didn't fry anything.
          • Yeah, 5 minutes is all it took. I think over time they had the same problem with the oil as the did the distilled water - the intimate proximation of the liquid to the wires quickly (relatively) ionizes it. I think the resistance is the key factor. Thus, water was stable for 5 minutes and oil, IIRC was like 3 months or so. Either way, all liquids in contact with circuits will, over time, become conductive. As always, if I'm wrong, please correct me.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Anpheus ( 908711 )
              I'm not an expert, but I did take AP Chemistry... It depends on whether or not the liquid is polar. Oils are almost always nonpolar covalent, whereas water is polar covalent. In the presence of an ion, water tends to self-ionize and split into two ions itself. And where there be ions, there be a conducting path.

              • Not so, maybe... (Score:2, Informative)

                by Gazzonyx ( 982402 )
                Yeah, in my original I wrote that I thought that it had to be non-polar, but I wasn't so sure about it, so I took it out. I'm fairly sure you're right. I think it takes a LOT of electricity to break a double covalent bond, and still quite a bit to break a covalent bond. So, those electrons are fairly well 'glued' in their orbits... But when you take into consideration that the water will be absorbing heat in the presence of something like 2.5 amps (I'm assuming 300 watts @ 120 VDC - I'm sure this is over

        • Re:Not so (Score:4, Informative)

          by modecx ( 130548 ) on Wednesday March 07, 2007 @01:30PM (#18263932)
          Distilled water in a cooling system is no better than tap water. Sure, you won't have an amount of ions that will be signifigant to conduct electricity...for the first day, that is. The particles are still going to come off the metals that compose your system, and then you're on the path to being hosed by galvanic corossion.

          The key is to not using dissimalar alloys in your system. An aluminum block and a copper radaitor are going to cause problems, unless you use some of the products out there which combat. That's the real key. Pure water is even more corrosive than tap water. Ideally, you want your alloys to be as close as possible, simply for the fact there will be little electrochemical potential.
      • Oil on the other hand [boingboing.net] is a great insulator, and works quite well for cooling a computer.
    • Plus, if you have to dive really deep then you can saturate it with oxygen and breathe it like amniotic fluid!

      Of course, the following lung trauma is fatal. Still, vorsprung durch technik...

    • Re:zap... (Score:5, Informative)

      by NeoThermic ( 732100 ) on Wednesday March 07, 2007 @11:01AM (#18261890) Homepage Journal
      You never fill a water cooling loop with normal water anyway. The two main reasons why is that first it's conductive, and second, it is impure, meaning you'll get problems later down the line with scum forming on the pipes and on the insides of coolers. Instead, the suggested water to use is deionized water, which is non-conductive* and doesn't suffer as much from scum forming (although many still like to use an anti-algae solution to combat the scum that forms.

      NeoThermic

      (* ok, it still conducts, but it has a higher resistance, and in computers there's few items that'll make deionized water conduct if it leaks. Much safer than normal water)

      • Re:zap... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by CreatureComfort ( 741652 ) * on Wednesday March 07, 2007 @11:16AM (#18262064)

        Except that what really makes water start to conduct is the impurities dissolved in it. Have you looked inside you computer lately? I've got industrial grade air scrubbers running in my house (roommate with allergies) and I still get dust buildup inside the case. As soon as that deionized water hits that dust, I'm sure the resulting mud would be conductive enough to be devastating.

        On the other hand, we are getting closer to the point where everything inside the case that needs cooling could be hooked up to the water system. If we can add power supply and hard drives, then it might be possible to hermetically seal the case, and just cool the water.

        • Well, sort of.... http://www.overclockers.com/tips1240/index03.asp [overclockers.com]
          The article is about building a plexi box, putting a waterblock in the box, then tossing the PS and some mineral oil in.
          Just seems unsettling to have the PS in liquid.
        • If your water cooling system is exposed to the environment, it's broken. A non-broken water cooling system is *closed*, so the only impurities getting inside are the ones that are there when you close the system.

          Your house, OTOH, has windows, doors, and cracks, as well as at least one occupant who probably enters and exits through one of those things periodically. Even if you're the stereotypical slashdotter, your mom probably goes out to buy food once in a while. People who live in biodomes excluded, ho

          • But the situation we are talking about is precisely a broken water cooling system. If your water cooling system is, and stays, sealed, I agree, you don't have to worry. What most of us, who are unwilling to take the plunge to water cooling systems, worry about is the results when, not if, it breaks and leaks.

            If you have a non-conducting medium, it may be a mess, but not a disaster. If you are using a conducting medium, like water, or one that becomes conducting when it leaks, like deionized water, you

            • Well, you could look at it this way: build it well enough, and by the time it becomes likely to leak the computer is obsolete anyway. For example, having a 1% chance of leak within the first 5 years could be "good enough," even if the probability increased exponentially after that.

        • Actually, most household dust is just flaked off skin, which is pretty non-conductive itself. If you had metal shavings or something else soluble in the dust, I'd worry, but it's very unlikely.

          • Your flaked off skin has high concentrations of various salts in and on it. Back in the day, when they actually did experiments in high school chemistry class, I remember one where we used deionized water, a battery, and a light bulb to show that the water was non-conductive, then added salt and showed that it became a good conductor. That was the experiment I was thinking of when reading the GPs post.

        • You mean like this [koolance.com]? I can't find any hard drives with built in water blocks but there are plenty of after market ones. In fact there are water cooling blocks for damn near everything; voltage regulators [koolance.com], north/southbridge [koolance.com], RAM [koolance.com], hard drives [koolance.com], etc... I'm only pulling from koolance but there are many after market water cooling kits for everything that produces noticeable heat.
      • Highly purified water is actually fairly reactive chemically, and it will slowly dissolve tiny amounts of material from the tubing, waterblocks, pumps, etc. Unless your system incorporates some type of water purification element, the water in it will be no better than tap water in a few weeks.

        Water cooling has been used for decades in high powered radio and TV transmitters, but such systems incorporate water conductivity monitors to check for dissolved impurities, and some means of removing them (distiller

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

        Instead, the suggested water to use is deionized water, which is non-conductive* and doesn't suffer as much from scum forming

        Ordinary distilled water is close enough to nonconductive, until it gets contaminated of course.

        Deionized water is significant in that it is not only nonconductive, but it is noncorrosive. Water is corrosive because of ions known as hydronium and hydroxide (although as I am chem-bozo-man, I have no idea which is positive and which is negative.) Water will actually react with itself

      • Wrong.
        DI water will eat metals as it looks to get its ions back.
        Distilled water is vastly superior in electronic cooling applications.
        We have $500K testers that use distilled water and PG in a 50/50 blend. Use DI water and your warranty is void.
        -nB

    • Re:zap... (Score:5, Informative)

      by moonbender ( 547943 ) <moonbenderNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday March 07, 2007 @11:07AM (#18261954)
      You haven't heard of water cooling RAM because it's a waste of resources, even more so than water cooling other components. RAM doesn't use a whole lot of power and consequently doesn't generate a lot of heat, a quick Google says about 10W. That's comparable to hard drives - the difference being that RAM doesn't really mind running at 50 to 80C, while HDDs do. DDR2 SDRAM doesn't need special active cooling, a somewhat ventilated case is easily enough.
      • Until you're overvolting your RAM to speed up timings just like you do with your CPU. Then you might want some extra cooling for the extra heat being created...
      • However watercooling the ram is useful if you are trying to have zero (or close to it) noise - zero noise means zero fans (preferably) so you need to get the heat out of there some how.

        You will probably also encase the hard disks in sound insulated water blocks and put the pump inside accoustically damping foam.

        Cooling is all a question of planning and know what you want to get out of it

        Cool, quiet, cheap - pick two!
      • The power you mention is at stock voltages. Many overclockers run their RAM at 2.0 and higher.

        For them (and me), RAM created heat is a problem.

        However, I just hung an old-school ghetto CPU fan over them. I'm not sure I need them water cooled.
    • If they marketed it as ultra-quiet PC's, I might be more interested. But that would be for the purpose of removing fans, not supercharging my memory. more interested in quiet and energy-efficient solution than clock speeds that moore-ishly will be on sale in a few months.

      And some people would prefer if we hug trees instead of pondering how to spend more power to remove the heat from all the power we're pumping into our gaming rigs.

      Hmm... wonder how many comments we'll get with 'afraid of water' and 'liquid
      • Would running the water pump be louder than running the fans? I have some computers with fans that you can hardly hear. If only they had fans with seal bearings, so that they wouldn't start to make so much noise once they got filled with dust.

    • Re:zap... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Phreakiture ( 547094 ) on Wednesday March 07, 2007 @11:53AM (#18262514) Homepage

      It gives new meaning to the term "memory leak", no?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bcmm ( 768152 )
      The nice thing about oil cooling is that as it is non-conductive, it doesn't need an elaborate system of pipes and thermal interfaces to components. Most components can just sit in the oil and be cooled by convection (hard drives don't like it, apparently, although presumably it wouldn't be an issue provided they were properly sealed). There was an article on Slashdot about it a while ago, with pics of a caseless computer in a fishtank of mineral oil.
    • When you find something non-conductive enough, you could actually just fill the entire case with it -- or just drop your whole computer into a tank of non-conductive oil [markusleonhardt.de]. I always loved the idea, and was never brave enough to actually try it, but it seems like a much easier solution than water-cooling.
  • I can just picture Cray sitting on his porch in Chippewa Falls with a basket of DDR2-800 DIMMs and a coil of copper tubing, plumbing together his next home computer.

  • Soon enough. (Score:4, Funny)

    by shirizaki ( 994008 ) on Wednesday March 07, 2007 @10:39AM (#18261666)
    We'll need water cooling for the water coolers.

    And then someone will get the smart idea to stick his whole tower in the freezer. Then nerds will become buff by moving around all their heavy equipment.
    • We'll need water cooling for the water coolers.

      Been done. There's a two-stage system on the market (I think the ad was in CPU Mag) that uses a Peltier device to cool the water.

      rj

    • I actually had a plan drawn out to convert half my chest freezer into a cooler for my computer. I gave it up when I realized that the freezer was much more useful for keeping food frozen and that having the computer in there would probably not keep the rest of the food cold enough.
      • Freezers are not dsigned to move a large amount of heat that is being continuously generated - theyare designed to cool a space then keep it cool.

        This is one of the reasons that putting a PC in a freezer is not a good idea. Asside from the condensation you need a huge chest freezer to even have a hope of keeping an average PC cool, even then the pump will be running at max so you will have a lot of noise and its likely to fail sooner since those ones are not selected for continuous running.

        There are much be

    • We'll need water cooling for the water coolers. And then someone will get the smart idea to stick his whole tower in the freezer. Then nerds will become buff by moving around all their heavy equipment.

      Putting your whole tower in a consumer refrigerator or freezer wouldn't work too well, because of the moisture and condensation. However, there are computer refrigeration [guru3d.com] units available for -50 deg. C cooling.

  • But how much does it really improve things? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JoeD ( 12073 ) on Wednesday March 07, 2007 @10:40AM (#18261674) Homepage
    Every time I see something like this, I wonder how much real world improvement you will see.

    Sure, there may be a small improvement on a benchmark, but those rarely translate into something that's noticeable to the end user.

    Or is it really more about having the shiniest toys?

    • Re:But how much does it really improve things? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by penp ( 1072374 ) on Wednesday March 07, 2007 @10:46AM (#18261748)
      To a lot of people, water cooling isn't only about the possible performance increase, it's also about the sound (or lack thereof). Personally, I haven't tried water cooling yet, but I would definitely like to get the sound of a buzzsaw out of my PC.

      As far as performance goes, I recently upgraded from RAM that had a CAS latency of 3 (Corsair XMS) to some that had more aggressive timings (OCZ performance ram) with a CAS latency of only 2. They were running at the same speeds (DDR 400 / PC3200), but at the faster timings the improvement was vastly greater than I had expected. After reading up on it some, a difference of 1ns can mean a lot when you're talking in terms of tens of millions of data cycles.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by moonbender ( 547943 )
        Quietly cooling a computer is really, really easy these days. Two or three years ago, it was a pain, because CPUs actually generated more heat back then, but more importantly because silent computing is just mainstream these days.

        The power supply is probably the hardest thing to get quiet, unless you're going with a passive one. But you can also get an efficient one with a good fan controller, like a Seasonic, for 75 bucks or so. Silent CPU coolers can be had for 25, and while most graphics cards these days
        • But you're making the choice between "silent" and "high performance", because if you stick a lot of high-spec parts in your machine, you'll need active cooling of some sort. You can't cool a GeForce 8800GTX combined with a Quad Core chip passively. Hence, the water cooling allows you the best of both worlds. But it's all a choice.
          • No, I made a choice between silent and overclocking. You won't cool that hardware passively, but that's not necessary, you can cool it with a very low number of very slow fans. It's not silent - nothing is! even passive PSUs buzz - but it's as good as silent at 2 feet. I've got a mid-end system running that way, and my cooling hardware is just vastly inferior to what's out there: a Scythe Ninja was designed to cool dual Prescotts quietly, a Quad Xeon just isn't that big of a problem.

            That said, once you star

        • The power supply is probably the hardest thing to get quiet,

          Not at all. Just replace the stock 80mm fan with a better (thermally controlled) one. For $5, you've got a very quiet PSU. For those not proficient with soldering or splicing, a $1 fan extension cable to will be long enough to allow you to plug the fan into your motherboard, or a fan speed controller.

          Hint: Avoid PSUs with 120mm fans. It's all gimmick. They're usually poorly designed, with horrible airflow, and much noisier than 80mm versions.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by moonbender ( 547943 )
            Not at all. Just replace the stock 80mm fan with a better (thermally controlled) one.

            Yes. That's hard. At least compared to just buying cheap, off the shelf quiet components.

            As for the rest: the doctrine at Silent PC Review, probably the definitive resource on this kind of stuff, is that 2.5" disks overall are more quiet than 3.5" disks and that current 120mm PSUs are more quiet than 80mm or 2x 80mm PSUs. The current Seasonics (sorry about the price, I'm in Europe and didn't want to underestimage the US pri

            • Yes. That's hard. At least compared to just buying cheap, off the shelf quiet components.

              Not at all. If you're buying a PSU separately, you're competent enough to route all the wires, plug-in the ATX connectors properly, and remove and replace a dozen screws.

              At that, throwing 8 more screws into the mix, and one more wire to plug-in isn't a big deal.

              the doctrine at Silent PC Review, probably the definitive resource on this kind of stuff, is that 2.5" disks overall are more quiet than 3.5" disks

              I'm not sure

              • At that, throwing 8 more screws into the mix, and one more wire to plug-in isn't a big deal.

                I know a whole lot of people who build their own computers, I only know a handful, myself included, who are willing to mod anything, and touching PSUs isn't my favorite pastime, either. If you think modding hardware is not a big deal to most people, you're a bit out of touch. A long time ago, when I built my first two computers, I was scared shitless - having saved up for the hardware and all; I wouldn't have dared o

                • Ehm. No. Their vibration scale is x out of 10, 10 being completely without vibrations.

                  Yeah, my mistake. Just took a quick glance.

                  FWIW AAM on or off doesn't make much of a difference with my drive, especially since I suspended it.

                  I find that very strange. It made all the difference with mine (WD 160GB).

                  Why? First among other things: "Much lower noise."

                  It's strange, they list many things, but nothing about arm noise, spin-up/spin-down noise, etc. Also, the extra quiet 2.5" HDD @16dB is quite the exception,

        • I recently built a new computer. Not only do I have quiet parts in it, but also I have it overclocked to (checks) 3244 mHz. Here are some of the relevant parts:

          SilverStone SST-ST30NF 300W Fanless Power Supply (Wattage might be an issue for dual 8800's, but that wouldn't be very quiet, would it? Quality is more important than rated watts, anyway.)
          Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
          Antec Solo Quiet Mini Tower Case ATX (no useless holes in the sides, some vibration-reducing material built-in, decent 120mm fan, no sill
      • I recently purchased a fanless power supply, now I only have a fan on the CPU on one on the graphics card.
        You can't even hear the pc when your right up next to it, water cooling is a waste of money.
      • PCs can be quietly cooled with much less extreme methods. For example, for a long time, I've owned workstation-type computers (Alpha, PPC and Xeon) that were quieter than the typical consumer or gamer desktop, despite being more power hungry than a consumer desktop, they just used better parts and better design for the cooling. For one, it takes just a little more expense to buy fans that are either better built or just larger diameter but run slower, and maybe have a thermostat so that it doesn't need t
    • Marginal improvement in performance, with the possibility of doing serious harm to your system. This stuff also reminds me of the 100 MPG "vortex" air fans that you put into your car to improve it's mileage, or guys buying big rims for their cars.

      • Marginal improvement in performance, with the possibility of doing serious harm to your system. This stuff also reminds me of the 100 MPG "vortex" air fans that you put into your car to improve it's mileage, or guys buying big rims for their cars.

        You don't get a performance improvement from water cooling. You get it from overclocking.

        The car analogy, which you probably won't understand because you obviously understand neither water cooling of computers nor much of anything about cars, is adding an oil coo

        • I know you can get performance improvement from overclocking, although the CPU usually isn't the bottleneck in performance for most computers. My point was that most people will probably be doing this for show (i.e. giant spoiler, air dam, and fart pipe muffler on their car with little/no improvement in performance), and that the "overheating" of their memory is a minimal risk if their systems has adequate ventilation. I previously installed water cooling on my system, but more for noise reduction.

          As far a

          • As far as cars go, I've replaced entire engines, dropped trannies, etc so STFU before making any assumptions about me in your condescending reply.

            Then why did you make such an ignorant statement? Your specific examples of "useless" modifications were completely erroneous to say the least.

            My overall point is that, for most people, it will produce little benefit, and that most who do it will not need it. How many cars have you seen with 50-75 extra pounds of side skirts, spoilers and splitters, low profile

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by plover ( 150551 ) *
      Truthfully, it's mostly about adding shine to their toys. Once a gamer gets a frame rate of 72Hz on a 1920 x 1200 display, it's time to add all the detail -- reflections in the water, individual leaves on the trees, beads of sweat on the character's forehead, that sort of thing.

      There are also the people who do serious work who might notice a boost in productivity: they might be able to render movie frames faster, or compile a project with 10 million lines in an hour instead of 70 minutes. Of course peo

      • But I doubt that professionals doing intensive tasks like you mentioned would be bothering to overclock systems or rig up water cooling. They'd be more likely just to buy a powerful server or cluster and have a system that was designed for that kind of load instead of tweaking a PC.

        • Re:But how much does it really improve things? (Score:4, Informative)

          by plover ( 150551 ) * on Wednesday March 07, 2007 @11:49AM (#18262446) Homepage Journal
          True, I'd never trust our build cluster to a bunch of potentially unstable, home-made overclocked Franken-PCs. And even if I would, I seriously doubt management would agree with me. They'd have one of two stock answers: "we'll add another server to the cluster" or "there's no money in the budget, live with it."

          No extra credit points for figuring out which answer we'll get this year.

          However, I will say that the recent set of Dell workstations we got in technically use water cooling. The heat sinks use heat pipes to passively transfer the heat from the CPU up to the large copper radiator fins, and the heat pipes most likely use water as their internal cooling fluid.

          • I know I'm picking a minor nit here, but to the best of my knowledge, heat-pipe coolers use alcohol, not water.
            • Depends on the planned heat load and pressure.
              For Prescott systems ideal is water under a partial vacuum, I would imagine for a lower heat density app alcohol would be ok, but it has a much lower latent heat of vaporisation, so will not remove as much heat as good 'ol H2O.
              -nB

          • However, I will say that the recent set of Dell workstations we got in technically use water cooling. The heat sinks use heat pipes to passively transfer the heat from the CPU up to the large copper radiator fins, and the heat pipes most likely use water as their internal cooling fluid.

            All I have to say about that is: powermac liquid cooling [google.com] (images search)

      • I know people that do this sort of thing because it's a challenge and can be interesting and fun. I don't think there is much of a commercial market but there will always be people who like to tinker with their setup and get the most from it even if it isn't really cost effective.

    • Re:But how much does it really improve things? (Score:5, Funny)

      by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Wednesday March 07, 2007 @11:13AM (#18262034) Homepage Journal
      These radiators add at least 1.4 inch to your e-penis length.
    • Everything that goes in a server eventually trickles down to desktop. Right now servers are using buffered DDR2. Especially, the ram data lines are converted into a type of packet serial data on a special chip on the ram stick. At close to 1066mhz, these things get hot. Like burn your fingers hot. (Know from experience)

      Eventually, we will have to go with buffered DDR2, because you don't get as bad signal degrading after 4gigs. (Only systems I know of that support 64gigs of ram, without special riser

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by plover ( 150551 ) *
        "trickles down" is perhaps a poor choice of metaphor when you're talking about water cooling.
        • Once when I was talking about Republican domestic economic policy I said "Trickle Down, My Ass!" Only after the words escaped my mouth did I realize what I had said...

  • Moo (Score:1)

    by Chacham ( 981 )
    Water cools things? Wait. i have an idea! Remember those people saying something about global warming? Well, let's spread water all over the Earth. That oughta cool it off real well.

    What can i say, i'm a genius.

  • I love the smell of Slashvertisement in the mornin (Score:5, Insightful)

    by beavis88 ( 25983 ) on Wednesday March 07, 2007 @10:42AM (#18261702)
    This is has been done for awhile. Yes, perhaps not DDR2 and memory/waterblock made by the same company, but in my mind, that's the least newsworthy part of this whole endeavor. Nothing to see here (except an OCZ ad), move along...
  • no expence except a cheap heat spreader soldered to a flattened copper tube works quite well, but its mainly not about speed but quietness you don't need a case fan at all. and now you can actually get a water cooled PSU I belive

  • ocz == rice (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    OCZ is to computer parts what Monster Cable is to HDMI cables.

  • Beg pardon? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I water-cooled for years, CPU and northbridge, and I can tell you that water-cooling RAM has been done for several years now using home made water blocks. This MAY be the first retail block from a memory company but there is certainly nothing groundbreaking about that.
    Water-cooling RAM has always struck me as a lot of work for little to any performance return. Plus it's one more thing to go wrong. I never lost a component in 4 years of doing this but it was such a pain to install and maintain. I can onl
  • Like others have said, I find it mind-boggling that "innovations" like this exist almost exclusively to cater to those who are seeking a virtually indistinguishable increase in performance from their machines. Its pretty much just another inch on the tape measure used to distinguish who has the biggest e-penis.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Aladrin ( 926209 )
      Sounds like someone's a little jealous.

      Are they hurting you in any way? No.

      Are they driving the industry that makes computer products better and better? Yes.

      Does having better products every year help you? Yes.

      Seriously, just let them have their fun. Most of us can't afford to spend the mega-bucks on things that don't matter, but these people can, and they enjoy it. Let them have their fun while they inadvertently make the world a better place.

      Besides, I'm sure you have some hobby that most people thin
    • darkforce@Heimdall:~$ ./vpenis
      65.7cm

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AK Marc ( 707885 )
      I find it mind-boggling that "innovations" like this exist almost exclusively to cater to those who are seeking a virtually indistinguishable increase in performance from their machines.

      And I thought it quite reasonable, since many people that use water cooling do so for the sound, not performance increase, and if you eliminate case fans, the memory can easily overheat. This will make it easier and more reliable to make a quiet system with water cooling.
  • Unfortunately, these are useless. I can get more than adequate air-cooling in a case that these would fit in. Where water cooling would be useful is inside a 1U server case and these are too tall.
  • Sounds like both Thermaltake (Aqua RX) and Koolance didn't hear the news. Oh wait, thats because they've had blocks out for a while.......
  • conuection?
  • They don't look like they will fit my 1/2" inner diameter cooling system...

    • Pipe four of them in parallel to get the same total area (i.e., pi*(.5/2)^2 = 4*pi*(.25/2)^2). They'll still restrict the flow some (because the fluid has non-zero viscosity), but I'd guess it'd be pretty close.

  • Dunk the motherboard into a mineral oil bath and use a pump to move it around.

  • Does this host water system ship with Starbucks or Nabob?
  • At what point will manufacturers start making components with water cooling builtin?

    I see a CPU that does not have a heat spreader. Instead it comes with two connectors for plumbing and the water channels are built inside the chip. Same goes for graphics and whatever else needs cooling.

    Cases will have space in them for a cooling unit and pump. Plumbing lines will be as prevelent as power connectors. You will buy "Hyper-Gamma Computer Coolent(TM)" from your local geek shop. And it glows in the dark so you

    • The reason we need cooling so much is because of the heat is WASTE.

      We only started to need CPU fans with 486s and up.

      They need to just prevent the waste in the first place like they are currently tying to do and the problem will go away, without liquid cooling.
      • We only started to need CPU fans with 486s and up.

        Unless you had an NEC, where CPU fans were taboo.
      • Right then. Hope you're happy with your 286's performance then. And make sure you don't drive a car, or even ride public transit, as all those emissions of hot gases are just a waste. Or sit in a heated building in winter or cooled building in the summer, because it'd be much less wasteful to have the inside the same temperature as the outside. Or use a CRT television or monitor, as those use much more energy than an LCD.

        What you refer to as "waste" is simply a by-product of adding more energy to the
      • Hahahaha that's cute. First off, the process (as in CMOS process) back in the 80s was NOT better than it is now. The reason your 386 didn't need a fan (some did have heat sinks though, or at least needed them) was that they only had 300K transistors [or whatever it was]. A modern processor has in the range of tens to hundreds of millions of transistors. Most new processors have more cache than systems had memory, etc.

        What you should concern yourself with is the overall MIPS/watt ratio. Which is definit

    • At what point will manufacturers start making components with water cooling builtin?

      That's what this is!

      But seriously, I think it's coming soon. You buy retail CPUs with coolers. Why not with water blocks?

      The best part about it of course will be that more solutions will be available so we'll find out quickly which connectors are the best type to use and so on.

  • You know how hot and sweaty people get after about 20 minutes of playing DDR? My local arcade has these huge fans next to their machine, it's about time they came up with a better solution...
  • ooooooh! A copper tube soldered to a bent piece of metal! Call the networks!

    Seriously, Seymour Cray's cooling guy did this in 1962. The hot and fast RAM of that era was a 4K by 12 bit module, about the size and weight of three bricks, and costing about $15K each. These needed a 1/2 inch thick aluminum heat spreader, bolted to a thick aluminum frame with chilled freon running thru it.

    ... and you don't get much of a speedup by cooling your RAM. Silicon speed is close to PTAT (Proportional to Absol

  • Thermaltake has had a memory liquid cooling heatsink [thermaltakeusa.com] for a while now.

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