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."
Been done before... what's original here? (Score:5, Insightful)
All I can say is.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unrealistic (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Not another... (Score:3, Insightful)
You desktop jockeys have no idea.
Datacenter workers are far more aware of the demands and complexity of cooling.
1. It's a commercial pursuit, which is meaningfully different than one-off's from the lab. They must have some customer in mind. If they don't, well, their investors will get burned.
2. I can easily imagine a commercial application where, perhaps cooling needs overwhelm a building, this may come in as a cheap alternative.
Get back to us when you've figured out how to cool a rack full of blade servers working near capacity. This may do it more elegantly than air.
Re:Been done before... what's original here? (Score:1, Insightful)
WTF?! Highly flammable? That's why space-heaters use it, right?
Re:"You can't use water, of course" (Score:4, Insightful)
...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?
Re:All I can say is.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah but at least it would be in a few pieces after the explosion when the coolant was topped up with tap water.
Re:Unrealistic (Score:4, Insightful)
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:"You can't use water, of course" (Score:2, Insightful)
It boils too easily. I don't mean 'rolling boil' I just mean that it will evaporate very easily at room temperature even, let alone at 40degC. Once evaporated into a normal oxygen atmosphere, it is highly flammable (not that it isn't already).