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View Full Version : Wow, this is the most impressive machine I have seen in a while (made by Hardcore PC)



Lord Xeb
October 21st, 2008, 12:01 AM
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/hardcorepc_reactor

Since the PC was born, we’ve been fighting heat. Conventional PC’s use combination of fan/heat sink, chassis fans and ducts to try to keep the machine from turning into the oven. But as the heat continued to climb, enthusiasts turned to liquid cooling the CPU and GPUs. Others have used a combination of liquid cooling and thermal electric coolers to help move temperatures lower.
Both of these methods face one problem though. Conventional fan/heat sinks can’t move the thermals fast enough and create too much noise and liquid cooling key hot components doesn’t do enough to help the surrounding components. So what if you took all of the hot components, dunked them in a non-conductive oil and sold it?



That’s the concept that started Hardcore a few years ago. In fact, the company has U.S. Patent No. 7,403,392 for “Liquid submersion cooling system.” Submersing the components is far more effective than even the highest volume fans because liquid is a far better conductor of heat than air. With the oil that Hardcore uses, the company figures it’s about 10 times more effective than simple air cooling. Since the liquid envelops the entire videocard and motherboard, it also cools the voltage regulators, chipset, and RAM. A pump circulates the liquid through a custom radiator to keep the temps down. Simple circulation isn’t enough to keep the CPU and GPU cool, so custom blocks are fitted to the CPU and GPU to increase surface area and increase the flow of liquid over the hottest components. The result is a relatively quiet PC for the amount of hardware it packs. Hardcore estimates that the components in the machine should never really run higher than ambient room temperature if all is well. If it works in the real world the way it should in the scientific calculator, the liquid cooling should allow the machine to run at greater clock speeds for longer periods of time than more traditional cooling methods.
Of course, all this is meaningless if the company isn’t real. Which is the hard to believe part of Hardcore. With a custom, aluminum-cast case, aerospace transparent tank, mil-spec RAM and redundant power supplies, you’d expect such a rig to fetch into the low $10K range. Hardcore is spec’ing its lowest configured machine in the $4K. So we’re supposed to believe that a custom PC company just comes out of nowhere with an insane design at a surprisingly moderate prices? (click http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/hardcorepc_reactor for more info)





This is an awesome concept. It looks freaking sweet as hell and I would buy it just because it looks ********* awesome! This is a startup company but I hope for big things for it in the near future.