A half-written draft of this piece has been living on my HDD for nearly half a year. Recent discussions re: the subject of "aging and death of PC irons" prompted me to dust it off and quickly post. Regularly-scheduled programming will resume shortly...

"The tools, the means and the methods disappear under the overwhelming dead weight of simulacra and cvasi-originals nobody knows how to distinguish from the genuine article anymore long before the activities they used to support are altogether renounced as such. That's be why you're still pretending to be engaging in computing long after the last computers became unavailable to you. That's why you can't buy silk anything, that's also why I have to argue with the clerks over cotton socks ("oh, it only says 80% cotton 20% synthetic" "right" "that's the elastic, you don't want socks without elastic like for diabethics do you ? the kind that crumple around the ankle and don't stay up ?" "..." They're always shocked when they proclaim so and so article "no longer exists" and I point out I'm wearing it."

-- Mircea Popescu, "Domestic casting"

"...why are we even _thinking_ about home computer equipment when we wish to attract professional programmers? in _every_ field I know, the difference between the professional and the mass market is so large that Joe Blow wouldn't believe the two could coexist. more often than not, you can't even get the professional quality unless you sign a major agreement with the vendor — such is the investment on both sides of the table.... ...they don't make poles long enough for me want to touch Microsoft products, and I don't want any mass-marketed game-playing device or Windows appliance _near_ my desk or on my network. this is my _workbench_, dammit, it's not a pretty box to impress people with graphics and sounds. when I work at this system up to 12 hours a day, I'm profoundly uninterested in what user interface a novice user would prefer."

-- Erik Naggum

As a boy, I had one of these "breadboxes":

This small but nearly perfect "micro" came with full electronic schematics, and was a joy to use. But, more pertinently to the subject at hand, it ate less than 10 watts of current at peak load, and consequently needed no forced air cooling:

You could hear the birds sing while using the Commodore.

After this, came the time of the ubiquitous 486 "AT" towers, where already the power supply blower could be heard from across the room...

... but at least the CPU needed no fan of its own:

And then, came the "Pentiums" etc., and suddenly it was considered acceptable for a desktop computer to sound like a vacuum cleaner and draw in similar quantities of dust.

I have always despised the CPU fan. Possibly because -- in spite of living for many years in the "country of the deaf" -- I did not partake in their peculiar heathen ritual whereby they blow away their high-frequency hearing (this thing they call "concerts".)

When I first began to work for serious pay, soon enough I was able to build a "workstation" (in my conception, a workstation is a machine that you expect to work with, daily, and consequently ought to consist of the best components that your money can buy.) But the idea that such a machine ought to loudly suck in several liters of air and dust every second, I found quite offputting. And so, went and purchased a Toyota radiator, and ended up with this:

There was nothing "overclocked" inside the pictured dual-"Athlon" box. The experiment with piped water was intended strictly for noise-deadening and "uptime" (i.e. avoid disassembly for cleaning) :

After a few days of temperature measurements, I proceeded to remove the two fans which came with the chassis. But there still remained the one in the power supply. Initially I thought to fill the latter with transformer oil and seal a copper heat exchanger coil inside; but at the time did not have a welder, and so it stood as it were.

Prefab "water blocks" for various CPU had just appeared on the market, so it was not necessary to make them by hand:

Pumps specifically built for this purpose, however, were not available, so the chosen pump was of the sealed magnetic type used in fish ponds. It circulated about 4 litres of distilled water + antifungal:

HDD water block:

And video card...

... which, some five years later, developed a leak and drowned the machine. Rubber hoses with compression fittings are not a reliable component.

The reader is invited to point and laugh at the author's folly.

After this, and to this day, I live with the whine of fans, just like everyone else. And yes it is possible to buy "quiet" fans. But when there are six or seven of them, and you run your machine 24/7 (with, remember, two -- or even four -- CPUs, a full "server" board's worth of RAM, etc., it's after all a workstation, you work on it...) , and at full CPU load in the night (why would you want to have idle cycles in your workstation? you paid for it, let it work!) and dust slowly accumulates...

Eventually, the airflow slows, the two (or if you're "loaded", four, or more...) 200 watt processors begin to warm the "oven", and capacitors -- pop.

And if you, like me, use strictly pre-NSA-Fritzchip "egg boiler" AMD irons, you will be in search of a costly and potentially-unobtainable set of replacement parts.

It is here that I must point out that there is nothing physically impossible, or even especially difficult, about constructing a hermetically sealed electrical machine which disposes of multiple kilowatts of waste heat via adequate passive cooling.

Your local power company fields thousands of them:

In the early 2000s, Korean company "Zalman" marketed a kit for constructing a dust-sucker-free PC:

This was a pretty solid item, 40kg or so of "hedgehog" thermal mass, at several thousand $. Unfortunately, "Zalman" folded before it could mass-produce a multi-CPU variant of this system.

A roughly similar item is apparently still sold today:

... but it is of course a "consumer" piece of rubbish, limited to a single (and underpowered) CPU, on account of a laughably-inadequate "hedgehog".

If anyone were to market a "mains transformer"-style 100%-passively-cooled chassis for serious workstations -- I would buy it. I do not care if it were to have the size, weight, and cost of an upright piano. (I expect, on purely physical grounds, that it must -- especially if built with a 2-3x engineering margin.)

A PC workstation that could be radiosnoop-shielded, filled with inert gas, and welded shut -- and reliably expected to work for decades, would IMHO be a quite serious advance -- in a market where serious advances have been conspicuously absent for many years.