When it comes to high-performance desktop PCs, particularly in the world of gaming, water cooling is popular and effective. However, in the world of datacenters, servers rely on traditional air cooling more often than not, in combination with huge AC systems that keep server rooms at the appropriate temperature.
However, datacenters can use water cooling, too! It just doesn’t always look quite how you’d expect.
Continue reading “The Weird World Of Liquid Cooling For Datacenters”
[gigs], whose foundation-based PC cooling project we covered earlier, has posted his initial test results. There was a large debate going back and forth in the comments as to whether or not this would work, and hopefully this should clear most of it up. He used a 150W fish tank heater to simulated his system’s heat output, and used a quiet fish tank pump to keep the water flowing. Over 8 hours, he was able to maintain a constant temperature 16° C (61° F). While not quite frigid, this would definitely provide ample cooling for normal operation with some headroom for overclocking.
Chart of results after the jump.
[thanks to gigs for getting back with real data so soon]
[john] mentioned this on the LCD LED backlight post. Given the date on the posts, I was surprised that we haven’t seen it before. He replaced the CCFL lamp with 32 1 watt luxeon LEDs mounted on a custom copper water cooling block. The result is bright enough to be sunlight viewable in his car.
[Bard] just sent me a nice water cooling hack. He built a simple water cooling system that can be manually inserted into the cooling system of his laptop. He wanted it for watching movies sans annoying fan noise. He soldered the parts together using a stove instead of the standard propane torch. Necessity is definitely the mother of invention. I hope he relocates the water cooling supply. When he wants to go mobile, he just unplugs the cooling fins.
