Gizmodo Australia » water cooling

Aftermarket Xbox 360 Case Reduces Noise, Heat and Design

Sean Fallon — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:20:00 +0000

If the Xbox 360 is simply too loud, hot and small for your taste, the Lian-Li PC-XB01 case mod can help. The case can silence the disc drive with sound-proofing foam and keep things cool with improved airflow, a single 120mm fan or optional water cooling system. Plus, it is four times the size of the 360–so you know it will take up that extra space you have been meaning to fill. A price point has not been made available, but we do know that you can get your hands on this hulking beast sometime this August. [Lian-Li via Xbox Scene via Hack a Day via Boing Boing Gadgets]

Water-Cooled Grill Supposedly Keeps Meat From Charring

Gizmodo US Edition — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 16:00:00 +0000

I’ve always thought that a good char on a burger made it exponentially more delicious, but in case you’re worried about carcinogens, Wellbas’ water-cooled barbecue grill promises that your slab of meat will come out tender, juicy and completely char-free. Water is pumped from a reservoir through small pipes on the actual grill to keep it cool even as you cook.

After the water finishes its route through the grill plate, it’s cooled down again via a heat exchanger before making its way back into the grill. According to Wellbas, the system not only keeps food from turning black, it also lowers the fat content of your steak… supposedly because fat can’t drain properly from charred bits.

I’m no Alton Brown, but some of this science sounds kind of iffy. Isn’t adding heat to meat the whole point of grilling? If you’re grill’s getting cooled, I would assume it means the food would just take way longer to cook. Plus, the design doesn’t seem to take into account heat distribution–some parts of the grill will be much colder than other parts.

But what do I know? The grill’s apparently already won some design awards. Pricing is unlisted on the Wellbas website, but each system looks like it’ll cost a couple thousand dollars at least. [Wellbas via Cnet]

IBM Developing Water-cooled, ‘3D’ Semiconductors

Adrian Covert — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:46:14 +0000

Straight out of IBM’s Zurich R&D labs are these concepts for semiconductor chips that are stacked on top of eachother and allow enough space in between for water cooling. Developed jointly with the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, the ‘3D’ stacking of these chips not only uses less space and allows for greater speed, but the water cooling technique could potentially take the generated heat and reuse it for other purposes. IBM says the water cooling structure is as thin as 50 microns and equal in complexity to the system of nerves and blood vessels in the human brain. Crazy stuff.[IBM via TG Daily via Engadget]

IBM Mixes Water, Chips to Make Supercomputer And Cook Dinner Too

Gizmodo US Edition — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:40:02 +0000

It might sound like a risky idea, but IBM’s new Power 575 supercomputer uses a new system of chip-level water-cooling to keep its processors chilled. Nicknamed “Hydro Cluster”, the machine actually uses 448 of the new 5GHz POWER6 processors. They must kick out a hefty heat load because IBM thinks there’re eco-friendly uses for the spare hot water. Much like the Swiss town pool mentioned the other day, the suggestion is that it could be used for heating people’s homes or even for cooking. Check out the video to see how IBM plans to take water even closer to the chip surface in the future.

The computer was built at the Max Planck Institute for plasma research in Germany, and basically uses an enhanced version of the water-cooling that PC modders love. Apparently it’s what helps make this computer quite so “super” in such a small size.
In-chip cooling next, hey? That’s pretty neat, and the leak-proofing is going to have to be amazing, but makes perfect sense with the 4,000 times efficiency water cooling offers over air cooling. [IBM press release via Gadget lab]