Submitted 2 days ago by awky@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Hi, I’m building a homelab watercooled unix server. I don’t want to buy expensive overpriced pre-mixes from ekwb or aquatuning. What cooling solution do datacenters use for water cooling?
What is the chemical solution? Does anyone know?
I hate that tech YouTubers have made people think they need liquid cooling and RGB to do anything PC related. You don’t need to liquid cool your homelab. Period.
I like RGB, and I am not ashamed!
You don’t, but it’s considerably quieter to use a liquid cooler on current high-end CPUs because of the amount of heat they dissipate. My current CPU has a considerably higher TDP than my last desktop’s, but I finally broke down and put an AIO cooler on the new one, and all the fans on the radiator can run at a much lower speed than my last CPU because the radiator is a lot larger than one hanging directly off the CPU, can dump heat to the air a lot more readily.
The GPU on that system, which doesn’t use liquid cooling, has to have multiple slots and a supporting rail to support the weight because it has a huge heatsink hanging on a PCI slot that was never intended to support that kind of load.
What cooling solution do datacenters use for water cooling?
They don’t. The servers are air cooled and the room is conditioned with a Liebert or similar HVAC system. Liquid cooling servers is not practical or warranted for most situations.
That’s not entirely true, some do in fact use water cooling. There’s even “of the shelf” solutions from Supermicro.
www.supermicro.com/en/solutions/liquid-cooling
It’s not widespread, but it’s not inexistent.
Expanding on that, direct water cooling becomes more common the higher power density the racks are.
So as you get into 35kW+ racks it becomes the only way to get that much heat out, lots of GPU compute racks are water cooled by default now, the El Capitan super computer is entirely cooled through direct liquid interfaces, for example.
There’s no way you need whatever you’re looking for.
is liquid cooking really necessary? critical data centers I have worked in use swamp coolers. cheaper, more efficient, more reliable, uses same water as your house…
Are you sure they use swamp coolers? Also known as evaporative coolers, they add moisture into dry air, making the area they are cooling very humid and only slightly cooler.
Practically all even semi-modern DCs are built for servers themselves to be air cooled. The air itself is cooled via a heat exchanger with a separate and isolated chiller and cooling tower. The isolated chiller is essentially the swamp cooler, but it’s isolated from the servers.
There are cases where servers are directly liquid cooled, but it’s mostly just the recent Nvidia GPUs and niche things like high-frequency-trading and crypto ASICs.
All this said… For the longest time I water cooled my home lab’s compute server because I thought it was necessary to reduce noise. But, with proper airflow and a good tower cooler, you can get basically just as quiet. All without the maintenance and risk of water, pumps, tubing, etc.
yes. I programmed and integrated swap coolers at Amazon data centers. when the cool air hits the hot aisles the humidity goes down.
Industrial cooling towers are usually evaporative in my experience, smaller ones are large fans moving air over a stack of slats that the return water is sprayed or piped over and the collects in well for recirculation, larger ones afaik (like what you’d see at power plants) operate the same way. Top ups and water chemistry is all automated.
Those systems have operation wide cooling loops that individual pieces of equipment tap into, some stuff uses it directly (see that with things like industrial furnaces) but smaller stuff or stuff that’s sensitive you’ll see heat exchangers and even then the server & PLC rooms were all air cooled, the air cons for them were all tied into the cooling water loops though.
liquid cooking?
Haha, stupid sexy autocorrect, or honest typo, either way I got a good chuckle!
oh man! I just poked ptsf@lemmy.world for a Austria!=Australia flub in another thread… my come uppins!
I don’t have a direct answer to your question, but expensive premixes aren’t really necessary outside of achieving a certain aesthetic.
Distilled water, biocide and corrosion inhibitors. Make sure your metals are all compatible.
hot and cold aisle hvac is how we cool our datacenter
Water cooling is typically much more complex and expensive than air cooling, and is mainly attractive because of space limitations. The same applies to data centers. IBM’s mainframes have a liquid cooled version mainly targeted towards users wishing to get the most out of their data center space before upgrading sites. These ship without coolant, and simply ask the user to “just add water,” i.e. just demineralised/distilled water.
Sure Mainframe ain’t dead, but what about that toilet water? | Aussie Storage Blog - …wordpress.com/…/sure-mainframe-aint-dead-but-wha…
I have no idea what a data center would use and I haven’t over locked since the 90s, but water wetter is what I used then.
If you are willing to deal with potential galvanic corrosion, condensation, leaks, replacing fluid every now and then and so on I suppose you could use red or yellow radiator coolant from your local car service shop. It has all the properties you’ll want from a coolant liquid, but as others have already mentioned, it’s not really worth the hassle. Atleast if you’re not running something really power hungry, like GPU farm. And even with liquid you have the very same problems than air, you need the heat to go somewhere. So either have very long pipes (and pumps to match them) so you can have the radiator on a different room/outside or big fans to move the hot air away from radiator.
gray@pawb.social 2 days ago
There’s basically no reason ever to do water cooling on a home system unless you’re trying to do overclocking.
Air is cheaper, more reliable, and typically quieter because you don’t need pumps.
MNByChoice@midwest.social 2 days ago
Air also does not make things wet when it leaks.
Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Is rain a leak?
billwashere@lemmy.world 1 day ago
And air doesn’t leak all over your electronics. Well it does but it doesn’t short anything out.