VaporPhaze 360

this year at QuakeCon, Zac Glander won the Scratch Build category of the case mod contest with a mod that is not only interesting to look at, but is also an extremely impressive bit of engineering. Glander named his mod “VaporPhaze 360” because it uses a very unique form of cooling, and because the case gives you a full 360-degree view of the components inside. “I have been inspired by this technology since 2000, when I learned about liquid-immersion cooling,” Glander says. “The concept had been rattling around in my head for 10 years before I decided to start bringing those thoughts to life in 2010. From a very young age, I have had a knack for building computers. I was always wanting to know why and how they worked. At age 12, I was given my first hand-medown computer, a 486 that I took apart just to put back together. From that point on, I have been building, repairing, and maintaining computer systems of all types. I now run my own IT services business, so as you can see, I have always had a passion for computers and all that they entail.” Glander says he mods anywhere he can find space, including at home, at his office, and in friends’ shops. Once the ideas that led to VaporPhaze 360 began to fully jell in his mind, he spent approximately a year and a half designing and building the system as time allowed. He says the rig turned out exactly the way he imagined it, but not without plenty of revisions and tinkering. “I built my first system to prove that the concept could actually be made to work, and to prove to myself that I could build a working system,” Glander says. “The system is not a mod, so to speak, as it has never been done on this level. True enough, I used off-the-shelf hardware, but the rest of the computer was possible only through imagination. Thank god for computeraided drafting!”

Science 
“The system in general proves that liquid-immersion technology is relevant and a viable solution as an alternative to direct air, or any of other form of cooling,” says Glander. “I have always been a stickler for a neat computer to allow for better air flow, thus making the system perform optimally. So, to get the most cooling possible, I decided to put the computer directly into 3M Novec 7000, which phase-changes at the low temperature of 34 degrees Celsius, meaning that the fluid changes from a liquid to a gas. “During the phase change, heat energy gets transferred away from the hardware into its gas phase, where it is condensed back into a liquid in the radiator, in a closed-loop cycle. One of the best analogies that comes to mind is when you have a cut and you use rubbing alcohol to clean it. When you blow on the cut, the alcohol goes from a liquid on your skin to a gas, which makes your skin feel cold. I am able to use this exact effect that you can feel to cool computer equipment. Using this technology also allows me to cool the entire hardware package using only one 200mm fan drawing air through the radiator.” Glander says the process is not without its charms, and it has practical applications, too. “The bubbles are one of the more aesthetic effects in the system; this is the fluid actually boiling, just like a pot of water on the stove, only at a lower temperature,” he says. “This system does fill a particular need in terms of being proof of concept, to be applied to servers in the near future. A producible gaming model is also in the works, which fulfills the extreme computing needs of gamers.”

Design 
Glander custom-designed the radiator where the magic happens, and says it’s the world’s first cylindrical radiator with vertical tubes that he’s aware of. He also custom designed the cylindrical glass container that makes up the body of the case. It was built on a mandrel at 5mm thick and is guaranteed to withstand 50psi of internal pressure. The support structure inside consists fully of laser-cut aluminum with tolerances in the .0001 range. Glander hand-tapped every screw hole in the build and did the finish work for the entire structure using a Bridgeport milling machine from the 1930s. “The devices that look like small heatsinks on the components are specially designed boiling enhancement units,” Glander says. “They are heatsinks with a proprietary nano-copper coating that makes the phase change occur in more places on the surface of the units.” The rig’s lighting is brought to you by about 500 LEDs of various colors.

Tech 
In addition to its sophisticated housing, VaporPhaze 360 is an Intel Core i7-3930K, an ASRock X79 Extreme4-M motherboard, 16GB of Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer memory, dual ZOTAC GTX 680 graphics cards in SLI, a SeaSonic X-Series 1250-watt power supply, two Crucial M4 128GB SSDs in RAID 0, and of course the aforementioned single 200mm Cooler Master LED fan. Glander says his next rig will be even more powerful, with dual Xeon 2690 v2 CPUs, 64GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA TITAN Z graphics card. You can probably guess how he intends to keep all of this gear cool. “All of this will be in my newly designed liquid immersion system,” Glander says.