Spray Cooling – Recreating Supercomputer Cooling on a Desktop CPU [video]
4 comments
·October 12, 2025everyone
Not super related but I investigated cooling solutions for my own desktop pc, and I got the impression that the typical closed loop liquid cooling systems are pointless. They're not quieter and dont cool any better than a good air cooling solution. Thoughts?
Numerlor
The cooling should be better, especially with higher wattage chips (either out of the box, or overclocked). The AIOs have gotten a lot better with faster pumps.
Noise should also be lower again assuming you'd be actually cooling enough power with an air cooler that'd require higher fan RPMs. Pump noise differs by model, with quite a lot of them being silent
Avlin67
try with 800W xeon/threadripper
Flourinert was very.. yellow. The cray-1 had a see-through plastic recirculation tank with a float, much like a toilet. Oddly, hidden away inside a cabinet. We hung a plastic squeaky Lobster in ours (-UQ) because we'd named the Cray "yabby" for obvious reasons.
I helped in very minor ways commissioning the system, so I got to play around the edges. Looking at hotspots through an old school IR camera with about 127 scanlines was fun too.
Hint: just because a raised floor was OK for IBM cooling pipes doesn't mean it meets minimum bend radius for a Cray. Oh dear..