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[JoshuaFH]

What do people do with their computers that such advanced cooling systems are necessary?

[Skyrunner]

Water cooling led me to mainframes and server farms on Wikipedia. And nineteen-inch racks.

Reminds me of the awesome depiction of a mainframe computer in Summer Wars, which sadly fried itself because they didn't have adequate cooling. ;_; Poor computer.

[RedKing]

What do people do with their computers that such advanced cooling systems are necessary?

Overclocking. And the fact that the average quad-core desktop rig now has more transistors in it than ten Pentium 4s did. Overall power draw has increased significantly to where a 600W power supply is considered average at best. GPUs have their own heatsinks and cooling fans now.

Eventually you wind up where 2/3 of the interior of your case is devoted to fans and mammoth heatsinks and it just doesn't work anymore. Liquid cooling is an elegant, quiet solution to that. And unlike a fan/heatsink combo, if the fan fails, you're not going to see a heat spike destroy your PC in seconds. Even if the water pump fails, you'll have a minute or two to start getting alarms and have time to shut down.

[Frumple]

What do people do with their computers that such advanced cooling systems are necessary?

... computers get hot (seriously: If you point a monitoring program at your computer right now it's probably closer to 100F than not, and a strong CPU and heavy use can inch that toward boiling.). Keeping them cool helps keep them from melting. From what I've noticed, liquid cooling tends to be generally more effective than the "less advanced" stuff. So it's not so much necessary as more effective (and presumably a net gain in terms of parts life time and maintenance.). Plus the aesthetics are arguably more impressive, heh.

i think you misunderstood.....

its not immersing the components in water, its using liquid coolant in tubing to take heat away from components.

otherwise i agree. immersing things in water, especially electronics is a baaaaad thing to do.

Well, not just immersion... liquid cooling in general is fancier than just blowing air through the system. I think.

And they do have full immersion cooling systems. They're pretty awesome, if... somewhat impractical for general use Very, very effective, though. Even the smaller scale personal computer level stuff.

[RedKing]

Yup, typically immersion in a neutral oil. Crazy stuff. Can't help but mentally picture it as sticking your computer into a deep-fat fryer. 

[MaximumZero]

Yup, typically immersion in a neutral oil. Crazy stuff. Can't help but mentally picture it as sticking your computer into a deep-fat fryer. 

Mineral oil submersion FTW! I'm probably going to put together a big oil-submersed rig when I get a house and have no prospects of moving the thing.

[miauw62]

Java.

I update it to the most recent version, yet I cannot use it on a website because it's apparently outdated. I tell it to run it this time, and the webpage decides to fuck up.

I've had that for ages with one of these powder games.

[FearfulJesuit]

Yup, typically immersion in a neutral oil. Crazy stuff. Can't help but mentally picture it as sticking your computer into a deep-fat fryer. 

Mineral oil submersion FTW! I'm probably going to put together a big oil-submersed rig when I get a house and have no prospects of moving the thing.

I've heard it's been done to create a liquid immersion system using water. That sounds a little cray-cray.

[Nadaka]

Yup, typically immersion in a neutral oil. Crazy stuff. Can't help but mentally picture it as sticking your computer into a deep-fat fryer. 

Mineral oil submersion FTW! I'm probably going to put together a big oil-submersed rig when I get a house and have no prospects of moving the thing.

I've heard it's been done to create a liquid immersion system using water. That sounds a little cray-cray.

You need distilled water, anything less will have enough contaminants to carry current.

[Tellemurius]

for me its cooling simplified as all of my water is routed to a cooling block hidden away somewhere and my computer is dead silence.

[Graknorke]

Yup, typically immersion in a neutral oil. Crazy stuff. Can't help but mentally picture it as sticking your computer into a deep-fat fryer. 

Mineral oil submersion FTW! I'm probably going to put together a big oil-submersed rig when I get a house and have no prospects of moving the thing.

I've heard it's been done to create a liquid immersion system using water. That sounds a little cray-cray.

You need distilled water, anything less will have enough contaminants to carry current.

So you need to separate the computer from the atmosphere to keep things dissolving too?
Sounds prohibitively difficult.

[penguinofhonor]

More like prohibitively awesome.

[Nadaka]

I would actually love to build a fishtank computer. I would even see if it was possible to put in a plexiglass barrier in so that the front of the aquarium could have actual water and fish, and the back would have oil and raw computational power.

[Greiger]

I....I want one....now.

Maybe they can do that on that weird tv show where they turn stuff into fishtanks.

[Graknorke]

Apparently the powers at Google have decided that I would be best off using Youtube Australia.