I remember reading about these liquid-alcohol cooled monster machines with WinXP installed on a flash chip of some sort. The OS was done booting before the monitor refreshed. :lol: They started at ~$5000
I don't see why liquid ALCOHOL is better than say, water. I use a nonconductive coolant for safety in my machine's cooling system. It's quite beefy, with dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4200+ processor overclocked from 2.2 to 2.9 GHz (roughly the performance of 2 5 GHz Pentium 4s, if they existed), 1024mb of DDR400 RAM, 2 160GB and 1 80GB Samsung Spinpoint HDDs, an NEC ND3540A DVD+/-RW burner (double layer), a fanless Antec Phantom 350w PSU, an Antec Super Lanboy Mini-ATX case, and a Biostar T-Force 6100 939 board (with onboard GeForce 6-series video, nForce 430 chipset. The video card burned out.) It had a 6600gt prior to the video card dying, but came in just a tiny bit over the $1,000 mark at the time, and this is when the processor cost $585.
I wish I waited til AMD's enormous price drops to build it, but oh well.
Another thought on the 'liquid alcohol' bit, a heatpipe CPU cooler does use a vaporizing liquid in its tubes to transfer heat from the block to the heatsink. I seem to recall alcohol is common to use for that. It's very common, though, in notebook PCs, high end PC CPU coolers and it's employed in the XB360 and PS3 cooling units. Also the Dreamcast's, IIRC. It wouldn't enable any significant speed increase without overclocking the CPU it cooled, though. A CPU is just as fast at 80C as at -40C.
As for running XP off flash, it wouldn't be nearly that fast. Faster than a mechanical hard disk but not that fast. It would be enormously snappier off a good RAMdisk though; Gigabyte is selling RAMdisk cards that look like a hard disk to the BIOS via the SATA bus and a bridge chip. But it wouldn't load before the monitor 'refreshed' (1/60th of a second or less), maybe you mean before the monitor had time to power on and display a coherent image?
