Vista - Soak It to Me: Inside Liquid-Suspended Gaming PC

Looking for a beefy gaming rig, and don't mind getting your hands a little wet? Hardcore Computer's Reactor might just be the 100-pound computational monolith for you.

Crafted from 2.5mm-thick aircraft aluminum and packed with powerful hardware, the Reactor is already a fairly striking and competitive machine. But there's a secret weapon sloshing around in that unassuming tank: four and a half gallons of cooling oil.

PC enthusiasts looking to get the most power out of their machines have often turned to overclocking — pushing key components to perform faster than the manufacturer intended. This generates quite a bit of heat, which is traditionally fought using an array of fans or a maze of tubes pumping cooling fluid to select components.

The Reactor takes the liquid-cooled principle a bit further by submerging everything into a tank of coolant. Of course, this isn't your average fish tank filled with mineral oil — take a look at the innards of this (relatively) mini-supercomputer.

Left: Behold, Hardcore Computer's Reactor. Like most gaming PCs, it's crammed with overclocked, high-performance hardware. But there's an important difference here: Every single component is submerged in a custom-designed cooling oil, called Core Coolant. Less trouble with heat means a faster, highly stable system. Dunking everything in fluid works surprisingly well, and is more efficient compared with traditional air- or water-cooling methods.


Soak It to Me: Inside Liquid-Suspended Gaming PC

It's been done for a while now this sort of cooling, just this company are cashing in on the idea.

That is so cool, but i would imagine changing hardware could be a real bitch....

~Lordbob