[airspirit]

Ah ... school experiments.

Your answer is yes, young Jedi. Watercooling a server farm is much more economical than air conditioning it.

Think about it. I can cool 4 PCs with a 95W pump and 100W of fans. That's it. If there was an effective way of importing and exporting the air (air ducting, duh), then that 195W (less than one PC's worth of consumption) cools all four units. Now, to air condition that room in order to cool them effectively, I'm looking at a minimum of a 500W air conditioner. Do you get the picture?

Better than this, though, would be cooling the system via a Stirling cryocooler, allowing for as much as 100W of cooling by using 9W of power (you'll have to wait for the article!!!) at 190 VAC. Putting this in a massively parallel system to cool 10 PCs, you'd need about a 300W pump combined with 10 units to cool the 1000W combined heat output of the CPUs, northbridges, and board mosfets and you'd be using a grand total of about 390W of power to cool 10, which would require over 1000W from air conditioning. The radiator could be passively cooled by putting it outside for cooling the hot sides of the Stirlings.

Taking the Stirling example to the next level, you could cool every component of every PC (PSU, GPU, NB, CPU, etc) for about 170W per unit for a grand total of 1700W of cooling using about 450W of power. This would keep your room at a couple of C above normal, and would require AC units of over 2000W to cool the room to the same levels.

Watercooling is effective, but there are other more effective methods that are coming down the pipe, Paco.