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It's easy to think that water cooling is a fairly new thing on the computer scene. I mean,

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I'm going to guess that your old mid-1990s Packard bell didn't have an AIO liquid cooler.

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But it turns out that water cooling has been around for a really long time. In fact, all the

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way back in the mid-1960s, IBM had a line of mainframes called the System 360 that featured

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built-in liquid cooling. Although many System 360 models couldn't even handle

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one million instructions per second, being older computers, they still generated enough heat

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to justify liquid cooling. You could even buy an optional water tank for the mainframe.

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Some early supercomputers also used liquid cooling, such as the Cray 2 from 1985,

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which actually had its components dunked in a special fluid that wouldn't conduct electricity.

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But as the years went on, new types of semiconductors and ever-shrinking transistors

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made computers a lot more power efficient, meaning that they gave off less heat.

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The result was that it started making more sense to air cool servers. Even though air isn't as good

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as water at carrying away heat, air cooling was cheaper and you didn't have the risk of leaks.

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And speaking of cheaper, it didn't make much sense to water cool early home PCs either,

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as they were already quite expensive and most home users simply wouldn't benefit from it.

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But as people started to do more with their PCs, water cooling at home

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started to emerge in the 1990s. However, these early water cooling solutions were almost entirely

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the realm of enthusiasts, as they were usually homemade. Intrepid users repurposed materials

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like drink bottles, pumps from fish tanks, and automotive radiators to cool down their CPUs.

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And water blocks themselves could even be fashioned from smaller heat sinks by sealing a CPU cooler

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inside a housing with a strong glue or epoxy to prevent water leaks and then

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adding connections to allow water to flow and basically flood the heat sink.

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Various designs were used by home enthusiasts until about the beginning of the 2000s when

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a retail market for water coolers began to tape shape. A good early example is the Asetek Waterchill,

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which was an AIO kit that wasn't closed loop. Instead, it came as a very utilitarian looking

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set of components you put together and fill with water yourself, including plain clear tubing

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and a radiator fan combo that looked similar to a tower style air cooler. The water block also

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had a simple pattern in it that would encourage turbulent flow to improve cooling. And as time

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went on, professionally made water coolers would deliver better performance than homemade solutions

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partly due to more intricate engineering of the water blocks to optimize thermal management.

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This was the era where we started to see water cooling become more common among

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PC enthusiasts. And you saw things like those totally clear cases with colored tubes going

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this way and that rather than the super clean setups up today. Even Apple got into the water

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cooling scene as their PowerMac G5 from 2004 became the first consumer PC to include liquid

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cooling by default on some models. Who'd have thunk it? In subsequent years, the rise of easy

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overclocking fueled even more demand for efficient CPU cooling. As overclocking became a matter of

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simply tweaking a couple of settings in the BIOS and rebooting your system, a market sprang up for

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hassle free water cooling, giving rise to the first closed loop cooler in 2006, also an ace

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attack creation. Since then, many more companies have gotten into the AIO game. And there's also

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a thriving market for custom loop components for those who want the best possible performance

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and Instagram worthy glam shots of their rigs. I will say though that I think it'd be really cool

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if someone made their own water loop setup out of an old super soaker. I know it doesn't make

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sense, but I just want it. So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe

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and be sure to hit us up in the comment section with your suggestions for topics that we should cover

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in the future.