Hardcore Computer bringing oil submersion cooling to the masses

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/427483847/

Filed under: Desktops

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]

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