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Originally Posted by HAL-9000
About a year ago I had an idea for a case that would use R707 (CO2)refrigerant. The idea was that you would just have the coolant physically evaporate off of the selected bits for focused cooling via tubes exiting directly on exposed silicon. Rather than have a return feed like a Vapochill back to the compressor, the evaporated refrigerant would just blow around in the sealed case and the compressor inlet would be strategically placed in the enclosure to draw the evaporated coolant (which would still be pretty chilly) across all the system components, thus cooling them while heading for the compressor inlet. The advantages would be the case would not interact with the outside atmosphere, be humidity free, and not needing any openings you could seal it up so it would be dead quiet in operation.
You could use less extreme coolants than R707 in such a setup, but its so chilly (-77C) and its heat capacity is so good. Plus, with R707 you could match the internal pressure to the local ambient by either purging the system of some coolant, or "priming" it to higher pressures using common CO2 cartridges for BB guns with an identical valve used on the gun.
The tricky part that kept me from ever trying to specifically design/build such a contraption was that sealing the backplane part of the computer where all the cards and I/O goes without making the install permanant would be a sunbitch. Plus, it would take some serious kilowattage for a CO2 compressor that could deal with ALL the heat of a modern PC. Oh yeah, I was also relatively dirt poor when I thought of it. Lately though, I've got the cool chips bug again and am considering possibley building something like this. Anyone have any ideas on sealing up the backplane?
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I'm not sure what low pressure side working pressure would be, but I seem to recall that keeping C02 liquid around room temperature requires something like 500-700 psi at the very minimum. Those 12 gram bb gun cartridges are 1800 psi. I would guess that the strongest case would be quickly destroyed by 1 psi or so (even that would be hundreds of pounds on a side panel), so this might be a little further than you'd think.