GIGABYTE Shows Off Server Running Immersed in Liquid!

In the land of immersed systems, there are many ways of doing things. A few intrepid users have gone with oil, still using a CPU cooler but relying on the liquid cycling throughout the system to remove heat energy. Going back over a decade and a half, I recall a system whereby a 35W processor was immersed, without a heatsink, into a bath of a 3M hydrocarbon with a modest boiling point, around 45C, which was then combined in a sealed system with an external thermal electric cooler to initiate the recycling. The demonstration by GIGABYTE at CES this year with a fully-embedded system is more the latter than the former.


Obviously you cannot use water (unless exceptionally pure/distilled) for conductivity reasons, so some inert hydrocarbon is the purpose here. The concept for this design is a two-phase change from liquid to vapor and back, using no pumps but relying on the fact that the gas will condense and fall back into the solution and sink, causing automatic cycling