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."

Been done before... what's original here?

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 [youtube.com] ). 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.

Re:Been done before... what's original here?

Ah, but this is just step 1. In step 2 they add a trained octopus to each tank that will do your PC repairs for you. Then you'll really see the value! Just don't forget to feed your octupus, or it will come looking for food on it's own.

Re:Been done before... what's original here?

Actually that isn't too strange of an idea. Flourinert [wikipedia.org], the coolant used, actually can hold a significant amount of dissolved oxygen and has been used in lab experiments where rats and other animals were kept fully submerged and breathing the liquid for a non-trivial period of time. So, I'd go with a larger tank and a small cadre of laser equipped, liquid cooled, attack tigers...

Re:Been done before... what's original here?

...Or at least bad tempered sea bass.

Re:Been done before... what's original here?

It can be a superior mode of building. A waterfall is not what is called for. Rather a radiator like device is sufficient. That puts the cooling fans outside the case for easy maintenance.Dust inside a PC as well as corrosion are warded off completely in such devices. If done right it is a superior build. If done wrong it can make a mess.

Re:

The summary said that the R&D costs were £100,000, not that it was the price of the PC.

I know, actually read the summary, must be new here, etc.

Re:Been done before... what's original here?

Step 1: Read about crays
Step 2: Pay Billco £100,000
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit

It's immersion cooling. Pour liquid, add pump and radiator/bong, submit to slashdot.

We were doing this in the 90's! [archive.org]

Re:

Um, it never says that the case costs £100,000. It says that bringing the case to completion took them that much in R&D. Making something is cheap. Working out how to make it right is expensive.

yawn

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.

Re:Been done before... what's original here?

I'm not sure where you got the idea I was suggesting a different immersion liquid. If you checkout the rest of the comments on this story you'll see that I discuss fluorinert at least 3-4 times. I'm merely suggesting that wasting ~10k USD on coolant and then building a giant gaudy waterfall enclosure isn't exactly how I'd go about doing a project like this. A much smaller volume of liquid in a much smaller container with radiator/fan cooling could be assembled for about 2-3% of the cost they've incurred. Likewise a conventional closed loop cooling system that isn't fully immersing the system could be built for only a few hundred dollars and effectively cool all the components nearly as well and certainly be more cost effective. If you wanted performance you could build a whole cluster of either of the systems I've described for the cost that this article is advising.

Re:Been done before... what's original here?

Oh, come on. They were just really smart and spent it all on strippers, now they have to come up with a justification of where all the dough went. Look! Blinkenleuchtz...

Re:Been done before... what's original here?

They don't, Mineral Oil is used in cooling large transformers though. And yes it is flammable and they do make a HUGE fireball when they blow up. Fortunately it takes some pretty extreme conditions to light it up like say a lightning bolt.

Re:True, since for $400, you can phase change

$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.

"You can't use water, of course"

"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?

Re:"You can't use water, of course"

They used flourinert [wikipedia.org].

Re:"You can't use water, of course"

They used flourinert.

...which is why this prototype will never see production. They got their flourinert from an old supercomputer, and that's not a viable supply for fullscale production.

That makes me wonder about their motivations for this PR stunt. Venture capital, anyone?

More seriously, I wonder if transformer oil could be used for this sort of thing. Flourinert may be overkill... or maybe transformer oil has enough capacitance to cause problems for the extremely high frequencies used on PC motherboards. Anyone know?

All I can say is....

I am happy that I do not work for the geek squad anymore... can you imagine asking grandma to bring in her 300lbs pc?

Re:All I can say is....

Yeah but at least it would be in a few pieces after the explosion when the coolant was topped up with tap water.

Fluorinert

Flourinert [3m.com] 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...

Re:Fluorinert

Heh, looks like my recollection on the pricing is a bit off: 250ml for 555.35USD [artchemicals.com] at one retailer and 3Gal for 2,450USD [parallax-tech.com] from another.

Unrealistic

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.

Re:

Apparently its approx $500 a gallon [octools.com] for the Fluorinert solution.

Once again, an article that sparks my interest, then someone comes along and destroys it with reality...

Re:Unrealistic

Oh come on - they're asked to show a dream PC and they've come up with a mini and modern Cray-2 - fits the bill perfectly. It's a concept PC - having some interesting ideas, not making people think yeah that's practical. I don't want a BMW with a flexible rubber 'skin' but I think it's a good concept.

And the speech is just a English accent - a real one! (many British actors on American TV have to learn the English accent generally used on TV). I have similar difficulty understanding a Texas drawl.

Re:Unrealistic

I have similar difficulty understanding a Texas drawl.

You think most Americans can? We can't either.

Re:Practical use?

since when do computers get twice as fast every 18 months? That hasn't been true for a couple years.