Oil-Immersion Cooled PC Goes To Retail 210
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."
Re:Hmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
press release,much? (Score:1, Insightful)
For instance, who outside infomercials aimed at the homebound uses the term 'space age materials'. People have been in space, of and on, for 50 years, two generations. Who does not use space age materials? And what are these materials anyway, plastic? Sometimes these adverts just makes me screams incompetent design, and I wonder who in their right mind would buy from these people. Probably the same people who buy the magic stock market accounts.
Why bother with such "high end" stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
System is worth $11k today, maybe $2k by 2010. Super high-end systems that are not designed for professionals (or servers for datacenters) just have never made sense to me. The depreciation is just too great on a computer.
Not to mention it will be worth $0 when the oil containment fails.
Re:so much for quick repair (Score:5, Insightful)
Dead fan -- I'm sure that's a problem with an OIL-COOLED box. I suppose the extreme PC users you know would also complain that they wouldn't be able to vacuum the dust from their heat sinks, too.
Now, a dead oil circulation impeller, that's a completely different animal.
Pointless waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
First off, the summary reads like a press release, as does TFA, is slashdot that desperate for cash these days? Secondly, the PC itself seems like a pretty useless gimmick.
I don't understand who is supposed to be buying this thing at $4k-$11k.
Hardcore overclockers? OK the thing has excellent cooling, but not much better than you could achieve with a decent watercooling rig at a fraction of the price. This group will be put off by the proprietry(and probably overpriced)upgrades and the difficulty of actually opening the thing, not to mention the pricetag.
Gamers? Why would they pay this much over the odds for a system that's at best 10% faster than a commodity system? Again, this group will be put off by the lack of a decent upgrade path.
Silent PC enthusiasts? This group might be interested at first, the one thing an oil filled PC might arguably be useful for is silence. But at $4000+, you've got to be joking, there are already very good solutions at a fraction of that price.
Ultimately I just don't see any need for this kind of cooling system, PC's just don't run hot enough that it's worth dealing with the hassle.
Re:Eww (Score:3, Insightful)
*sigh*
You can still build an oil-cooled PC, but you might get a call from Hardcore if, for example, you include "a hard drive mechanism disposed in the interior space and submerged in the dielectric cooling liquid, and a snorkel connected to the hard drive mechanism and in communication with the exterior of the interior space to achieve pressure equilibrium between the hard drive and outside air pressure".
Re:Bulletproof? (Score:5, Insightful)
I spent a year at University of Edinburgh, and I can tell you the parent should be modded informative, not funny.