OilSubmersionCooling
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Intel treats servers to mineral oil bath in year-long cooling test
If putting liquid cooling pumps, hoses and water inside a highly electrified computer case doesn't seem crazy enough, how about just dunking the whole kit and kaboodle into oil? That's what Intel did with a rack full of servers, and if the oil in question is of the non-conducting mineral kind, it's actually a very chill idea. After a year of testing with Green Revolution Cooling, the chip giant saw some of the best power usage efficiency ratings it's seen, with the oil-cooled PCs easily besting identical, air-cooled units. The company believes more adapted heat sinks could push the gains even further, and affirmed that the technology was safe and didn't affect hardware reliability. Cost savings could be enormous, as server rooms wouldn't need raised floors, air conditioning units or chillers -- if you don't consider oil spills and ruined clothing, of course. [Image credit: Green Revolution]
Hardcore Computer bringing oil submersion cooling to the masses
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]
