ramielrowe

Yea, it's the combo of the chiller and cooling tower is analogous to a swamp cooler. The cooling tower provides the evaporative cooling. The difference is that rather than directly cooling the environment around the cooling tower, the chiller allows indirect cooling of the DC via heat exchange. And isolated chiller providing heat exchange is why humidity inside the DC isn't impacted by the evaporative cooling. And sure, humidity is different between hot and cold isles. That is just a function of temperature and relative humidity. But, no moisture is exchanged into the DC to cool the DC.

Edit: Turns out I'm a bit misinformed. Apparently in dry environments that can deal with the added moisture, DCs are built that indeed use simple direct evaporative cooling.

Practically all even semi-modern DCs are built for servers themselves to be air cooled. The air itself is cooled via a heat exchanger with a separate and isolated chiller and cooling tower. The isolated chiller is essentially the swamp cooler, but it's isolated from the servers.

There are cases where servers are directly liquid cooled, but it's mostly just the recent Nvidia GPUs and niche things like high-frequency-trading and crypto ASICs.

All this said... For the longest time I water cooled my home lab's compute server because I thought it was necessary to reduce noise. But, with proper airflow and a good tower cooler, you can get basically just as quiet. All without the maintenance and risk of water, pumps, tubing, etc.

I'd take a look at packer and ansible. Packer can be used to prepare a new base image for your VMs. And ansible can be used to automate the provisioning of a VM once it's booted.

If you're considering video transcoding, I'd give Intel a look. Quicksync is pretty well supported across all of the media platforms. I do think Jellyfin is on a much more modern ffmpeg than Plex, and it actually supports AMD. But, I don't have any experience with that... Only Nvidia and Intel. You really don't need a powerful CPU either. I've got my Plex server on a little i5 NUC, and it can do 4k transcodes no problem.

You really don't need an AIO with a 5600X. Just grab a reasonably sized tower cooler and call it a day. There's less to fail, and less risk of water damage if it fails catastrophically. I've found thermalright to be exceptionally good for how well priced they are. Not as quiet as Noctua, but damn near the same cooling performance.

Another thing to consider is that a 5600X doesn't have built in graphics. I think you'd need to jump up to AM5/7600X for that.

A coworker of mine built an LLM powered FUSE filesystem as a very tongue-in-check response to the concept of letting AI do everything. It let the LLM generate responses to listing files in directories and reading contents of the files.

Honestly, I don't mind them adding ads. They've got a business to support. But, calling them "quests" and treating them as "rewards" for their users is just so tone-deaf and disingenuous. Likewise, if I've boosted even a single server, I shouldn't see this crap anywhere, let alone on the server I've boosted.