Not water, but it is liquid cooling

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/09/04/intel-explores-mineral-oil-cooling/

Mineral oil submersion for datacenters. Neat stuff. I'm wondering where they keep the storage. All flash based and submerged with the the rest? I'd imagine mechanical drives wouldn't take kindly to being submerged.

It doesn't apply much to home users unless you're a folding nut with a 4P board or two that you'd like to cool quietly. I would like to make a fish tank based submerged system at some point in the future. I think it'd look great as an HTPC somewhere in the living room. It'd have to have a diver and/or treasure chest.

BRING ON THE OIL!

Thats very cool ! But will intel go with it ???

I don't see why not. Two interesting quotes from the article for those uninterested in reading it:

Intel has just concluded a year-long test with immersion cooling equipment from Green Revolution Cooling, and affirmed that the technology is highly efficient and safe for servers. The testing, conducted at an Intel data center in New Mexico, may mark a turning point in market readiness for submerged servers, if recent experience with Intel’s embrace of emerging data center designs is any indication.

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More broadly, submersion cooling may benefit from Intel’s affirmation that submersion doesn’t have any impact on hardware reliability. “When we pulled the servers out, we took them to our failure analysis lab,” Patterson said. “They could find nothing at all to suggest that this is a bad idea.”

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The article talks about the possibility for parts specifically designed for submersion cooling being designed by Intel and others. Specific designs most likely means full warranty coverage. We'll see what happens. Sometimes server stuff trickles down to the consumer world, but I don't foresee submersion cooling being terribly popular. It's certainly too messy for the average consumer, and is likely too messy for most enthusiasts.

It's been a cool idea that's been done for a while now. Actually I'm sure you can find a few threads in extreme cooling. I remember seeing that couple video on this back in the 775 socket days although hds back then would fail if submerged due to the oil viscosity so they did need to be left out but the rest (CPU, gpu, ram, and mobo) were submerged.

well they are going to be out of business if this picks off

It's neat, perfect for 1 million$$$+++ data centers. Better heat transfer. Google has had one where they send cooled water to each 'trailer' stacked on top of each other for chilled air units. Each unit got a pipe off a 24" chilled water pipe. Forget where I read it, was very neat.

Very specialized, outside our specs, interesting though.

Couldn't you just do this yourself. I am thinking, fish tank + water chiller + mineral oil = bingo! (or bang if you did it wrong).

Been done. Many discussions. Old hat, pain in the back side. They have blades they drop into a big pool with no external connections. When you have 1000 blades for a data center, then it's worthwhile.

Home PC? You can read all about it.

SupaMonkey said:

Couldn't you just do this yourself. I am thinking, fish tank + water chiller + mineral oil = bingo! (or bang if you did it wrong).

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Doesn't have a chiller...but it's a fish tank with mineral oil

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=706680

This has been done a lot of times. I don't usually remember the mineral oil systems enjoying a nice temperature, though.

Like any other system, it needs active cooling. Pump fan and a rad.

The oil will slowly heat up without cooling and sooner or later will be warm enough to shut the PC dowm. It heats up a lot faster than it cools down, so once it temps out, say in 7 hours, it'll be 24 hours or so before it's back to room temp.

It's neat, it's not magic, it still follows the laws of physics.

Conumdrum said:

It's neat, it's not magic, it still follows the laws of physics.

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Blasphemy! It's voodoo like everything else done here!! But yea, if you run a submerged system with nothing except natural heat dissipation (no rads), it'll be about as successful as those water cooling loops that have tried to get the job done by using a large volume of water in the loop with very little or no radiator area like the Thermaltake Bigwater systems. It'll run great, until it overheats.

From I've read/seen, components running submerged tend to have a higher tolerance for high temps than those cooled using other methods though. I'm not sure why exactly, perhaps the total submersion reduces hot spots.

The higher tolerable dT allows for less raddage and fewer/slower/quieter fans though, so that's a definite bonus, particularly in an environment like a server where you need to dissipate a LOT of heat. There are obviously some serious downsides though, extra especially if you're a person who upgrades frequently.