2005? Plus the one in our mod of the month is better http://www.bit-tech.net/modding/2008/12/04/motm-nov-08/5
this one is my favourite http://www.custompc.co.uk/features/604728/video-dream-pcs-2008-armaris-amazing-xcp.html it'll cost you ten grand though!
Very nice but: How is being submerged in a special, oily fluid, in a box which is bolted shut, more accessible than a watercooled part?
the design of the armari means that the oil can be drained into two seperate tanks at the side of the main chamber. the main reason this pc is so impressive is because of all the high pressure pipe work they have moving the oil around and venting new cool oil to all the right places. this is a more wallet friendly user version: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/hardcorepc_reactor with this one the motherboard can be pulled out of the oil where it will sit on some sort of drainage shelf to save you getting your finger oily.
I'm sure it's an elegant and wonderful solution - it looks bloody brilliant. What I'm saying is that it's nowhere near as accessible as watercooling imo.
by its very nature its will never be as easy to fiddle about with (althogh the hardcore pc has some good designs for making it easier) the advantages are glaringly obvious if it can be engineered correctly, but for someone who does a lot of fiddling with their system it never going to be ideal. in fact its not going to be ideal 99% of people, but i'd love to be in that 1% that can afford it, can justify the expense and have the space
The Armari XPC is not dunked in oil but Fluorinert. It has a viscosity lower than water and evaporates without residue at room temperature. Once you drain the main chamber to lift the components out they are bone dry in less than a minute. However because of the evaporative properties of Fluorinert, the main chamber has to be sealed airtight --which it is, with 20-odd bolts. I can think of easier upgrade processes. And the pressure in that case is not that high, by the way. Does require a beefy pump and big pipes to circulate 30 litres of Fluorinert reasonably fast though.
that looks really cool but it's just too similar to a watercooling to be worth the price and the effort in my opinion. I would expect 'oil' cooled pc to have huge passive heatsink instead of a being covered by the liquid and 'waterblocks' cooling the cpu/chipset/gpu
i see your point, but even with the hardcore pc everything is submerged, so you dont have to have fans for stuff like voltage regs
Nope. The liquid acts instead of air to remove the heat from everything. You do need fans on the radiator though to remove the heat from the liquid.
The fact of the matter is no matter how well the thermal transfer works, the heat still has to leave the case somehow. The ultimate PC solution today is still air cooled and always going to be until we move them to some other natural heat sink, like the oceans. The ideal solution is to have better air cooling parts that allow the case to maintain full surface area and flow of air over the whole system. What oil does that water does not is provide a thermal transfer surface for the exposed transistors and PCB, a water cooled system relies on air without heatsinks to add thermal transfer surface area.
We'll harness the power of the sea for component cooling? Seems a little extreme... Although a gigantic underwater supercomputer does arrive at about #3 on my list of awesomest things ever.
