Immersion-Cooled Gaming Machine with GTX 480 Graphics Cards

[petuma1]

The condenser is a conventional water cooling radiator from Hardware Labs except that the copper finstock is thicker than normal to compensate for the higher heat transfer coefficients of condensation versus forced air.

[happyrichie]

@petuma1 hi, can the psu be immersed?

[petuma1]

@happyrichie

Yes. If you look at the Apple G5 video or the server demo videos, (also on my channel) you'll see that the PSUs are immersed.



[petuma1]

The coating is made from sub-20-micron copper powder coated with about 20nm of silver. This is coated onto the copper substrate using an oil. The coating is fused at 850C under vacuum. In an ideal world, this would be applied to the heat spreader before the chip package was assembled. We didn’t have that luxury so we soldered it on after. No other modifications were made.

[petuma1]

You can google "Open Bath Immersion" to learn more.

The boilers: The boilers are simple slugs of copper with a porous metallic coating on one side. In these case of the GPUs, this slug had small pin fins but these would not have been necessary. The CPU slug is more typical/preferred.

[kidl33t]

This is super cool. Is there anymore information on the setup? Can you post some details on the boilers? Can we have some more details on the condenser design? Did you silicon around the CPU to keep the pins dry (as often done in oil immersion)? Please post a ton more information!

[thepancoproductions]

awesome x.x

how much liquid did you use & how much did it cost? im thinking about getting sth like this ;)

[petuma1]

@thepancoproductions,

This one took a lot of liquid, some 10 gallons or $2k worth. However, the guys who built it used an off the shelf aquarium that would fit much of an ATX chassis. Also, the equipment was all designed to be air cooled so everything is spread out and requires a lot of space. From a thermal point of view, cooling an 1800W machine doesnt require more than a 100cc if you couod make the electronics dense enough. The fluid then would cost less than a copper heat sink

[thepancoproductions]

@petuma1 ok, thank you for that info.

from my calculations i'd need about 7-8l (~2 gallons) of that stuff...

from what ive found on the internet this would be around 500$... phew... thats alot of money... and the housing and tec cooling cists extra...

[spopajr]

but u at least tried right.. :-)

[spopajr]

can it be combined with LN2.

[petuma1]

@spopajr Yes and no. A system like this one is designed to operate at atmospheric pressure and the fluid boiling point is constant at 30-70C depending on the fluid. You can condense that fluid with LN2 but you would not depress the fluid temp below its b.p. If you built a pressure vessel and condemsed with LN2, the pressure and boiling point would drop but at some point, maybe -20C or so, volatility of the fluid would be so low that boiling wouldnt be very effective. You's waste your LN2.

[spopajr]

what is that threshold for chip and GPU that liquid lifts off of the chip and it begins to overheat.

[petuma1]

@spopajr These GPUs don't draw much more than 260W even when they were air cooled and runing at 100C junction temp. However, with the lid modified as it is, they would be safe to 400W+.

[spopajr]

I love this video, so awesome..