Quote from: antirack on June 17, 2014, 10:56:01 PM

3M Novec surely could be cheaper, but what many people forget is that you only need a tiny little bit of it. You can cool 4kW of hardware with 200cc or 6.8oz of fluid if you want (that's what's tested, surely not the limit). That costs less than my usual double espresso per kW or less than a pizza for the complete 4kW. I would prefer reducing my hardware to a simple chips on boards any time over creating your a heat exchanger or my own buck regulators and put it in bulky boxes with cables.

It's simple, really. Every facility you build has a price tag and its own set of pro and cons. Usually we compare cooling, and only on the device level, but there is much more than that to consider (power, labor, manufacturing etc).

DataTank Immersion (3M Novec): <$0.65/W (PUE 1.01) -> $650/kW
Mineral Oil Cooling: $3.14/W (PUE 1.15)
Economizer (evaporative): $7/W (PUE 1.08) -> FB $750/kW
Water Cooling: $10/W (PUE 1.10)
Cheap air cooling: $11/W (PUE 1.3-1.5? HK is PUE 2.2!)

For you as hardware manufacturer, DataTank/Novec Immersion (<$0.65/W) has further advantages on the mining level:
- Includes power supplies, networking, everything required to start mining
- You don't need enclosures, heatsinks, assembly work, power supplies, all that
- I estimate that will make a 20% to 50% difference on manufacturing costs of your mining hardware
- You can ship your next hardware to the same customer in the same cheap form factor
- One single person can upgrade a whole container farm within hours
(ie. vs. how many palettes full of heavy 2U boxes that need to go into dozens and dozens of racks)

Facebook prides itself for paying $7500/kW ($210M total) for their Prineville data center in Oregon (it's a 28MW facility). It took them years to build, they have created thousands of jobs, and they evaporate 7 liters of water per kilowatt per day.

Ghetto Mining? Could we consider KNC as ghetto style considering it's scale? Rest assured it's probably not far from Facebook's pricing, after all the KNC site was built by the same people that built Facebook's place (The Node Pole).

Here's some more info and an analysis of the KNC and other mines:
https://www.googledrive.com/host/0ByWHHc0u_thNMWtQeDNiT2duU0E/Analysis_of_Large-Scale_Bitcoin_Mining_Operations.pdf

Naturally, businesses need to make money, so we are all getting charged what it costs plus some more.

Edit: if you are wondering, some of the above data is from here:
http://www.grcooling.com/data-center-cost-savings/
http://blog.schneider-electric.com/datacenter/2012/02/16/how-much-should-a-modular-data-center-cost/

Dude, I'm not forgetting anything. All I'm saying is mount the Bitcoin mining chips (on small PCBs) directly onto your secondary cooling loop. There are no patents involved in that and exactly zero has to be paid to 3M or any other "engineered fluid" vendor.

But it would also zero your commissions, so I fully understand why you keep pretending that you can't understand the difference. Bitcoin mining is not a "data center". It is an "embarrassingly parallelizable" problem where speed-of-light or any similar limitation do not apply.