Stop. You had us at oil submersed motherboard, CPU and GPUs. You didn’t even have to dunk the SSDs, PSU or create a custom motherboard and bullet resistant tank too to convince us that you’re really hard core, umm, Hardcore.
Of course, if you stare too hard at the tank, you’ll miss all the heavenly glory that the Hardcore PC truly is. From its beautiful aluminum case, to its top port routing and the easy to access hard drives, every centimeter of the machine oozes custom computing. And we can honestly say that after tinkering with the most exotic PCs available on Earth for a decade now. What Hardcore is trying to do is so over the top that no one has ever tried it before on a production machine.
But before Hardcore can ascend to take its place among the top performance PC makers, there are an awful lot of questions to answer. Like can they really make and sell these babies for how much the company claims it can? Does it really work? To find the answer to that read on.
The future today! Switched on, the Reactor looks like a PC snatched from the future and placed on your desktop. Production machines promise to be quiet and as ominous as it looks here.
Fighting the heat
Since the PC was born, we’ve been fighting heat. Conventional PC’s use combination of fan/heat sink, chassis fans and ducts to try to keep the machine from turning into the oven. But as the heat continued to climb, enthusiasts turned to liquid cooling the CPU and GPUs. Others have used a combination of liquid cooling and thermal electric coolers to help move temperatures lower.
Both of these methods face one problem though. Conventional fan/heat sinks can’t move the thermals fast enough and create too much noise and liquid cooling key hot components doesn’t do enough to help the surrounding components. So what if you took all of the hot components, dunked them in a non-conductive oil and sold it?
Slimlines only: Hardcore