[concept] A mercury-cooled computer would be pretty cool.

Aside from the fact that mercury is very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very ,very, very, very toxic; it does work good as a coolant.

So let's visualize this:

The entire case has an ancient-Roman style that alludes to the god Mercury.


Frame is made primarily of something like pewter or white ceramic, stylized after architecture such as the Maison Carrée. do a test-bench layout with the motherboard horizontal, with a peaked roof with glass panels.
all piping is made from glass (ideally a pyrex-like mixture if possible), with straight vertical/horizontal piping connected by joints.
because mercury expands a lot when heated have in all four corners a glass resivore pillar-like tube for overflow, sealed with a soft vaccum. bonus if the pillars are textured to have vertical indents, or a pewter sheathe with vertical windows.
Custom pump that is strong enough to push the mercury through.
This is all stacked on top of a horizontal radiator the size of the case, with large enough gaps that fans can easily push air through.

Can anyone visualize it?

Interesting concept until it comes to the use of mercury. I thought the curly-Q/pigtail shaped CFL light bulbs would be better than the incandescent bulbs until I heard the cost of a haz-mat team needed to clean up the mercury mess if one of those bulbs shattered, went to the newer LED bulbs.

I did a search for "mercury as coolant" and it came up on a number of computer forums. The almost universal reaction was "don't do it".
Just a few things to consider:
1. It is dangerous to handle. Do your own research.
2. It is much heavier than water.
3. It is expensive.
4. It reacts readily with a number of materials, notably aluminum.

As I see it the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages.

True

FuturDreamz said:

Still it would look pretty cool and, if done right, could be a museum piece.

There seems to be some huge misinformation out there that Mercury is somehow a super heat conductor. The fact is, it's not. It's actually orders of magnitude worse than water at conducting heat.

Because of Mercury's high boiling point (671 degrees), it can't be used strictly as a thermal barrier like water can (ever take a blowtorch to a filled plastic bottle?), it would raise to too high a temperature without a radiator to disperse the heat. And, because of Mercury's poor thermal transfer characteristics, it would not work well as a simple heat pump.

I've yet to see anyone come up with any conclusive evidence that using Mercury for this would even work, much less be worth the potential risks.

Oh well, thought it was cool. But then I thought of a PC design based on the Pantheon and that's even cooler - even if it just uses water. It's going to take a while for me to get the money to make it though.