Ricardo B (ricardo.b@xxxx.xx) on 6/25/11 wrote:
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>ZaZa (no@thanks.com) on 6/25/11 wrote:
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>
>>as long as density of water is a Thousand times higher than air, there is no way
>>Air Cooling could be better than water cooling
>
>As Moritz correctly said, in the end, heat always gets dumped into air -- unless
>you're a ship or environment unfriendly power plant, which use sea and river water as heat sinks.
>
>So, everything is "air cooled". The difference is how effectively you can radiate heat to air.


I don't know if anyone still does it, but old (70s/80s) watercooled mainframes often dumped heat into the building cold water supply (the heated water was then typically discarded). 3087s (the coolant distribution units for the 3080 series of mainframes) were available in air and water cooled models. Internally they had a closed loop to the mainframe itself (two, actually, for redundancy), and then heat exchangers for either cooled air or cold water.