14 DAY TRIAL // Water cooling is now widely used as a custom cooling solution for overclocked machines because it is cheaper and more easily installable than other more exotic solutions while being more efficient than the default air cooling kits that are installed for factory on the hot computer hardware parts.
Commonly only the central processing unit, the mainboard's chipset and the graphics cards are cooled using a liquid solution but sometime ago NEC and Hitachi produced a liquid cooler design to keep both cool and quiet a hard disk drive, so until the two Japanese companies decided to roll out a computer featuring their new cooling solution it was just a matter of time. Now, NEC and Hitachi are proudly presenting a multimedia computer system designed to replace the old and not so trendy TV set which is entirely water cooled as this approach gives it a series of advantages like reduced running temperature and because all that water act as a noise absorber, much quieter operation. In order to be able to successfully discharge its duties as a multimedia computer, the Valuestar W is equipped with a digital TV tuner along with a drive that can read and write Blu-ray Disc and read HD DVD.
As it is next to impossible to make a traditional hard disk drive operate very quiet, NEC and Hitachi returned to their hard disk water cooling solution which can act as a noise dampening device so now the 500GB Serial ATA HDD can hardly be heard. "It's difficult to make a hard-disk drive quieter so we decided to dampen the noise," said Hiroshi Sakai, manager of NEC Personal Products' common engineering department who was cited by the news site infoworld. Among the other hardware specifications of the Valuestar computer system there is an Intel processor from one of the Pentium Dual Core, Celeron or Core 2 Duo product lines alongside with a maximum amount of 4GB of random access memory. Other components are also present like the discrete graphics card powered by an AMD/ATI video processing unit, the Radeon Xpress 1250, 5 high speed USB ports, a FireWire IEEE 1395 port, a multi format card reader as well as a Gigabit Ethernet card.
Returning to the water cooling solution used with the Valuestar, the know how was provided by Hitachi which has extensive experience with running water cooling solutions as the company employed the very same method while designing its mainframe systems business. The first water cooled Valuestar multimedia computer went on the market in 2003 and since NEC rolled another three generations, the last one featuring an entirely new CPU heatsink developed by Hitachi.