Interview with Hardcore Computer: The quest for a full immersion cooled desktop PC

Posted at: Tuesday 14th October 2008 by Mark Mackay

Thoughts of full-immersion PCs still fresh in our minds from this years Dream PC competition, a new, more accessible embodiment of the technology hits the market. Custom PC interviews CTO of Hardcore Computer to find out more.

CPC: [laughs]

Chad: It’s supposed to be drinkable but it could just make you very irregular for a while.

CPC: Well if you can get us a review system we can taste it and I’ll let you know how it goes. How exactly does it work, the reactor system?

Chad: It’s a self contained system, based on patented technology. The system is essentially a tank that you completely submerge all the active PC components in. We submerge all the active components, including dual power supplies. We have up to 1300W in our first offering and if one of them fails, you’ve still got 650W available.

CPC: Do the core components have custom heatsinks to better transfer the heat to the liquid?

Chad: Yes, we have our own custom heatsinks on CPU, Northbridge and Southbridge and also video cards. We have a vented system so we actually directly pipe some of the coolant to certain areas to improve cooling performance. Without that it still works, it’s just that we’re doing everything we can to make the system run as cool as possible.

CPC: Do you have any fans in the system to blow over radiators or something similar and exhaust the air?

Chad: No, no fans because everything’s directly in the fluid right so everything is just jet-fluid based cooling.

CPC: How does the system deal with the pressure changes as the coolant warms up and expands?

Chad: There’s a bladder inside that the end user doesn’t even see. It’s actually buried on the other side of the system where as the pressure inside the tank increases, the bladder expands to make up the additional pressure.

CPC: Is it all self-contained within the case?

Chad: Yes. Now if you can imagine there’s a metal plate that your motherboard and your video cards mount at a 90 degree angle off the port. We have three PCI-E express connections.

CPC: What can you tell us about the hardware specification of the components?

Chad: We’re using three-way SLI. The current motherboard, for the initial product will be using Nvidia’s nForce 790i Ultra chipset, and it’s our own custom motherboard design. We’ve actually done a custom layout where we’ve added a lot of novel things that no-one else has done and improved on the performance.

We’re not just submerging cooling because it’s a cool thing to do – there are reasons for it. We’re doing a significant amount of overclocking. Up until now, heat’s been the limit to what you can do for performance on a computer. With our system that’s no longer the case.

It's one thing to get high overclocking scores, but to do it 24/7, 365 days a year, that's what we're all about. We're trying to get the best performance, but do it in a way that you can rely on it. We're trying to build server-class reliability into the system.