It's easy to think that water cooling is a fairly new thing on the computer scene. I mean,
I'm going to guess that your old mid-1990s Packard bell didn't have an AIO liquid cooler.
But it turns out that water cooling has been around for a really long time. In fact, all the
way back in the mid-1960s, IBM had a line of mainframes called the System 360 that featured
built-in liquid cooling. Although many System 360 models couldn't even handle
one million instructions per second, being older computers, they still generated enough heat
to justify liquid cooling. You could even buy an optional water tank for the mainframe.
Some early supercomputers also used liquid cooling, such as the Cray 2 from 1985,
which actually had its components dunked in a special fluid that wouldn't conduct electricity.
But as the years went on, new types of semiconductors and ever-shrinking transistors
made computers a lot more power efficient, meaning that they gave off less heat.
The result was that it started making more sense to air cool servers. Even though air isn't as good
as water at carrying away heat, air cooling was cheaper and you didn't have the risk of leaks.
And speaking of cheaper, it didn't make much sense to water cool early home PCs either,
as they were already quite expensive and most home users simply wouldn't benefit from it.
But as people started to do more with their PCs, water cooling at home
started to emerge in the 1990s. However, these early water cooling solutions were almost entirely
the realm of enthusiasts, as they were usually homemade. Intrepid users repurposed materials
like drink bottles, pumps from fish tanks, and automotive radiators to cool down their CPUs.
And water blocks themselves could even be fashioned from smaller heat sinks by sealing a CPU cooler
inside a housing with a strong glue or epoxy to prevent water leaks and then
adding connections to allow water to flow and basically flood the heat sink.
Various designs were used by home enthusiasts until about the beginning of the 2000s when
a retail market for water coolers began to tape shape. A good early example is the Asetek Waterchill,
which was an AIO kit that wasn't closed loop. Instead, it came as a very utilitarian looking
set of components you put together and fill with water yourself, including plain clear tubing
and a radiator fan combo that looked similar to a tower style air cooler. The water block also
had a simple pattern in it that would encourage turbulent flow to improve cooling. And as time
went on, professionally made water coolers would deliver better performance than homemade solutions
partly due to more intricate engineering of the water blocks to optimize thermal management.
This was the era where we started to see water cooling become more common among
PC enthusiasts. And you saw things like those totally clear cases with colored tubes going
this way and that rather than the super clean setups up today. Even Apple got into the water
cooling scene as their PowerMac G5 from 2004 became the first consumer PC to include liquid
cooling by default on some models. Who'd have thunk it? In subsequent years, the rise of easy
overclocking fueled even more demand for efficient CPU cooling. As overclocking became a matter of
simply tweaking a couple of settings in the BIOS and rebooting your system, a market sprang up for
hassle free water cooling, giving rise to the first closed loop cooler in 2006, also an ace
attack creation. Since then, many more companies have gotten into the AIO game. And there's also
a thriving market for custom loop components for those who want the best possible performance
and Instagram worthy glam shots of their rigs. I will say though that I think it'd be really cool
if someone made their own water loop setup out of an old super soaker. I know it doesn't make
sense, but I just want it. So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe
and be sure to hit us up in the comment section with your suggestions for topics that we should cover
in the future.