Dousing your gaming rig in oil is a technique we've
seen from custom shops before, but not quite like the offerings from Minnesota-based start-up Hardcore Computer. Its Reactor line of submerged gaming rigs, shipping to real, live customers in about a month, use custom enclosures to dunk everything from the CPU to the SSDs in a
blue-dyed, non-conductive concoction that we hope is mineral oil (it doesn't break down and go rancid like canola). A pump circulates the liquid through a side-mounted radiator for cooling while all the wet components slide out of the top for potentially mess-free maintenance. You can get your choice of
Core 2 Extreme processors, up to 8GB of DDR3 memory, and even three
GeForce GTX 280 GPUs stacked right on top of each other if you have the bank. Prices start at about $4,500, which isn't as bad for a crazy setup like this, with a well-spec'd, triple-SLI machine coming in just under $10k. We'd certainly call that
hardcore -- despite the gushy center.
Update: It looks like
Maximum PC spent some time soaking in this one and posted some early impressions and a bunch more pics. As it turns out the goo inside isn't blue after all; it's just lit-up that way.
[Thanks, Havok and Jamie]
posted October 21st 2008 9:47AM
How do you upgrade this bloody thing?
Big deal, this is easy enough to do yourself. Just caulk the bottom & sides of any old ATX case and pour a jug of mineral oil in. You don't even need the circulation pump. Try it!
It SOUNDS good, but there are so many proprietary parts that it piles up the costs dramatically.
Then there is the fact that it is "room temp"?? regular water cooling does better than that, and for the price it is
a LOT better to go phase exchange- $800 drops it to freezing.
The only problem with that is I have not seen the addons for phase to include gpus and plates for HDD's