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Hardware Hacking

Corsair Demos Easy Watercooling PC Rig 120

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-you-can dept.
Steve from Hexus writes "Trying to lure more people into watercooling their PCs, Corsair have created the Nautilus 500. It consists primarily of an external unit housing the radiator, reservoir and pump, which sits atop the PC's case. Installed inside the PC is the CPU water-block, which can be fitted without removing the motherboard. At HEXUS we've got pictures from CES of a system with the cooler installed."
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Corsair Demos Easy Watercooling PC Rig More

Corsair Demos Easy Watercooling PC Rig

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  • This is "interesting news"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Weatherman-au ( 572907 ) * on Sunday January 08, 2006 @09:36AM (#14421421) Homepage
    Steve from Hexus is the same bloke that posted the pictures of the car heater attached to the side of an Xbox and said it was a water cooling unit. Come on, guys. Is this news, or advertising?

  • for myself.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by know1 ( 854868 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @09:37AM (#14421424)
    i wouldn't consider buying one of these unless the warranty covered replacing my whole system if some water leaked out and futzed the inside. and whether i'm right or wrong, i would think most of the general public would feel the same. mind you this is for more of a geeky crowd at the minute

    • Re:for myself.... (Score:3, Informative)

      by taskforce ( 866056 )
      I can honestly say I've never heard of a PC watercooling unit leaking onto a motherboard, and I tend to be quite active in Overclocking and Modding circles. This is basicly becuase everybody is so scared of this obvious danger that they take extreme steps to make sure it isn't going to happen. I would imagine however, that if it moved from a niche market into the mainstream, the resulting drop in quality control in order to push down prices becuase of competition would end up in some nasty accidents.

      • Re:for myself.... (Score:2, Informative)

        by RipTides9x ( 804495 )
        I can honestly say I have heard of a PC watercooling units leaking, but ususally NOT onto the motherboard itself. Because of the horizontal mountings they usually tend to leak down onto the northbridge and or graphics/audio cards that lie below, frying them nicely. Now that I have that snarky comment out of the way. The worst offenders are the ones that have the clear acrylic tops over the copper bottom plates. Seems the acrylic units tend to crack around the connectors because of people being so careful t
      • At the same time those "overclocking and modding circles" have something of a testosterone driven macho scene, were some people would probably refrain from admitting failure, for status reasons.

        But otoh, i don't intend to suggest that water-cooling is particularly risky, i guess if you use quality equipment and keep a clear mind then there is not more risk in qater-cooling than in, say, not using datacenter-quality surge protection on the mains and i certainly don't do that.

        i migtht actually get a reserator
    • Just drain the water out and replace it with gasoline. Then your computer will be as safe as your car.

      rj
      • last time i checked the car runs mainly on the internal combustion engine, which seeing as it handles explosions to create force. this would be the part the water comes into contact with. not the cd player

    • Re:for myself.... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Tim Browse ( 9263 )
      Could be worse. I used to work on flight simulators, and one day on the factory floor a seal went on one of the hydraulic jacks, and the fluid shot out in a jet...across to the next simulator along, where it punched a hole through four of five layers of custom wire-wrapped circuit boards.

      To make it even more fun, although I wasn't there at the time (for which I am grateful) I am reliably informed that the hydraulic fluid smells like "cat's piss". Also it put back the damaged sim's schedule by six weeks.

    • It shouldn't be a problem if you fill the system with pure distilled water, because there's no conductivity, right? That would be preferable anyway to prevent the build-up of deposits in e.g. the radiator and CPU waterblock.

  • Advertising for hexus? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gcnaddict ( 841664 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @09:41AM (#14421434)
    This may be slightly off topic, but I find the fact that hexus is trying to advertise their site somewhat problematic. It seems to be an increasing trend here at Slashdot, and I hope the editors can pick a new set of cue-cards and reject the advert/story hybrids.

    As for the story itself, meh. Its nothing new.
    • Isn't the lesson of Google the fact that advertising doesn't have to be annoying if it is relevant? If this is topic that most of the readers are interested in, then is there reason not to post the "story", other than the fact that it is an advertisement?
      • Yes. Yes, there is.

        Advertising should not be masquarading as content.

        There are far more interesting/important issues to discuss then YAWCA.

        I don't have a problem with there being a catagory for paid/sponsered articles. Trying to fool /. comment contributors into providing the real content of this site (the comments) for an undisclosed ad is cheesy and cheap.

  • Straight up once again (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Spazmania ( 174582 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @09:43AM (#14421440) Homepage
    Once again the hoses come straight up off the CPU block. The one place that water coolers would be insanely useful is in 1U rackmount servers (1.75" tall). The hoses would have to come off the block at an angle to accomodate that though.

    • But there are risks (Score:3, Informative)

      by gcnaddict ( 841664 )
      Watercooling in a rackmount solution, especially one which may me mission critical, would be fairly risky. Failure of the watercooling system would result in loss of the server and possibly loss of other servers.

      I think rackmounts will be fine with aircooling for the time being :) At least there's less risk.
      • Plus the fact that noise is less of an issue in a rack. Sure, air cooling isn't effective as watercooling, but whack the fans on high in a server rack and you keep it cool(ish), and the only person that cares is the poor peon working in the same room.

        Unts (Steve from Hexus)
      • "Failure of the watercooling system would result in loss of the server and possibly loss of other servers."

        As long as the rack goes sideways you'd be fine.

        • sure but human buildings tend to have rooms significantly higher than 19 inch.

          serious waste of space for anything other than geeking it out at home with rack-mount toys. the only reason for 1U hardware is saving space.
      • Although we call it "water" cooling, there's no reason why you actually have to use water. Other than that it's cheap and easily available. You could alternately fill the system with some sort of nonconductive refrigerant, or even fill it with Freon and keep it pressurized, so that if there was a leak, the fluid would just boil off.

        I had an idea a while back to get a big tub of nonconductive liquid and just submerge the whole motherboard in it. I never got around to actually trying it, but it's been in the
        • I vaguely recall seeing someone submerge his board in a box with mineral spirits (if I recall correctly). It was on one of the overclocking sites three or four years ago, sorry I cannot remember which. Personally, I cannot stand the smell of mineral spirits for more than two or three minutes so that would stop me right there.
          • I just did some research...my un-implemented idea about submerging a mobo in oil was a while ago, and at the time I was never able to find any supporting information on it. It seems now though that a lot of people had the same idea, and a few of them have even gotten it to work.

            Also, I found the name of the material used in the Cray II's submersion cooling system. It's called Fluorinert FC-77 [3m.com], and it's made by 3M. Electrically inert, not toxic to the touch (unlike PCB based transformer oils), great heat tra
            • Why not submerge the board in palm kernel oil? It's liquid at room temperature, and because it's a saturated fat, it won't go rancid nearly as fast as vegetable oil. If you're still worried about it going rancid, try building an airtight computer case; as long as there is no oxygen in contact with the oil, the oil will probably outlast the computer.

              And for those of you who read the labels on processed foods and wondered why so many contain palm kernel oil, it's the fact that it's saturated (and therefore
          • I believe it was mineral oil. Mineral spirits are quite flammable and IIRC are also conductive. This pops up on /. once or twice a year. I recall one story in particular. The author's reasoning for using mineral oil instead of vegetable or sunflower oil was that mineral doesn't turn rancid unlike its biological counterparts.
          • It was mineral oil, in a syrofoam case, cooled by a window air conditioner. Worked great until he forgot to turn the A/C off one day, and literally froze several of his components.

            It has been copied numerous times, mainly in a fishtank, including being featured here on slashdot last may.
      • I once heard a comment from an employee for a certain well-known special effects company in the northern San Francisco bay area that he'd be thrilled to be able to use water-cooled rackmount servers in their render farm. As it stands now with their hundreds (literally!) of high-density servers, all of which are air-cooled, the amount of air conditioning needed to keep them cool is probably high enough to justify the risk of the occasional server failure due to a leak in the water-cooling (a single server i
    • Water cooling is insanely useful to stop you from going insane from the fan noise. I got new mobo + cpu at work and I had to finally cave in and put the box under the desk as the hairdryer was driving me nuts.
    • There are functional reasons for the vertical placement of incoming and outgoing lines on a waterblock. Generally they are situated that way to avoid tight, flow-reducing turns. This is particularly important in designs that rely on jet impingement (like the Little River Storm G5 [procooling.com]) to cool the CPU. In these designs, the incoming water is directed forcibly onto a small central area of the waterblock base located directly above the CPU die. Typically the outgoing line will be off-center, and in some cases ther
      • Generally they are situated that way to avoid tight, flow-reducing turns.

        Okay, that's an argument I don't follow. You come in at 30 degrees from one side of the block and leave at 30 degrees on the other having passed directly over the CPU. Total turning radius: 60 degrees. How is that a tighter, flow-reducing turn than the 180 degrees needed to go straight down and then straight back up?
  • Anyone else find it ironic that a company named corsair makes water-cooling units?

  • Differing definitions of neat... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @09:49AM (#14421458) Homepage
    From the article:
    "Most of the cooling system is external, sitting neatly atop the PC's case"

    Also from the article:
    A picture of this 'neat' set-up [hexus.net].

    Even by an utter slob's standards, though is no way in hell that thing can be considered neat. Not on this earth, not on any other earth either. I'll try to restrain obvious Apple fanboy'ism, but it's interesting they've attached to an already G5-a-like case. With the exception of the latest quads, which are apparently a bit messy internally, you can see what 'neat' actually means when applied to water-cooling by looking at the Power Macs. I'm sure people on the PC side can point me to considerably more aesthetically pleasing installations than this too.

    Cheers,
    Ian

    • as being from the PC side (too poor for macs :-D), i can confirm that there are plenty of neater external kits (that are better) and there are also many internal kits that can be used, so your case doesn't look any different (except that i have a clear case so yeah)

      i would myself rather buy each part seperatly - i think it is cheaper that way - and besides, i can't see myself paying for a reservoir when all it is is a plastic box with holes.
    • That case you mention is a Lian Li, I'd definitely like one of those - they're not cheap: http://www.lian-li.com/product.htm [lian-li.com] . The cheapest one on Newegg (and yes I know Newegg is not the end all be all of online stores) is $199: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16811112051 [newegg.com]

      But yes, you're right: the water cooling setup is an ugly implementation. They should've drilled holes in the top and ran the tubes through that instead and put elbows on it to bend it at a 90 degree angle to the box
    • I saw the same thing ... "woah, ugly!" when I looked at the pictures.

      I wouldn't want that on my desk, or under it for that matter.

      If you want pretty, check out Zalman's stuff [zalman.co.kr], like the fan I use in my PC [mikebabcock.ca].
    • Koolance http://www.koolance.com/shop/default.php?cPath=28_ 43 [koolance.com] has some great cases, though they stay with the blocky cases they do a very nice job of integrating the radiator, resevior, pumps and fans cleanly into the case. They look like the cases are custom built by Koolance even though they are standard cases that are modified.

      The best thing they offer is temperature monitoring hardware that will increase the fan speed when the temp starts climing and will shut down the PC if it goes past the limit
  • I wouldn't trust a premade water-cooling setup. There's a certain ease-of-mind to putting it together yourself and knowing the parts are all good quality inside.
    --
    United Bimmer - BMW Enthusiast Community [unitedbimmer.com]
    • I wouldn't trust a premade water-cooling setup. There's a certain ease-of-mind to putting it together yourself and knowing the parts are all good quality inside.


      I wouldn't trust premade quality parts. There's a certain ease-of-mind to forging the copper blocks yourself and knowing the heatsinks aren't full of nitroglycerin.
  • If one takes a look at the system specs of the the comp that they demonstrated the cooling system on; it NEEDS water cooling due to the 3.73 GHz Intel CPU. That's why its best to buy an AMD64 at the moment: so that you do not have to spend extra money on water cooling. Water cooling should not be necessary. CPU's should not emit any more heat that cannot be taken away by a simple heatsink and fan. I personally can't imagine any rational human being wasting thier money on water cooling or on something that

  • Great. Yet another thing that can go wrong.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cculianu ( 183926 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @10:22AM (#14421545) Homepage
    It isn't enough that this morning I got into my car, was about to put the key into the ignition when I noticed the funny smell. I looked down on the floor under the dash and saw a nice green puddle. A familiar sight, to be sure.

    In the 10 years that I have been driving crappy cars I have experienced the puddle of lovely green disappointment twice. And no, I am not broke -- I can afford a new car but when you live in NYC, buying a new car when you are going to park it on the street is insanity.

    At any rate -- now I can look forward to the same lovely green surprise from my COMPUTER? No thanks! Computers are getting complicated enough without having a puddle of green liquid-kryptonite potentially spilling all over my desk and carpet, thank-you-very-much.

    Liquid cooling systems break down. Hell, for that matter all systems break down eventually. That's what happens with man-made systems. Funny things. Even God-made systems break down, just much slower.

    Anyway, my point is that keep it as simple as possible if you want to avoid catastrophe. A little fan, an aluminum heatsink, and a motherboard sensor to tell you when the fan stops a-turnin'. What's so wrong with that? Why do people have to go and make things so complicated? Putting green liquid and water pumps and tubes and the like inside a computer is just an ugly, nonsensical thing to do in my book. You're basically asking for trouble. And as other people pointed out -- as the technology hits mainstream it will only get more crappily made and lead to a higher failure rate.

    And for what? A few extra MHz? Before +200 MHz goes and makes that much of a difference in your life, you need to examine all the parts in your computer from the RAM to the motherboard chipset to the freakin' BIOS firmware version before you should think about that +200MHz.

    Take an example from engineering/consumer history:

    The VW Beetle was a car reknowned for reliability. One of its key features was its extremely simple mechanical design. It also happened to be air-cooled (I am not sure for the motivation for that design choice but I bet it had something to do with simplicity).

    Keep is simple, and less things can go wrong.

    • The VW Beetle engine was not air cooled. The engine was oil cooled. The oil was air cooled. There are many, many engines which are air cooled, typically motorbike engines, mowers, chain saws etc. but the VW Beetle was not one of them.

      The key to long Beetle engine life was frequent oil changes moreso that anything else.

      OK pedant mode off now!
      • I didn't know that. But the fact of the matter is that the VW Beetle lacked:

        1. A water pump
        2. A radiator
        3. A water pump belt.

        All 3 of those components, at some point have broken down for me. In the beetle, those were just 3 fewer things that can go wrong.

        And yes, I know the VW may have had some radiator-like device -- but water+antifreeze rusts metal faster than oil does.

        • AFAIR, the (original) beetle also missed a gas-meter. Instead it had a backup tank that could be emptied into the main tank by a lever, so you knew when you only had 5 litres (or whatever) left.
      • Uh, no. The oil does very little cooling, about 20%. The balance is direct heat transfer from the cylinder walls and cylinder heads to cooling air via cooling fins. If it was truly oil cooled, there would be oil passages throughout the heads and cylinder walls. But the oil passages only go to bearings and other wear surfaces.

        The main reason for the oil cooler is to keep the oil temperatures down so the oil doesn't break down and lose its lubricating properties.

        The Beetle needed oil changes no more frequ
      • The VW motor was designed to be entirely air cooled, including the crankcase, that's why the cylinders have all those fins and stuff on 'em with a big fan blowing over, but the oil overheated, so they added an oil radiator external to the crankcase in the blower housing, just like you see on some high performance,four stroke air cooled motorbikes.

        I fail to see how this adds up to being oil cooled, or at least any more so than a water cooled engine with an oil cooler is oil cooled.

        One could, in fact, argue t
    • Back in the day the mainframe got shut down if the temperature in the computer room went over 85 farenheit. The temperatures these newfangled computers run at is downright frightening. I'd like a system that keeps them cooler and does it quietly. I'm seriously considering liquid cooling or a heat pipe solution (Or both) on the next rig I build. The Zalman reservator looks marginally less hideous than this one does, though.
      • While I get your point, the fact that the machine shut down when the ambient air temperature reached 85 degrees F says nothing about the internal temperature of the machine.

        If you were in a room where the only heat source was a big computer, and the temperature in the room started to rise appreciably, up to where it started to become uncomfortably warm (I consider 85F "uncomfortably warm") you had better bet that there are parts in the machine that are a LOT hotter than 85 degrees!

        So really they were just u
    • The VW Beetle was a car reknowned for reliability. One of its key features was its extremely simple mechanical design. It also happened to be air-cooled (I am not sure for the motivation for that design choice but I bet it had something to do with simplicity).
      Yes, and nice thing is that the passenger cabin was air-cooled, too.

      Meaning, the heater didn't work at all or only in those situation where didn't want the heater to work (+25C).
    • I water cool. Why? Because I got tired of the jet engine that was my CPU/GPU cooler setup. I could barely hear myself think. Not only that, but after a few hours my system would get extremely hot all over as the heat spread around. I went to water cooling, and i'll never go back. The system I run is very very quiet, and remains pretty damn cool for about a day if i'm gaming a lot, or many days if i'm not. Yeah, there's the risk of it getting a leak, but so far so good, and I'm very happy with it. I'm w
  • It amazes me how often marketing people are monumentally stupid. In the sentence that begins "Most of the cooling system is external..." in the Hexus.net article, the words "cooling system" are green and underlined twice. When I mouse over the green, I see an ad for Sears. Is Sears selling radical computer gear now? No, it's an ad for heating and air conditioning.

    The only way I can imagine that Sears could profit from that ad is if I were willing to pay Sears not to be annoyed.
  • Sunday afternoon, not totally focused, and the headline arrived in my brain as

            "Easy Watercooling RC Pig"

    which would have been a marginally more interesting story.
    • heh, sunday afternoon, not totally focused and i had to read your post 3 times to finally see "RC Pig" instead of "PC Rig" (i even compared to the headline and thought "what? it's the same 5 letters" before finally seeing the difference).

      i have to agree with you that "RC Pig" would have been a more interesting story
    • RC pig [crazyaboutgadgets.com]?

      Just spritz it with ice water and you'll have the other part.

  • Neat and Tidy? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by teh bigz ( 900495 )
    That has to be one of the ugliest watercooling set ups I've seen for a while. What about cooling the video cards too - X1800XTs make quite a bit of noise, so what's the point in this device when high performance custom build watercooling loops will perform much better if it's a CPU-only loop? I admire Corsair wanting to get into the watercooling market, but I think they need to go back to the drawing board again.
    • I wondered this as well. It might be as simple as buying additional blocks and tubing for the video cards and putting them in a serial loop with the CPU.

      Are there any cooling gurus that can hazard a guess as to whether this thing woould actually keep multiple CPU/GPUs cool enough to make it worth it?

      This thing is seriously so ugly that I would hide the cooling unit under a desk or something... put it as far away as the hoses/pump allows.
  • It seems like a cool setup but why does the case need to be upside down?
  • I was all for liquid cooling right up until the point where I had the liquid freeze in the tubes while I was transporting the computer. It worked afterwards but weakened the system and it broke a few months later. Reguardless, I don't think it's worth the hastle yet. Also, I went to rack mounted systems so they'd all be together and out of the way.
  • What are those LED-looking things in the pics? They appear to have some RAM designation on them....
    • corsairs XMS line has a LED readout of 'vital' ram info.. more bling ;) cheers
      • Yup, Bling. Rice. Nasty as putting a big heavy do-nothing-wing on your civic, along with a fart-can exhaust. It 'looks' like performance to posers, but actually degrades the performance of the car. In this case, they slap on a big piece of plastic and LEDs on top of their RAM. Plastic is rotten at transferring heat. Not only that, it blocks air flow, preventing heat transfer from the RAM, as well as impeding it to other components in the case. Anyone who cares about heat in their system would never use
      • Thankee :)

  • Thinking about getting this. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Douglas Simmons ( 628988 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @01:09PM (#14422269) Homepage
    When it's peak hours on my web site and I'm playing xlander and gtk-gnutella's connected to a zillion ultra-peers, and some douche is reloading a page every instant with some firefox plugin (basically I'm trying to say the cpu's 0% idle constantly), will this keep my chip cool and calm like the shine on a radiator grill so my box doesn't start beeping with the kernel giving me annoying overheating messages and slowing down the chip's speed in response? That beeping's so annoying and no one in #debian will tell me how to turn off that part of the kernel.
  • Something about this product seems to imply that watercooling a PC is difficult to do without one of these messy external kits. As long as you're not so clumsy/stupid as to fill the system with the computer on, and miss, all it really takes is a couple hours mounting stuff. Aside from internal setups being infinitely more neat, they're much safer too - you don't run the risk of somehow ripping a tube out, or having the cat think it's a chew-toy. Though, as someone looking to go into a professional waterc
  • Watercooling a PC is a great idea; but only watercooling the CPU is just plain crap.

    In the photos in the linked article, there were enormous heat sinks and fans on the graphics cards, and still a case fan, and no doubt a power supply fan.

    I don't want to take the heat simply out of my computer case, but completely out of my house. I have 4 computers in my office and 2 more in my lab, and my air conditioning bills are truly heinous, not to mention that even with the quietest case and CPU fans I could find, t
  • Watercooling a PC is a great idea; but only watercooling the CPU is just plain crap.

    In the photos in the linked article, there were enormous heat sinks and fans on the graphics cards, and still a case fan, and no doubt a power supply fan.

    I don't want to take the heat simply out of my computer case, but completely out of my house. I have 4 computers in my office and 2 more in my lab, and my air conditioning bills are truly heinous, not to mention that even with the quietest case and CPU fans I could find, t
  • Looking at the picture the system seems devoid of harddisk and the CD rom cables seem to be non-existant. I didnt quite make out a physical network connection so how is this thing booting? Or is it simply not?

  • Okay, the specific heat for veg oil is lower than glycol or water, but better than air. Since oil is an insulator it would not short the board if it leaked. We all remember the guy who dropped his whole rig into an aquarium of oil. [markusleonhardt.de] And he is still reporting it works fine. That is pretty radical, but it seems to me that a controlled oil system could do pretty well cooling one of these nastyhot P4s. Mine runs warm with no overclocking at all. You might stain the carpet, but you would not have as big a chance

  • OK, so they got a water cooled radiator on the top. And maybe it's easy to install.

    I don't think water cooling computers is that big of a deal anymore. It's been around long enough that it's close to becoming a mature product.

    I think the important evolution that needs to happen before water cooling is of any main-line significance is noise. If it sounds like a jet engine then you've gained nothing in comparison to standard convection air cooling. The majority of computer owners don't notice their ther

  • Steve:

    Either you're such a newb that you don't even realize that this Nautilus 500 is very nearly a carbon copy of the original Koolance Exos from several years ago, or you're NOT a newb, know full well how un-innovative this product is, and yet chose to hype and pimp it anyway.

    Which is it?

    Mark

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