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."
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
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.
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.
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.