Slashdot Mirror
Aquarium Full of Oil For PC Cooling
JaredOfEuropa writes "Forget fancy watercooled CPUs or complicated heat pipes. Annoyed with the noise of the forced-air cooling in his computer, this guy simply dumped his entire motherboard in an aquarium filled with mineral oil. (coral cache). No modifications were necessary; he even left the fans running to keep the oil moving about. The only thing not submersed in oil is the hard disk."
Original site here.
I'm surprised that the PSU and all the cables (like speaker/CAT5) work at all, I feel so uneducated.
And I guess his parts have very little resale value?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
So if this thing overheats, does it deep fry itself?
Can someone please explain why this works? Why doesn't submerging it in oil just destroy all the parts on the motherboard?
Can we do the same thing with water instead? ;
he only thing not submersed in oil is the hard disk.
:)
And what about the CDROM drive eh, eh?!
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Baby, what you want, it's the way she move [Baby, feel what you want] Feel what you need, come on let's go [Baby, feel what you need] Cover you in oil I wanna cover you in oil [Let me cover you in oil] Let me cover you in oil [I wanna cover you in oil] Cover you in oil [Let me cover you in oil] [Yeah]
Ut Tensio, Sic Vis
Mineral oil?!? I'll bet all his fish are dead!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
From the looks of things, maybe his server could use some cooling. :-) Looks like I might have the first post, and the link posted above is already gone.
I'm very responsible, when ever something goes wrong they always say I'm responsible.
This has been done before, as reported by slashdot almost six years ago. Of course, the guy in the '99 story used a styrofoam cooler, while the newer one upgraded to an aquarium, so I guess progress marches on!
I'll keep the convenience of clean messing inside my current, completely quiet, oil-free PC, anyday.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Didnt some guy do this last year, and overclocked his 2ghz P4 to 4ghz? i wonder how fast his cd rom drives are submerged in mineral oil ;)
New Headline: Slashdot effect causes need to change the oil........
'Nuff Said
Mineral Oil is not nice stuff
Did you see the parts about flammable and a respiratory hazard?
What's next? A guy who uses gasoline for liquid cooling?
May I recommend Fluorinert FC-70?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Very interesting system. Would this work for all electronics, not just computers? This was on digg last week.
Come on, this had better not be a prank. I'm going to try dropping my motherboard into oil right now, this had better work!
I herd about somebody doing this with a old celeron 300mhz? Stuck it in a cooler, and overclocked it. I don't recall how fast he got it, but it was crazy.
I don't see any fans or other way the heat is dissipated into the air, from the oil.
I guess he uses it for an hour, then the oil becomes the same temp as the cpu.. and then shuts it off? Since he says that the forum isn't in english, I didn't bother to check.
However, nothing is visible in his pics...
I'd say that the only reason this hasn't gone *boom*, is because it looks like a PII or Celeron (Slot 1 card).. and he hasn't really pushed it for long periods of time.
Arson investigators in Germany are looking into reports that....
http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:KIrdgLy7q5IJ: www.markusleonhardt.de/oelbilder.html+&hl=en&clien t=firefox-a
"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
After all, it's immersed in mineral oil, which makes one wonder ... at what temp will it catch on fire? A good slashdot effect and whoops, there go the sprinklers ...
And what if his cat gets thirsty? Will it suffer any ill effects?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
What's next -
- PC kept lifted to tropopause to take advantage of constant -55C temperatures
- Armies of hamsters enslaved to turn multi-stage centrifugal fans
- PC strapped onto hood of 67 Camaro driven down freeway to maximize airflow
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Attention all karma whores: please visit this previous story to obtain highly rated comments to be reposted here. That is all.
I swear I've seen this before.
Maybe here?
(I was only an egg, but then I cracked)
it's regular old cooking oil!
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
I saw a few years ago (probably here on /.) where someone put a MB into a tank filled with glycerin, then put an air conditioner cooler grid into the tank with it. A pump curculated the glycerin over the cooling grid and around the MB. I thought that was pretty extreme. I guess the main point is that you don't want something corrosive or conductive, and you do want something with a sufficiently high specific heat to take the heat away without cooking the board.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
I'm an elevator Engineer. This reminds me of a very old residential elevator controller I saw recently that was installed in 1917 and still had all the original equipment in good working order. The controller was in a cast iron tub with all the relays mounted to the lid and suspended in transformer oil. There was a hoist in the ceiling to enable lifting the lid for access to the relays. It would cost a fortune to build something like that today, but it certainly was durable.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I find mineral oil greatly increases my throughput.
I wish I'd thought of that! Tired of the stupid computer that makes so much damn noise? Dump it in the fish tank full of mineral oil! (we won't go into why the fish tank was full of mineral oil). Well, hell, we've been drinking... I wonder if it still works... Whoa, it does work! Neat - take some pictures!
I must not drink enough when I'm near a fishtank of mineral oil...
--LWM
This is the type of innovation CEO's like myself look for in an employee. Best, James http://www.up-set.com/marciano.htm
At least I'm assuming it is. How many times has this subject come up?
Maybe we should hold competitions to see who can make the best mineral oil cooled machine?
I'm tempted to make a dry-ice cooled block (dehumidified of course and allowing for temperature gradients...)
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This thread is useless without pics!
There's not even a Google cache of the site. Oopsie.
For the curious, here's someone else who had a similar idea.
Just wanted to congratulate the poster on putting a link to a coral cache instead of hammering some poor undercapable web server into the ground. Kudos to you poster!
Check out our infosecurity industry blog: http://securitymusings.com/
Perhaps he should have used this on his webserver BEFORE posting to /.?
-Styopa
According to the guy who did it, he used vegetable oil, not mineral oil.
I don't see anything that he has done to cool the oil it would seem that he has decreased his surface area for air cooling, It just seems to work off the thermal mass of the oil.
This would work great until the oil reached a temperature similar to the max temp for the CPU.
Now if he added a little fountain or a bubbler, or something, that would increase the surface area and thus increase the cooling.
Now if he added little neon lights, some racing stripes, and some anime stickers, we could get some of the less infromed case modders to make some great messes in their cars
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
-> Softens hands every time you add/move components
-> Useful as a laxative (though this guy probably won't need this when he sees the bill from his provider)
-> Lubricant (what nerd doesn't need that)
-> Good for soothing baby's chapped bottom
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
The guy uses vegetable oil not mineral oil according to his site.
I did this for a year or so using mineral oil, a plastic storage tub and a small dorm-sized fridge. I had a small electric pump that pumped mineral oil into tubing which was coiled inside the fridge (drilled and in and out hole on the side) and then back into the resevoir. I was a little worried about condensation but it ran fine for over a year before I got tired of the clutter and mess of it. I could have done it better but I didn't want to spend any money on it and just use what I had laying around.
It was mostly for fun with a few interesting things I learned from it:
* It allowed me to overclock about 30% more than I could previously squeeze out.
* The mineral oil did not harm the hardware at all that I can tell from a year of being submerged(it just was a pain to clean).
* If you have your resevoir higher than your mouse then your mouse will be full of oil in a few weeks (same goes for any component connected by wire I imagine).
* The only component I found that could not be submerged was a hard drive.
* The outside coating on the wires will harden and break away after being submerged long enough(but they will still work).
* There was no connection issues with PCI cards or any peripheral device that was plugged in even if they were coated in mineral oil(even jumpers could be changed while it was submerged).
* If a drop of some other liquid (that is lighter than the oil) accidently falls into the resevoir it will quickly be coated by the mineral oil and slowly fall to the bottom and can be sucked out (phew!)
Probably more but those were the most interesting things I remember of it.
Of course, none of that really matters, since the images are on a different server that neither Coral nor the original site are able to access.
I've got a mirror of the images building here. The server is dying quickly, but I should be able to complete the collection.
You might want to do a Google search on this term and see what is considered the "universal solvent".
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Upon RTFA, I see that it uses vegetable oil, not mineral oil...
Flash point: 135C (275F) CC If any one component or combination hits this it will light on fire. P4's can easily hit 100C even without overclocking in some systems (limited cooling). If there is not enought oil to air heat exchange occurring, it could catch on fire if he keeps it on too long...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/7bb0bea011df80856 9857f1175b25bee/index.html
Some guys in Spain (http://www.sorgonet.com/torderawireless/nodo1mejo rado.html) already did it in 2003, and we at /. talked about it. Apparently it keeps on working.
m l?tid=193&tid=137
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/03/16/2023221.sht
As everybody says here: nothing [new] to see here, move along.
So he immersed everything but the hard disks. Makes sense for many of the parts, though I'd be a bit concerned about oil interfering with cable connectors, but immersing the speakers just sounds likely to fail :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So oil conducts heat much better than air. So the heat is going to be conducted away.. where? Hmm.. the aquarium walls. Then where does it go? Into the surrounding air. At a rate determined by the amount of surface area (and the airflow).
Thing is, I wager the aquarium walls have a lower total area against the surrounding air than his computer would've had otherwise. Which would mean that he's actually getting rid of less heat, and that in the long run (e.g. when the abient temperature, oil temp and computer temp have reached equillibrium) his computer is going to be a lot warmer than it was.
Or?
(And I can imagine that oil doing quite nasty things to the polymers in the machine. But that's a different story)
Did anyone notice that the images aren't on a coral cache server? They're hosted on the same server as the images for the original site so it will still be slashdotted. OTOH, mirrordot cached the images properly: http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/7bb0bea011df80856 9857f1175b25bee/index.html
Looks cool and pretty, but when you gotta upgrade, you're left in a sticky situation.
It's a real slippery slope.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Brings a whole new meaning to "You want fries with that?"
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
So once the uber clocked processor heats the oil to boiling temp he can make some fries.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
I was under the impression that it was the fan noise that made him go nuts...if this is an 80/20 solution to that, I guess it would work out OK.
man rtfm
Aquarium - little pottery diver bubbling air - plastic plants and of course coral.
How appropriate.
Since oil is electrically inert, how is he going to use any of the expansion slots on the motherboard should be decide to remove it from the oil?
I would imagine that even a thin film of oil on the electrical contacts will totally (to use the technical term) bugger it.
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
Flammable liquid coolants - just what a gamer needs. You thought using the flamethrower inside was only a way to die in Doom?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
he even left the fans running to keep the oil moving about. A bad move: his fans will soon burn out because they weren't meant to circulate oil, but air. With fans gone and the oil stagnant some parts of his computer will start to heat up...
Slashdot is wrong again. From the site: "yes! it's really a computer completely in vegetable oil!" He's using vegetable oil, not mineral oil.
Stupid like a fox!
..sprinklers hit burning oil and there goes his whole house
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I never really considered sticking a computer in oil before.
I have considered sticking a server in my CIO's ass, though.
No Nyarlathotep, No Chaos
Know Nyarlathotep, Know Chaos
I can't believe that I had to slog all the way to the bottom before someone mentioned the most obvious caveat in doing this! Mineral oil, alcohol, acetone, what do they have in common? They're potent oxidizers! They'll eat anything organic. Wait until the oil (or whatever) eats through the styrofoam and dumps itself onto the carpet. It could be really fun with the more volitile stuff, let it drip down to where there's a pilot light, then wait for the vapor pressure to build... Of course you could get to find out how long a PC can run after the PC boards delaminate and the plastic packages melt. After it does quit, you could sell it as high-tech art. I see the potential for making real profit on this!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sure, it's water repellant, but doesn't mineral-oil float on top of water, thus ruining the MB you have on the bottom of the acquarium ... ?
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
And what if his cat gets thirsty? Will it suffer any ill effects?
I wouldn't worry. The mineral oil will kill the cat long before the level drops far enough to have any ill effects on the mobo. Now, if the cat dies and falls into the aquarium, there might be a problem.
It's the land of the brave, and the home of the free
Where the less you know, the better off you'll be.
Would you like to supersize that order at Fry's?
he should make that sucker into a lava lamp
it would show/highlight the oil currents/flow by the fans (that are still turning, BTW)
whoah
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
So... how about adding some colored wax and putting all the components at the bottom of a tall/hexagonal aquarium and making a PC that IS a LavaLamp?
Not sure if the heat would get high enough to provide the necessary melting of the wax or fluid current in the oil, but as I recall, it doesn't require too much heat... my circa-1976 official LavaLamp only used a 30-watt appliance bulb.
see: http://www.oozinggoo.com/ for other such madness
Now I've gone and admitted that I owned a LavaLamp... in 1977... sigh.
cheers,
Levendis47
--==[ AOL YIM ICQ : Levendis47 : levendis47@yahoo.com ]==--
This makes me wonder: since oil and water are immiscible, wouldn't it be possible to put some mounting brackets in the tank for all of the electronics about halfway up the tank, then fill the tank to below that level with water, little plastic castles, and fish, and then with oil to the top?
Aeration might be a bit of a problem, but one could put a divider in the tank and have the bubbler on one side and the electronics on the other in case the bubbling action caused mixing between the oil and the water. If it was designed properly, it wouldn't even be necessary to have oil on both sides of the divider, just on the side with the electronics, although this would definitely make changing the water a delicate process.
nuke the moon
If he put some sort of radiator (heat sink?) on the top, would that help him any? As the warm oil dispates its heat through the radiator, convection would cycle the oil in the tank.
with the freakin' CPU cooling stories already! Every other day it's "some guy has invented a novel way of cooling his CPU using a recycled urinal flusher, some windex and half the periodic table. Download the 60GB MPEG to watch it in action!"
I ran it through babelfish, and it says its vegetable oil, not mineral oil:
c hner.htm
http://www.markusleonhardt.de.nyud.net:8090/oelre
-----snip----
yes! it's really A computer completely into vegetable oil!
----snip----
.
Yah- I remember an experimental F-5 radar that emitted 40Kilo Watts (take that, Pentiummmm!). It was about the cubic of a full tower ATX case. Aluminum case, machined heat sinks on the inside, the outside was mounted to a cold plate that was chilled with turbine bleed air. The R/T was mounted inside the case in a three dimensional kind of array of solid state and passive components. Fluorinert filled the cavity. Screwed the lid on, and it went to work. Heat flowed pretty well (thermal sensors built in to the circuitry at various spots) so straight convection was used (no fan, etc.). Worked great !
Seems to me that while the fans would be plenty capable of running in air, pushing around something the density of oil would put a lot of extra strain on them and cause burn-out?
Of course, you could always put a more resiliant fan on the case, and one of the advantages I could see is that they would definately be well lubricated (if if the oil stays clean, they'll not seize from dirt/etc for a long time, more likely to burn out).
Some things I would do if attempting a similar project:
a) Fans intended for moving liquid.
b) Protective covers on the PCI, etc ports so that later cards can be added
c) Seal/Cover up the other plug holes such as USB etc for later use
d) Perhaps something snazzy like intake tubes etc with fans on the end to move stuff around. Perhaps different coloured inert fluids (with high boiling points) for a cool effect when the fluids move around).
Then where does fish oil from from Mr Smartypants?
More efficient way is not to submerge the whole computer in oil, but just parts like psu. I know in a latvian forum a guy made a custom psu box and filled it with mineral oil for cooling...combine it with a self-made water cooling and the answer you get is a completely fanless computer. Now, try upgrading or changing a part in a computer that is floating in oil...
I'm building a case/cooling mod right now using liquid nitrogen!
Assuming you meant water, the you're wrong. Just water is quite a good insulator.
The US Navy was using water cooled computers long ago. Just flooded all the circuit cards with distilled water.
Note that you have to do this with pure water. If you dissolve much of anything in it, then the SOLUTION begins to conduct.
Most of the water you come into daily contact with (puddles, rivers, flooded basements, even tap water) has quite a bit dissovled into it, which is why generally electricity and "water" don't mix.
Nothing says "nerd" like a PC dipped in a vat o' lard.
So what happens when the motherboard gets fried?
Installing Mandrake results in a default hostname of PekingDuck.
Two words: Debian Potato.
Installing Snort causes the room to smell like pork rinds.
Cool off your PDA -- grease a palm!!!
No, the oil doesn't make your 56k modem go faster.
Friendly reminder to change your oil every 3 months or every 3000 Megs.
how much did all that oil cost? That's a huge amount of oil..
I like muppets.
Hey, he has a counter on his page. Incrementing pretty fast at the moment :-)
I guess this guy also get external ones, I can NOT see his pictures so I can only guess.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Anyone notice this thing still has ISA slots? What's the use of overclocking a Pentium II ?
I managed to grab a mirror with images here: Oil Computer
"And what if his cat gets thirsty? Will it suffer any ill effects?"
Only if it shits all over MY garden after laxating itsself with that oil
Why can't the hard drive be submerged? Does the oil leak into the casing?
The cat would be soo internally lubed up, hairballs wouldn't be any kind of problem.
If it were, you'd have cat diarrhea all over to contend with, plus a greasy-ass cat, dead or not.
I'm surprised that the PSU and all the cables (like speaker/CAT5) work at all, I feel so uneducated.
Actually, I'd be more worried about the high-speed circuits in the machine. Oil does not conduct electricity, but that doesn't mean its electronically equivalent to air.
Oil has a dielectric constant of between 2 and 3 (depends on the oil) and that will affect the capacitance on and between the traces of the circuit-board. The signals will run a little slower on the board and have a bit more cross-talk. Its probably not a big deal -- the materials in the circuit board have a bigger effect -- but it could slow the signals enough to reduce reliability in a marginal design.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
One of my friends did almost the same thing with water some time ago and his main board and PCI cards are still working fine. To my knowledge water has a higher specific heat capacity than oils meaning you don't have to move it around that fast.
I have a WD 120gig and it sounds like an A-10 Warthog pulling out of a dive after straffing a Taliban T-72...
God I hate WD drives... OTOH, I installed a new Maxtor 250g for a friend and it was so quiet I had to pick the drive up and feel it gyro in my hand to be able to tell it was running.
I don't mind fans so much but the whine of hard drives is pretty unbearable, especially when you have 7 pc's running at the same time.
But it would be nice if they could work on quieting everything down. It's a noisy world we live in. Too noisy.
At one time I worked for an electric utility and it was a definite consideration there in dealing with the old transformers. So no, I didn't get into the oil. I'm not a union employee anyway and can't mess with the hardware or I'd get in big trouble. I can design it, oversee installations, oversee troubleshooting and program the controllers (in assembly language), but can't pick up a screwdriver on a job site. This old oil is a problem the owner will have to deal with at some point. It's really interesting to see some of the old well-built gear that still works well as long as it's maintained.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
nt
Someone did this a few years ago, but they pumped the oil over an air conditoner coil to get it even cooler, pics are awesome!
s ubmersion/submersion8.html
http://www.octools.com/index.cgi?caller=articles/
why bother taking the hard drive out?
it is sealed, isn't it?
floppy/cdrom i would understand, just not the HD
now it runs like greased lightening?
Eek!
One of my friend approached me with this Idea back in 2000 and it's was so grotesque, that I designed an entire silent computer based on thermal Conduction.
The design can handle over 300 watts 3.X P4 cpu at full load, + drive + graphics cards and operate at near room temperature.
Just aluminum, drive is in 1" thick thermally conductive Silicon Rubber. (I added stuff to make it conduct heat)
Mineral Oil is just a bad idea. Even in my Aluminum design I have so much criticism about how hard is it to work on, get the parts etc. It's actually easier, but people just can't handle different then the status Quo.
Anyhow A companie was formed http://www.nisvara.com/, never went anywhere in 3 years. We had interest from everyone one though, even free offices from NASA Ames.
It blows away Hush computers or the Zalman stuff.
see http://www.videotechnology.com/old6-03.html Form more info and a Photo.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
We had this at the lab in 1995. This shouldn't be called "News" but 'Olds"
Slashdot 1|0 Productivity
Would somebody PLEASE think of the chil..I mean, fish!!
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
but does it run? :P
*ducks*
Like you said, the idea is not new at all. I remember seeing this years ago, the whole thing was submerged in a clear plexiglass container (much like an aquarium, but lower profile and trays over it for drives).
;)
And generally speaking mineral oil isn't really a good coolant (not very effective at heat transfer), and it's very messy (imagine taking out parts... no thanks!). And you'd think there would be some decent cooling for the oil... I'd like to see the oil temp grahps given a decent load, it just might eventually fry
///<sig
Some of the earliest hard drives were filled with oil - at slow speeds it kept the heads flying.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Objects with larger surface areas can be placed within objects of smaller surface areas.
Imagine an object consisting of lots of parallel plates, placed together with gaps on a base. Imagine decreasing the gap spacing and adding more plates. You can decrease the gap spacing more and more, add more plates, and the surface area will keep increasing. The surface area will soon become larger than a surrounding cube.
I bought a jug of fuser oil on ebay for $6 and after filling the fuser tank I started using the rest of it around the house. Great stuff!
Slick as hell, doesn't seize up like motor oil.
I have a lot of various fans around the house that I have to oil frequently. I have been using motor oil but it gums up after a while and the motors seize up. So I cleaned them all up and used the silicon oil on them. Man, it doesn't get any smoother than that. Not one seizure yet.
And, it does NOT break down plastic and rubber like other types of oil does so it's safe to use on just about anything. And as far as I know, it's non conductive and non-flamable. I just don't know about the cooling properties of it. Though I can't imagine that it would be any worse than the cooking oil or mineral oils, which BOTH are flamable and both will break down plastics and rubber..
And it's cheap enough...
The hard drives are the real noise makers on my computer. Especially since there are 4 of them.
One question. How did you clean the components afterwards? I assume you didn't just throw everything away and reused some of the parts. Didn't the unused expansion slots on the M/B and the open USB, serial, etc. ports have oil lodge inside of them?
just wondering if he has to change out the oil a lot
I don't think I'd want to buy any secondhand parts off of this guy.
Shades of Tesla
...for someone to figure out how to do a "lava lamp" effect with this, mount their hardware in a rack that's inside a large clear acrylic tube like those used for fancy aquariums, and watch all the pretty backlit blobs moving this way and that. That would be cool.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Stickiest dust bunnies EVER.
And you could add 2 giant fans to blow air across the fins to keep it even cooler!
That is actually a good idea that really would make cooling more efficient. Larger fans can move as much or more volumes of air at slower RPMs than smaller fans. Lower RPMs means less wear on bearings and quieter operation.
IIRC that is the strategy used in the new BTX form factor cases--the heat sync on the CPU is really big with a lot of fins and a big fan that draws air through those fins and over the motherboard (to cool the chipset). Current ATX setups are most often laid out poorly for cooling, and you end up seeing high-end systems with 3 or more fans in the case. It is the need for multiple small fans that makes these PCs noisy, not the fact that they require fans at all.
I still think it would be great to see the return of the days when chips and power supplies ran cool enough to allow for practical convection cooling. My fanless Atari ST was blissfully quiet--even the comparable IBM ATs of the day that only had a single fan in the power supply were horribly loud next to it.
I'd wait until he had a party and after everyone passed out, I'd sneak up and release a steamer into the oil.
Not sure if I'd wait to see their reaction on the webcam or light it up as I left.
Smokin' a turd in purgatory.
Now we should dump SCO in there so that they can dive down and see if he's running unlicensed Linux.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This coiuld probably be ressurected as a silent media PC with serious horsepower, if the case were styled a bit better. Think "high-end" audio monoblock class A amps, the heat problems they face, and how they're styled.
You could've hired me.
The flash temp is supposed to be something like 265F...autoignite is somewhere around 500-600F. I don't know how hot you keep it in your house, but I don't think it'd be much of a problem in mine. ;)
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
i think it's a scam.
even if he did drop it in the tank, oil would eat through rubber parts and thus short-circuit the whole thing.
As this is really a re-hash of an old story, I'd be more interested in what happens to these rigs over the long haul. How long does the computer last in oil? How often does he have to change the oil? How does he cool the oil? How long before the mobo and cards are somehow affected by the oil?
Answering *these* questions would make for a much more interesting article than just "Hey, dude, I put my mobo in oil! I'm l33t!"
Also, mine wasn't as ugly:
Picture 1
Picture 2
Picture 3
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
hello, with a friend we tried to build a 0db pc. it works for a couple of weeks, before a dead guppy indicates an error. look this: http://kluftern.homeip.net/files/0dB/0db.jpg
grz brs
So what about the connections in the PCI slots and such? Can't mineral oil get between the card and slot's contacts?
Do you have to keep the cards perfectly still to keep a strong contact?
Can you swap cards in the tank?
Can you adjust a connection (USB) while the machine is on?
I looked in the forums and nobody mentions this in english. Just stuff like "bloody brilliant"..
He should have submerged his webserver in oil!
Use mirrordot and give his server a break.
I'm pretty sure they aren't completely sealed, and submerging them in oil can have negative effect on electrolyte (and therefore on all components that these capacitors filter the power for).
...eliminate those "zinc whiskers" we heard about here before.
Oh good! Lots of fuel for when the thing overheats and ignites the oil. I'm not sure how flamable mineral oil is, but as a general rule oils burn, and burn very hot. On top of it, some plastics are dissolved when in contact with oils.
I'd like to see the temp for the CPU, graphics card's, and other heat sensitive components of this. The oil is slowing but steadily going to heat up. He will need some heat exchange between the oil and the ambient. In short, some things will dissolve, slowly heat up and finally burn. If you ask me, it's trouble brewing.
The flash temp is supposed to be something like 265F...autoignite is somewhere around 500-600F
... never mind.
... maybe it wouldn't burn, but the table or nearby papers and books might.
Well, that will take a while before it gets too hot then
Wouldn't want to be standing next to it when it's slashdotted though, the incadescent wavelength would be pretty toasty
There is safety. There is perceived risk. And there's burning your face off because your wings might not melt but your cotton fiber scarf will.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I tried this trick just last week. The problem is, the oil is a laxative, and my fish couldn't stop shitting all over the place! In no time flat, my MoBo was covered with fishy diarrhea!!!
note: fish-poo is an INSULATOR...my MoBo quickly reached 200 degrees!
The nuclear reactor I worked with as a grad student had bare incandescent lightbulbs in metal fixtures (I'd assume something non-corrosive) submerged in the water* surrounding the core, so that you could see to the bottom. Obviously, the water is quite pure.
What was more impressive, of course, was watching the core power up, as you stood on the walkway directly above it. The blue glow from the Cerenkov radiation is just plain impressive, no matter how often you see it.
*light water, in case you were wondering.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
I wonder if you put the aquarium in a freezer, how far could over-clock the CPU and would it cause any problems with the mineral oil when you brought the temps to 20 - 30 degrees)?
Insert witty comment here
He says in TFA that it's vegetable oil, and it obviously is not mineral oil since it's yellow and not clear. I wonder if this would work with mineral oil or not. Different types of oil are very different chemically so there may be some that work and some that go poof.
... is a good notebook with a silent drive from Fujitsu, eg. the MHT2080AT with 80 gigs. Not cheap, but portable, fast and reliable. And, to be honest: real good silencer kits cost more than the difference between a PC and a good notebook.
Am I the only one wondering how smart this is? I mean, computers might spark... nothing like an oil fire
Seems like everyone is missing the real point of doing this. The aesthetic value! Forget those swoopy-doopy new tower cases. These aquariums are see-through and can really enhance a room, particularly when placed in a window with a nice view. And those ribbon cables really add interest and texture. I'm sure we'll be seeing these on HGTV any day now as a new design feature!
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
How well would this work with a modern CPU?
...after it's been soaked in oil for a few days.
News? 7 years old is news?
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
So how many miles before an oil change? I'm sure most pc nerds would suggest 3000, but that's just to get more money out of your pocket.
I can't wait to see what sort of special mods he's made to the protective casing on his $200-a-pop harddrives! Too many blithering idiots out there.
When it said coral cache, my first thought was: "He didn't remove the ornaments from the aquarium?"
Read my blog: HansMast.com
is that every last connection has to be SOLDERED DOWN in order for this thing to work for more than half an hour.
The problem the guy ran into six years ago was that the mineral oil seeped in between all of the connections and disrupted the flow of electrons; PCI cards, AGP card, CPU, IDE, power... everything. A stock motherboard simply won't cut it, you have to have a custom board with everything hard-wired to it to survive the submersion.
This story is a dupe because it doesn't solve the basic problem.
If his website is running on it...instant deepfryer!
You're using her as bait, Master!
I thought hard drives were completely sealed so why does it matter if it under the oil.
I am considering doing something like this with (Dow 561) transformer silicone oil to protect electronics left in the field here in humid Florida. I suspect that in the long run this may or may not produce problems because the oil is inert for most things but not compatible with PVC for example. See section 3.10.1 in http://www.dowcorning.com/content/publishedlit/10- 453-97.pdf?DCAPP=&DCWS=Power%20and%20Utilities&DCW SS=Fire-safe%20Transformer%20Fluid
Some plastics may not be compatible with mineral oil either after months or years.
I bought the 561 in bulk, but anyone wanting to experiment with a small amount of silicone oil can buy the DOT5 type of brake fluid at an autostore (it is mostly silicone oil).
On a separate note, I have been meaning to look into the radiowave absorbing properties of silicone oil - if it is high enough a cheap plastic case could be used instead of metal (heat dissipation would be less but that would not be a problem for me). I'll try to follow up with a comment if/when I find out.
The only component I found that could not be submerged was a hard drive.
Where you able to submerge the CD ROM drive? Wouldn't that negatively effect the play speed?
-Valiss
Hope it never gets hot enough to boil. (If the guy's runing a Pentium 4 it just might.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
i'm not too sure when i saw this, but it was probably 8 years ago. there was a guy known online as Dr. Freeze and he had a site filled with pics of his submersion. He had bought like 3 bottles of mineral oil and submerged his motherboard and etc inside a styrofoam box. He also had a air pump. Later on in the pictures, he took apart his a/c and turned it on flew blast.
I used to have the pictures, but it's been too long and probably lost during one of my hdd crashes. if you google "dr freeeze" and "minieral oil", you can see people talking about him.
HD Trailers
How do you dispose of the oil? You can't just pour it down the sink...What are the consequences of everyone having a few dozen gallons of oil for home electronics that become obsolete in an average of 2 years?
This is new news? It's been done before. Move on there is nothing to see here.
First thing I thought of was hmmmmmm I want Fish in there.
Imagine a standard aquarium with the PC occupying the bottom third of the tank. Fill the bottom third with mineral oil.
Fill the top two thirds with Water and put in fish. Assuming we keep surface area of the glass is enough to keep the heat in control, the fish could live a long happy life.
I may experiment with this.......oil and water don't mix - so the fish should be fine - right?
Dupe or not, I still like the concept.
2005-04-12 16:39:15 Linux box in a tub full of vegetable oil (Hardware,Hardware Hacking) (rejected)
..so why was it not accepted then? I found this story from here
Proof: If, under normal circumstances, a computer will work for, say, twenty years before the motherboard stops working, and a hard drive will work for, say, five years, then by using the setup I described, you will be able to accomplish the same in the time it takes to plug it in and turn it on for the first time.
Efficiency is, after all, the wave of the future.
No, it's not mineral oil he's submerged his computer in, it is in fact vegetable oil! Had you accepted my submission, oh CmdrTaco, this little typo would never have crept in....
Of course, while a Mac will run cooler, it won't look nearly as cool as a motherboard in a vat of oil...
Sheeesh...
but where's the fish? 0mar
You are absolutely right.
That case is much better than this fish tank! Love the lighting too.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything" -- Josef Stalin
ffs this is old as hell i seen this on pretty much every other tech news site over the last few weeks.
I Predict A Riot
Computers running on oil? Cue Bush jokes.
I don't see what's wrong with a bowl of oatmeal.
Cook some oatmeal and bananas. Mix with yogurt or applesauce. You'll be running to the toilets in half an hour.
I was at the "Icon Byte Bar and Grill" in the SOMA area of San Francisco. They had a few televisions with the covers removed and completely submerged in mineral oil filled fish tanks of different shapes and sizes.
I also think this was one of the very first internet cafes, as I had never seen one before and the web was crap.. I remember thinking as I browsed with NCSA Mosaic, "what's the point? I'll just use gopher, it does the same thing."
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
Now when you overclock and your pc starts to heat up, you can make fried chicken!! yay!!
Actually the link is now long dead, but someone did this in 2001, and did it in an even more haphazard and impressive manner!
Same deal, but in a Strofoam box, with Mineral Oil and an Eheim pump moving the oil from the reservoir where the mobo and proc were situated and over the bare compressor coils of a stripped 1000btu Air conditioning unit resting on top of the whole setup.
but, no uhh, its not what you think boss, I was just fixing my pc...
This has been done before, more than once. The first time I read about it was long enough ago that I don't remember when it was..
Wouldn't the fish be crumbed or battered?
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I actually saw those same exact images over a year ago. Is Slashdot really hurting THAT bad for content? I really wouldn't think so.
It didn't kill them... it made them STRONGER!!!
Asumming that the computer is plugged in and is running (yes/no?)- a large proportion of the heat in the oil would leave via the corners (the Edge) of the tank. In the same fashion that heat leaves a house through a window. Even in a "modern" window - most of the heat is lost at the edge of the glazing. Hence the EDGE EFFECT. Naturally heat would be lost from the surface of the oil - buy not that much because of the upper half of the tank stops convection currents from cooling the surface of the oil. So most of surface heat lost by conduction - but air is a fairly good insulator and would slow it down.
... behind the tank. This guy knows cooling mechanisms, that's for sure...
Fluorinert FC-77 /. that cost at least as much as 2 liters of this. I wouldn't be surprised if someone was already doing it.
5 ml - $28.16
25 ml - $89.25
100 ml - $257.38
250 ml - $561.74
Found at:
http://www.sciencelab.com/
There have been cooling systems on
This isn't new at all or even innovative?! I've known you could do this for years, people do it all the freaking time. How the heck did this of all sites make front page? I mean really there are better examples than this.
Also leaving the fans in, is a bad idea, the increased load changes the resistance and it's bad for the motherboard.
What a load of crap.
Hey guess what? People have been using inert liquids to cool computers for decades!
Frick, some jagoff throws his tower into an oil bath and you sucks wet your pants?
This is dumb. Stupid dumb slashdot weenies.
Hey guess what? An oil bath will not let you overclock your computer to some magic level.
There is a little problem called specific heat capacity. That isn't even as much as a problem as THE CHIP ISN'T PERFECT! gadzooks what?! Yes children if you want more power from the same chip you can't just jeep ramping up the speed of the clock.
Can we get some real people here?
HELLO?
I mean, wow what a great idea, wish I'd thought of this. Oh wait no I did... 5 years ago, did anybody slashdot me then? No, why? Because informed people still made calls back in those days!
So on another note, it looks like pee!
I can vaguely remember this being on Slashdot before. Though then it was iirc a AMD 5x86 on 160MHz or so.
"is that pure water is a goog insulator."
Now we know how to stop eggs shorting out when you boil them.
Some buddies of mine did this last year, hooked it up to a home airconditioner, and took it to QuakeCon. http://users2.ev1.net/~eggy/lanparty/graphics/fish tank_final1.jpg [ghettolanparty.com]
Use a small m for meter. I though you meant Watts per million Kelvin for a second there.
I believe it's more commonly used in the UK than the U.S.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Hm.............
Maybe we have different ideas of "better".
These guys used sunflower oil, and a container, and it works.
A pump is overkill, and a styrofoam container is against the purpose of losing heat.
What would be just a tad cooler is a chromed or white tin container for the oil, or even an oil can, and some rubber "feet" or isolators for the
components.
[attack of the language nazi]"
Nothing is submersed. It is either submerged or not.
[/attack of the language nazi]
you don't coat yourself and your house in flame-retardant chemicals? tsk tsk
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
you don't coat yourself and your house in flame-retardant chemicals? tsk tsk
I used to, but it gets too sticky and the girlfriend says it smells.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
well, given the regularity of dupes around here, I'll go out on a limb and say as dupes go, this one is at least new to most of us.
Oh, well...I do that in place of having a girlfriend. I find the chemicals complain far less than the women-folk do.
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/hot_ water.html
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."