Oil Cooling???

[hermes09]

I know this may sound crazy but do you ever consider submerge your system into a pool of mineral oil?

[Jump4h]

 

Hard to believe, but yes.

[GaiusMaxwell]

The results from previous ones lead me to believe its more like oil toasting than it is cooling

[Overclocker16]

If you do it correctly it will work out better. Submerging IMO isn't completely the way it should be done. Considering what I work on and how it works, it should really be set up like water cooling. Considering you aren't going to be chilling the oil to cool it down, it isn't worth the setup. But yes, oil cooling works great. You really need to chill it to make it worth it.

[hermes09]

Heck, Puget System is selling one....

Aquarium Computer DIY Kits

If you want to see their experiment, see:

Mineral Oil Submerged Computer

Edited June 3, 2010 by hermes09

[molotovdaskwerl]

i'd wanna do it at somepoint, but not with a main system

[hierovision]

This is probably the most attractive cooling method I've seen to date. I probably won't be able to pursue it for another couple of years, but when I do I'm going to put an opening/closing treasure chest, a scuba diver, and some fake fish in mine. Oh yeah.

[BizaroStormy]

It sounds cool and I have seen a few interesting ones online (cooling the oil to below freezing with dry ice), But it seems extremely impractical.

It would literally weigh 200bls, all your components would be covered in oil, so every time you wanted to change a component out you would get that oil everywhere.

Then if you wanted to reuse your old oil computer parts you have to find a way to get all that oil off. And over time if dirt/dust gets in the oil it can become conductive and fry your computer.

[RedWonderer]

Damn that is so cool.

I think I would is this method for a living room PC because of the silence and looking awsome with a couple of lights in it. Visitors would be like WTF? when they would first see it.

But when you build this type of pc I think you should be really careful how you build it, as once built, you should leave it be until it dies. I read somewhere that one guys submarged pc lasted 3 years so far

[Hyper]

Yea, i was looking into that a while back. Still tempted to build one.. Problem is they are pretty heavy and I tend to want to move them around now and then..Of course you could put some big wheels on it and pull/push it around

[Geekspeak411]

http://www.hardcorecomputer.com/ has some very polished and well thought out albeit expensive options. If nothing else, they have good designs to take pointers from

[Turahk Master of Fear]

 

Hard to believe, but yes.

 

I watched this, and went on the best tangent ever:

SYSTM (YouTube channel)

They did that aquarium oil-cooling kit, and it turns out a lot of other crazy stuff not even related to PC's, but just awesome stuff in general, like night vision and alcohol distillation.

 

One thing they mentioned, that I actually suspected at first but couldn't find any data to confirm, is that oil is not nearly as good as water at conducting heat, and while it might be more conductive of heat than air, the fact that it has a higher resistance to flow means it won't be a big improvement, if any, because it'll want to stick around more. So an oil-submerged system might look dead sexy (heck, it could even spark a conversation with a girl) but it couldn't out-perform a water cooling system.