Copper! The only thing it does better than conduct heat is conduct a great steampunk vibe. [Billet Labs]’ latest video is an artfully done wall PC that makes full use of both of those properties.
The parts are what you’d expect in a high-end workstation PC: a Ryzen 9 and an 3090Ti with oodles of RAM. It’s the cooling loop where all the magic happens: from the copper block on the CPU, to the plumbing fixtures that give the whole thing a beautiful brewery-chiq shine when polished up. Hopefully the water-block in the GPU is equally cupriferous too, but given the attention to detail in the rest of the build, we cannot imagine [Billet Labs] making such a rookie mistake as to invite Mr. Galvanic Corrosion to the party.
There’s almost no visible plastic or paint; the GPU and PSU are hidden by a brass plates, and even the back panel everything mounts to is shiny metal. Even the fans on the radiator are metal, and customized to look like a quad throttle body or four-barreled carburetor on an old race car. (Though they sound more like a jet takeoff.)
The analog gauges are a particular treat, which push this build firmly into “steampunk” territory. Unfortunately the temperature gauge glued onto the GPU only measures the external temperature of the GPU, not the temperature at the die or even the water-block. On the other hand, given how well this cooling setup seems to work later in the video, GPU temps are likely to stay pretty stable. The other gauges do exactly what you’d expect, measuring the pressure and temperature of the water in the coolant loop and voltage on the twelve volt rail.
Honestly, once it gets mounted on the wall, this build looks more like an art piece than any kind of computer— only the power and I/O cables do anything to give the game away. Now that he has the case, perhaps some artful peripherals are in order?
Thanks to prolific tipster [Keith Olson] for cluing us into this one. If you see a project you take a shine to, why not drop us a tip?
This looks like the sort of computer Agatha Heterodyne would build in the Girl Genius comic books:
https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20070618
Looks seriously cool and functionally useful.
So very loud, hope he’s planning on wearing ear pro while that things running a few feet from his head.
Tell me you didn’t watch the video without telling me you didn’t watch the video
He’s probably not going to be running furmark 24/7
No kidding!
For bonus points he should make it brew espresso as well. Just needs a few more pipes.. Idunno if you want to have it use the GPU as a heater, or drink coolant, but more like a separate add-on that fits the same aesthetic.
The same theme.
Love this idea. It’s probably hard to implement because you want your coffee a bit hotter than the “coolant” even right as it’s coming off the CPU and GPU blocks, but in the heterodyne spirit, hard doesn’t mean impossible…
So, step one is that the coolant coming off the CPU and GPU need to be headed straight to a heat exchanger to pull as much heat for coffee as possible from these “sources”. Because the coolant coming off the blocks will not be hot enough for coffee, the next step is to get something hot enough to actually make coffee. Option one is to directly heat the coffee water the rest of the way. Boring, but effective.
Let’s go for the interesting way. If we really want to use the energy collected from the processor to make coffee will need to go through a heat concentrator. I think a centrifugal fan would be my choice here, recirculating the cool part separated off back through a radiator to pick up some of that heat. Another option is to highly pressurize the coolant and then radiate the heat from the pressurized coolant into a thermal mass that could transfer it to heating the water. Generally compressors are even more loud than a fairly serious fan, and would require a gas intermediary step, which would mean finding a thermally conductive gas, but quiet compressors do exists, and if we can find something with a liquid to gas phase change in the temperature range we want to keep out processor coolant, then we could potentially get some extra effective heat transfer. A thermoelectric would also be an option, though that would be matter of “integrating into” the steampunk vibe rather than embracing it as one could conceivably do with the fan separators. Either may take a few steps, to get to heat, and since we now want insulation, let’s use lab glass for as much of the tubing as possible.
It’s worth pausing here to mention that there is an added benefit of using a heat separator on our processor cooling loop either directly on the coolant or on something that can bring down the heat of that loop: the processors can be run at lower base temperatures, meaning more room to overclock, overvolt, or whatever.
Sadly, I’m not sure that a reasonable amount of heat separation would add up to the temperatures and pressures needed for espresso, but on the other hand, maybe that compressor can do double duty if we can push the water up even slightly over boiling.
All that may seem pretty ridiculous, but of course we could try using steam from an espresso machine to power the cooling system (pumps and such).
Think, “induction coil”…. Just saying..
It needs a window in the reservoir and a couple of sight glasses installed in the loop. A nice upgrade would have been to use some quick connect fittings. Not a fan of the plywood base. 😖 Maybe the next one can be better. Good luck.
I think the plywood base is just for getting the measurements right and it’s swapped out with billet metal of some kind near the end. You can see from the rear side. I might be wrong, I scrubbed through. Maybe it’s kept in as an insulator to prevent shorts against the back of the mobo, but stand-offs should be enough for that.
And yes, agreed with the sight glasses… like a level tube running parallel to the reservoir would be cool. Throw a bit of dye in there.
A floater flow meter maybe?
Form over function.
Now has maintenance access like a V-10 BMW.
Blowing the dust off the mother board is an engine out operation.
Like anything else steampunk, I think the idea is to let the dust and grime bake-on and develop a “patina.” I guess. I do wonder what it will look like once the verdigris sets in. By that time it will be very long obsolete I suppose.
There are chemical means of accelerating the process.
Real Steampunk serves no function. This isnway too useful.
I hate to be the barer of bad news, but form is part of function. I’m not against integration the maximum reasonable function into the form, but even the most technical and specialized of equipment benefits greatly from considering how interactions with that equipment will happen, and what can be done to make those interactions enjoyable.
And if the primary interaction is made more enjoyable (even just aesthetically) through, say, maintenance being made more complicated, then that’s a tradeoff, not a pure failure. Something built in sole service to “function” without even considering those tradeoffs, however, has indeed failed to account for an important portion of the design.
I’d be annoyed by the stupidity of this design, every time I looked at it.
Would be like driving a British car, it’s worse when you know they did that on purpose.
Form follows function.
To do otherwise is to be Harley Davidson.
Great engineers are good enough at everything else that they can do art (staying on brit cars, Areal Atom 4).
Terrible ‘engineers’ start by doing art, don’t even understand everything else (The Jag built by Raw Dong Lover and his crew.)
You can literally see the difference.
I absolutely love this! Combining modern tech with the steampunk had inspired me to hopefully build one myself!
For the cables could be used some nice copper busbars… just saying…
Ah man it would be super cool if a boilerglass was added for checking fluid level.
That is one of the coolest PCs I have ever seen.
I suppose it wouldn’t be too much to assume that the water will actually enter the GPU block much closer to the die?