> I've been shopping for new computers: CPU, Grapics  and 
> motherboards
> I noticed that lots of motherboards and heatsinks now use 
> copper heat pipes,
> I assume those are made from solid copper!

Probably not.
The heat pipes are probably heat pipes - a technically 
meaningful term which Gargoyle knows lots about. A heat pipe 
has an effective thermal conductivity well in excess of 
solid copper.

Use of a PC as a water heater is entirely viable but of 
questionable practical value.
Imagine that you could recover 200 Watts continuous by water 
cooling. That's about 200/6000 =~ 3% of the capacity of an 
element in a typical NZ electric water heater. Gaining that 
3%* requires designing the PC to accomodate this function 
and then connection to the household system. The optimum 
temperature for a cpu and a water cylinder are probably 
different.

Better might be to add an electric caliphont to your PC with 
waste heat providing base heating and the higher temperature 
being provided by a booster heater (maybe a spare 1000 Mhz 
Celeron). You can then get continuous Java with your Java.

Bear in mind that in Winter any removal of heat for water 
heating will make the room 'less warm'. If you run a heater 
in the PC room then the effort would be counterproductive.

        Russell

Depends on how many showers you take.
3% x 24hours = 36% for 2 hours so if you heat one cylinder 
full a day there MAY be some merit in this. 

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