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Want a Cool and Quiet PC? Dunk it in Oil
The Last Gunslinger writes "Tom's Hardware Guide has published an article (complete with video) showing how they employed their own approach to the liquid cooled computer. To offset the loss of normal airflow around their Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800Ultra, the mad scientists in the lab decided to fill the case up with 8 gallons of cooking oil. The oil temperature leveled off at a comfy 104F during benchmarking operations intended to tax both the CPU and GPU to their limits. Interestingly enough, they first attempted this operation using deionized water. It worked for 5 minutes before developing short circuits...but the hardware was amazingly undamaged." Slashdot has covered similar projects in the past but it was neat to see the differences in oil and the look at capacitance around the CPU pins.
This is not new and was probably done even before the digg article post, which was made over 180 days ago. I seem to remember coverage on slashdot or somewhere else about this being done several years ago.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
No pics left but archive.org does have a few pages achived from a guy who subsubmerged his Celeron 333 in oil back in 1999. I'm sure even earlier attempts exist...
s data.com/drffreeze/FAQ.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/19991122030011/www.acc
cause what you want on your PC is bacterium and other growing non-sense.
how about using oil especially made to cool electronics instead?
what about changing out hardware? what about leaks?
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Also, vegetable oil is a good solvent for a lot of polymers. And I imagine that there are several oil-soluble polymers on a motherboard. It might not dissolve them quickly, but it'll do it eventually.
It's not the water that damages electronics but rather the salts and other ions in the water that allow short-circuiting, and if concentrations are as high as in tap water will often leave conductive salt bridges between pins. (Washing ciruit boards in the dishwasher can be ok, though, if you know what you're doing.)
Deionized water temporarily has no ions but disolves some out of virtually anything, making it an undependable resistor. It also has a whopping dielectric constant that would be a bad idea in any case for a bath for high-frequency circuits designed to run in air.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Tranformers have used oil for a very long time for cooling. The problem with putting it in a computer case is that over time the oil would most likely work its way into the slots on any cards you have installed and cause the system to stop working. And you have the maintance problem, you want to upgrade that video card but now you have several hours job of draining the oil, removing the existing card, cleaning the slot connectors carefully, installing the new card, sealing the system up, refilling with oil, only to find out that you forgot to set the options on the card correctly, back to step one.
BTW: I saw a tranformer on a pole catch fire once. Spit oil and other stuff all over the cars below it. Very impressive.
Oil is a good (but messy) cooling solution. I think I'd prefer mineral oil for reduced possibility of microbial growth. You'd want heatslugs vertical to improve natureal convection. And I wound't trust ithe typical PCBthermisters with that much ambiient cooling.
Saturated fats are solid at room temperature and any temperture you'd want to keep the computer at (think butter, shortening, blubber).
Brake fluid (Dot5, silicone based) seems like it would be a good candidate.
Dot3 has awesome heat transfer ability, but collects water, and plays hell with paint (I imagine sensitive electronics to feel similar pain).
Silicone is a dielectric, right? How about PEG? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_glycol
We've been immersing electronics in oil for decades. Difference is, we build sonar systems, so we're doing it so the electronics can survive a high-pressure environment, and also because oil provides lots of heat sinking and you don't want to put fans and such in a sonar receiver. Like others have posted, though, it gets heavy: one of our units is only about as big as a Shuttle XPC box but weighs over 75 pounds.
I haven't seen the rancid oil problem, but we've only used a couple kinds of oil: a synthetic type (I'm told it's often used as a base for cosmetics), and castor oil. I have seen circuits change their operation when submerged (due to increased capacitance), but only once: a microprocessor reset controller changed its timing (it used a capacitor connected to a pin to determine how long to wait before letting the machine out of reset). You just have to be careful and watch for these things when designing the circuits.
Water leaks are bad, though water will tend to head down to the bottom. Our equipment is usually made to much tighter specs than any PC case, though (titanium housings and electron-beam welding, and sometimes an anti-corrosion coating). You get what you pay for.
A couple of things we deal with that your average PC builder won't: we have to forgo the use of any component with air inside it (e.g. aluminum can-type capacitors, some clock oscillator chips, really big power transistors), since they'll collapse under pressure (thousands of pounds per square inch), and we have to put a flexible window (or something similar) on one side of the enclosure because the oil volume will change with temperature.
Also... that oil gets on everything, man. No fun to work with. At least it doesn't smell too bad when you have to solder through it. But your hands feel greasy for the rest of the day, even after washing them.
I should call 3M and see if they can find me a non-conductive, inert, non-volitale chemical to submerge a PC in. I'm sure they make one.
You should. But I'll save you the trouble.
It's called 3M Fluorinert, and now that it's come up in two separate discussions in two days, I now know more about the stuff than I ever wanted to. (Great use of company time, eh?)
This is the 3M page about it, they make a bunch of different varieties for various purposes. I believe what you'd want to use on a computer is the '77' variety. (I'm told that's what the Cray II used.) 3M Fluorinert
Some people who will sell it to you in small quantities (3M wants you to buy 11 lbs.)
And here's the obligatory Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorinert
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I'm pretty sure that HDDs are air tight. Pretty sure i've read that dust in the air can wreak havoc on the platters.
I haven't prised apart a very recent drive (for the pair of nice powerful fridge magnets inside), but ISTR drives used to have a hole in the case to allow the pressure to equalise. The hole in the case was covered by a piece of felt so dust won't get in. This implies two things: one, standard model hard drives won't work in space with no fluidic effects to keep the head and disk apart, and two, immersing a drive in oil will wreck the drive as oil wicks in through the felt and buggers up the aforementioned fluidic effects.
I also STR posting a similar comment a few months back. Is this a dupe article?
It doesn't make this any less of a duplicate.
/ 11/1756259&tid=222
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
They admitted in the article that there are better kinds of oil for this kind of setup, and that one would have to clean the parts after taking them out. This was just proof of concept, I guess. I still find it pretty cool, since there are no moving parts, and it is probably "a tad" cheaper than the fanless cases Zalman sells...
But until then, it's the niftiest (if ugliest) case mod out there, at least from a technical standpoint.
if it's good enough for x-ray and broadcast transformers and particle accelerators, it's good enough for your pc. it's less likely to grow crud, very much less likely indeed to harbor water, and readily availiable.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
De-ionized water is a great non-conducting liquid, and in theory it would be a perfect bath for electronics. Unfortunately it's also a great solvent, and once particles start becoming dissolved, it becomes more and more conductive. It doesn't take a whole lot of conductivity to start arcing across solder pads with distances measured in fractions of a millimeter.
Definately not the dumbest idea I've ever heard -- making a hat out of a plastic bag, for example, would be worse.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Since we're picking nits; DOT 5.1 fluid IS DOT 5 fluid. It's just not SBBF. Related documentation appears below:
If it's DO5, then it will be further distinguished. It's all DO5.
I mean, if we're picking nits, I can pick 'em with the best of 'em.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The pcb material will swell over time. You know all those little thru vias that connect traces between the layers of the pcb? They don't stretch so good. That faint popping sound you hear is the vias seperating, and then bye-bye pcb.
A really good clue that your motherboard is dissolving/swelling is when the oil turns the color of the motherboard...
Funny how this same topic comes up regularly, and yet there seems to be no progress in forseeing the problems.
If you want a cheap way to cool a case, seal the cold coil of an AC unit into it, with internal fans to stir the cold air around.
They do nice hardware reviews but are otherwise clueless (admittedly like most of us are outside the respective areas of our individual expertise). Weren't these the same people who tried to liquid nitrogen cool a fluorinert loop for overclocking and didn't think before buying it whether the fluorinert might just freeze solid at LN2 temps (77K)? Duh. It would not matter in the least if the boards were rinsed before this was tried. Ultrapure deionized water has a theoretical resistivity of 18 MOhm/cm, pretty high yes. But add just one single part per million ionized contamination (ie. 500 MICROgrams of salt per liter (one mol NaCl dissociates into TWO mols of ions in soln!)) and your resistivity plummets to 500 KOhm/cm. In other words, conductivity skyrockets instantly as soon as the smallest mote of contamination enters the water, this of course causes a runaway effect in that the more conductive the water is the more electrolysis occurs at the metal contacts with voltage on them in the water and the more metal ions are leached into the surrounding water. I would've expected this to all occur within mere seconds of them switching the thing on and the fact that they say they got minutes of use out of it is absolutely shocking(heh). The only way this could possibly work is if the mobo were submerged in a running loop of DI water which is consistently replenished by a contaminant removal system and even then I highly doubt it because you would still get little pools where the water wouldn't be circulating fast enough and would have time to contaminate and become just normal conductive water.
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Isopropanol is too ionic. It'll behave a lot like the distilled water did in the article. Furthermore, isopropyl is very flamable (in it's pure state), is volatile, and moderately toxic. In any event, any lightweight alcohol will be highly susceptible to disolved ions and will short out your components. Minearal oil, motor oil, or other petroleum based oils would work better. Flourinert would be better because it is overkill. That's really the whole point of this application/discussion, I would think. :)
That's fully synthetic mineral oil for the hydraulic suspension, braking and steering used in Citroën, Rolls-Royce and some Audis. It's very thin, clear, bright green oil, and it's (relatively) cheap. It's also non-hygroscopic, which would be good here, and doesn't attack rubber and plastics (which is sort of the whole point, otherwise the hydraulics would pish fluid all the time).
This reference states the resistivity of pure deionized water as 18M.cm. That is not non-conductive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deionized_water