Full Immersion Cooling Comes To Desktop PCs 192
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."
Re:Been done before... what's original here? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Fluorinert (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Been done before... what's original here? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Been done before... what's original here? (Score:2, Interesting)
Mineral Oil (Score:1, Interesting)
You can do this with Mineral Oil. Cheap and found everywhere. I remember reading about a guy that overclocked his P2-400 to like 650MHz at the time using a homebrew cooling rig. Dr. Freeze or something was his name (freeze spelled strangely).
Midel 7131 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:True, since for $400, you can phase change (Score:4, Interesting)
$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.