Hardcore Computer intros total-immersion liquid cooling desktop

Case modders know all about water cooling systems for their overclocked CPUs, but how about dunking the thing? Enter the Hardcore Reactor, which officially debuted on Monday.

Yes, desktop PC components submerged in liquid...please stop twitching. The Rochester, Minn.-based startup has two patents for submersion-cooled electronics, including a circuit board designed to operate in the depths of what a company representative describes as "a mineral oil-like substance." (She also says it's potable, but this reporter will not be testing that theory.)

Here's how the cooling system works according to the documentation: The "dielectric cooling liquid," as the patent puts it, indicates that tests have been run with an engineered fluid of the 3M Novec sort, but the patent provides for various other liquids such as mineral, silicone, or even soybean oil.

The liquid fills a self-contained interior space that also includes the heat-generating electronics (e.g., the circuit board) along with a pump. On the outside of that interior space, there's a heat exchanger into which the pump moves the hot liquid; it moves along a cooling path and re-enters the enclosure to continue its work. An entire circuit takes about 30 seconds, and it's estimates that the oil can disperse an order of magnitude more heat than mere air can.

Submersion designs aren't unknown, and the patents list plenty of prior art predating Hardcore's founding in 2006. And submersion designs are already in common use in certain kinds of extreme environments (such as deep-water submersibles) where traditional cooling methods aren't appropriate. But such units have, aside from cost, certain problems of upgradability and access.

The Hardcore design ameliorates those by using pass-through connectors (between the motherboard on the inside of the enclosure to the rest of the machine outside) to allow for hot-swapping of SATA hard drives. Still, much of the unit appears to be proprietary; upgrade and even repair options remain to be seen.

And then there's the price -- this is not a low-end unit. On the site today, the basic system we configured weighed in at $6,058, and the seriously tricked-out model was well over $8,000, depending on our willingness to let our ugly old monitor, keyboard and such (not to mention Vista) touch the stylishly blue-glowing Reactor tower. And never mind service on older machines down the road; shipping alone raises questions like, "Can the same delivery services that can't manage to deliver shirt.woot.com purchases intact handle a machine that gets cranky if it tips on its side?"

Deep thoughts for deep pockets -- and Hardcore will doubtless be hoping for those profound and cash-flow-positive thinkers to flock to its inaugural offering.