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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."
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
Wait, wait, wait... You are linking to the original site rather than the distributed cache to PREVENT it from getting Slashdotted?
wagter connducts oil doesnt
so it sucks if you want to use the unused slots
at a later date
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.
Mineral Oil not that toxic. They used to use it for a laxative.
Unless you make a mist of it you really do not need to worry a lot about it as a respiratory hazard and the flash point is higher than the boiling point of water so the fire is not that much of a hazard. Nothing like gasoline.
What this would be really good for is a remote mesh node. Use something like an old ammo can for the case and fill it with mineral oil. The entire metal case would then act as a heat sink and the oil would protect the board from corrosion.
For a home system? Well it is kind of cool I guess.
Fluroinert? Last I heard that cost a small fortune.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
Sorry guys, I don't buy it. I've heated fish tanks larger than that, with a small heater (you know the little fish tank kind).
The ram, the CPU, the power supply.. they put out a LOT of heat, especially when taxed. As well, this oil is more dense than water. It will take longer to heat up, but it will also _retain_ heat longer as well. Water gets a lot of its cooling because of evaporation, which won't be happening to this oil..
Again, I don't buy it. I've seen others use external cooling methods for the oil. I'm quite sure he's never taxed this system.. or perhaps night time "cool down" is enough to carry him through the day...
I still don't buy that though. He probably uses it for a server or some such, after all... it's not a game machine, with a PII class CPU..
The problem with using "very pure" water is that it wants to become impure in the worst way. It's astonishingly reactive stuff.. It will suck atoms of carbon, silicon, and copper off a motherboard in its quest to become impure. And then, at some point, it starts conducting, and you're screwed.
So, you're partially right- you could use very pure water (for a very short time) until it managed to eat enough impurities to start conducting again.
You have to remember these sheets are mainly for people who work with large amounts of these materials every day. Visit a sand blasting site or a processing plant and you'll see clouds of this shit smothering everything. Sand blasting uses fine sand that becomes even smaller from hitting the surface and it forms clouds that can easily be breathed in without particulate protection. They have to write MSDS with the worst case scenarios in mind.
Look up "Latent Heat of Cooling" and then re-read your post.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
The outside coating on the wires will harden and break away after being submerged long enough
Well I'd say that just about nixes it right there. The oil might not conduct, but the insulation in those wire bundles is to keep the wires from touching each other, not just other things. Once the insulation crumbles away and the wires start to short against each other, you're going to have problems. Especially in the power supply.
I'd say the biggets problem with this is making sure the plastic in all the components is oil-compatible, i.e. doesn't degrade or dissolve. The bottoms of most shoes do, as anyone knows who stepped in a puddle of oil in a garage. So why not plastic used as structural material and insulation?
Also, loading a fan by making it spin in oil might make it use more power than normal, possibly overloading and overheating either the motor or the drive circuit, though the better cooling provided by the oil could alleviate that.
Ah, the memories... *sniff*
I don't think I'd want to buy any secondhand parts off of this guy.
For context, click Parent.