Fluid Thinking

“Buying a processor is like buying a Porsche with a 55-mile-an-hour governor on it,” Chad Attlesey says.

The cofounder and chief technology and design officer for start-up Hardcore Computer, based in Rochester, explains that manufacturers limit the speed of computer processors to keep them from getting too hot for a machine’s fans and cooling system to handle.

Serious gamers and others who want turbocharged performance have been overriding those limits for years. They “overclock” their processors with extra voltage and frequency, and add commercial or improvised cooling systems to their computers that dissipate the extra heat with water—similar to the way a car radiator works.

“If you get rid of the thermal barrier, you can actually open up and get the full potential of the processor,” Attlesey says. Taking that idea to extremes is Hardcore’s innovation: the Reactor, a computer that’s fully submerged.

Not in water, however. Hardcore uses a proprietary liquid that’s formed by combining two gases that are petroleum byproducts. Four and a half gallons of it go into the Reactor’s case to cover all the components. The liquid is “dielectric,” meaning it doesn’t conduct electricity, and it has at least 10 times the cooling capacity of air.

“So what we’re doing is giving an order of magnitude ability to remove heat from the system,” Attlesey says, which improves performance and increases the life of the parts. He says the 3.2 gigaherzt Intel QA9770—one type of processor that Hardcore uses—is overclocked to 4 gigahertz and beyond in the Reactor. “And we’re not only doing that with the processor, but with memory speeds, with the front-side [data] bus speeds, with video card speeds,” power supplies, voltage regulators, everything—“we’re able to optimize the complete system.”