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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.
...and make french fries.
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I won't believe it until I see it in a respected, peer refereed scientific journal. Downplaying this extraordinary "dunked in oil" claim by saying that it didn't work won't deter me.
Of course, once the oil turns rancid, things could get interesting as well as smelly...
Would you like fries with that?
they first attempted this operation using deionized water. It worked for 5 minutes before developing short circuits
Have to say that is kinda of dumb to try... de-ionized water is a great solvent and would love nothing better then to leach ions from material it comes in contact with.
This is one of those moments that I wish I could work at a Dunkin Doughnuts. I could deep-fry doughnuts from the heat of a dual-core AMD CPU and quad-core Nvidia video card and play Quake 4 at the same time.
Not sure why you'd want to do this. The benefits (effective, silent cooling) are more than negated by the drawbacks.
For example, if you get water into the system you could fry your machine. Its not that difficult, especially if its not sealed too well. Another example being if the sealing were to catastrophically fail, you'd have 8 gallons of cooking oil that wanted out, and if you weren't at home could very well destroy the board.
Think you're going to try to take this thing to a LAN party? Good luck. Better wear one of those muscle belts to be able to lift and carry it. And better make sure those seals are extra tight. How's the buff Asian guy next to you going to feel when he and his machine are doused in cooking oil?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Do you have to change the oil and filter every 3000 programs? On the bright side, you can use to old oil to make bio-diesel!
I wonder what would happen in the case of a spark in the case. Let's say :
1. Oil burns
2. The computer is filled with oil
3. Oups.
I hate all sigs, mine included.
Did this guy take pointers from the William Shatner School of Websites?
You get like half a...
a sentence and then...
have to click Next Page...
Just because there was oil in the PC, and the CPU was cooled, it doesn't follow that the oil did the cooling. It could be that CPUs that drop in temperature exude oil or that there is some other factors that caused both the cooled CPU and the appearance of oil.
-- SIGFPE
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.
BTW, It's been awhile (decades) since thermo - if it's not obvious.
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
This is a fun solution for hobbyists, but with the current prices of oil it would be cheaper to fly in bags of ice from arctic expeditions. *ducks*
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.
When I first heard of submerging a computer in oil I Googled the web to see if anyone had successfully done it. I came across a discussion board where a high school kid wanted to use the idea of computer cooling for his science fair project. He wasn't, however, keen on destroying a perfectly good computer with oil. He asked the group if submerging the computer in ethanol would be a better choice, since it would evaporate off when he was done.
Someone in the discussion said, while the cooling properties of alcohol are well known, and his hardware would likely come clean, the possibility of fire, and probably even large explosions wouldn't make it worth while.
Good thing the kid bothered to ask first. I can only assume/hope he got the advice in time.
At Los Alamos National Lab, an early star wars prottype, the Beam aboard a rocket program launched a sub orbital sattelite that had electronic dissipating lots of heat for a short interval. Fans don't work well in space. And weight was a premium. The solution was to fill it with parafin. The parafin not only conducted the heat as a solid/liquid but it also has a phase change from solid to liquid which until the transition was 100% liquid clamped the electronics at the melting temperature of the wax. This required no circulation pumps.
Of course once it all melt then you are back to the steady state conduction of liquid parafin. But if you've ever made candles then you know that melting 8 gallons of wax on a stove burner can take a long time. If you can make that last say 12 hours--a work day-- and then let it cool down overnight you might never melt it all (or have two computers and play ping pong: one always cooling while the the other is heating).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
I decided this weekend to try and quiten my PC by following some other members lead and going down the water cooling road. The fans on my PC were really starting to drive me mad. The first thing that I did was to remove all the fans. The one on the processor and graphics card were no problem but the one in the power unit was a bugger to get out.
The most difficult part was sealing all the ventilitation openings in the PC case with silicon. I also put silicon all around the joints on the PC case. The smell of silicon was dreadful but when my wife complained I told her to be patent as it will be worth it when we have a completely silent PC.
Because I had completely sealed the PC case the only opening near top was the DVD drive. So I opened that and put the small hose I had purchased specially for the job into the DVD drive as far as it would go. With what I can only describe as great excitement and anticipation, I turned on the water. It really is amazing just how long it took before the case was complete full, and boy was it heavy. That didn't really bother me as I didn't intend to be moving the PC anyway.
The big moment had arrived so I called in my wife and mother in law (who was visiting) and I announced "prepare to hear nothing!" and flicked the switch on the socket on the wall.
Before I could even press the power button on front of the PC, with a loud bang, the whole place was plunged into darkness
I knew that it was only the tripswitch so I told my onlookers not to panic and I ran out to the hall to turn the trip switch back on. But can u believe it, it wouldn't stay on. After five attempts I decided to try unplugging the PC and would you believe...yes the trip switch stayed on. My conclusion: the PC must have in some way been causing the problem.
After about an hour of tries I finally decided to abandon the whole idea of water cooling and emptied the water out of the PC, put back in the fans (except the fan in the power unit, I had broken that one getting it out) and tried the pc AGAIN. IT STILL CAUSED THE TRIP SWTICH TO BLOW!
My PC is completely shagged thanks to stupid suggestions that I got on this forum. What the hell am I going to do now. I spent two hours last night with a hair drier inside the PC case and it still trips the switch.
Any suggestions greatly appreciated
Conor
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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.
You've got to watch the thermal range, if you're wanting to do extreme cooling OR run really hot hardware. Some of 3M's synthetic liquids are excellent for this type of project - well, they would be but only a handful of enthusiasts have ever been able to afford them.
Finally, although you only need to extract the amount of heat being put into a total emersion system, you've got to cycle through most/all of the liquid in a reasonably short period of time. You shouldn't rely on the heat simply transferring through the liquid. Besides, if you do that, some regions will be hotter than you'd like and others colder, even if the average is just fine. The average doesn't matter, because no component will see the average.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The RAM will be volatile and the ROMs are burned...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
As thousands of Slashdot users hammered the newly setup web server cooled by cooking oil the processor quickly heated up to previously unseen levels. This resulted in the server caking the cooking oil and quickly overheating as it crumbled under the /. effect.
Okay....the server is still up....but it is running a bit slow.
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
That's a pretty interesting idea. Normally when we think of phase-change cooling it's liquid to gas and vice versa, but solid to liquid phase change is certainly an option too.
What I wonder about though, is whether in a conventional (atmospheric) application, you would end up with voids in the parafin (or other material with low melting point) as it heated and cooled. Obviously this would be a bad thing and could lead to overheating of the chips. I don't know much about the physical properties of parafin -- does it expand and contract as it heats and cools? If so then it seems like it could easily form voids around the chips.
I once worked with a liquid, some sort of long-chain polymer, that had a freezing point of around 40F. If you chilled the whole thing slightly below it's freezing point, that might be able to work in much the same way. Provided of course that it's a dielectric.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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?
the lube is right there!
Pre-warmed, even.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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.'"
If I overclocked my PC do I have change it every 2 months or 1,500 miles?
Will my next Intel Inside computer come with an odometer? Stay tuned! Oil filter change recommended once a year.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
You probably don't want something too flammable, but if you can seal well enough to keep water out isopropanol is relatively nonvolatile and nontoxic, it's just that alcohols tend to absorb water. (Another option is propylene glycol, the stuff used in nontoxic marine antifreeze.) A more off the wall option is a suitable molecular weight paraffin. High quality lamp oil is almost odorless and not particularly flammable in bulk. The question really would be how fast convection currents can move in the different options.
Pining for the fjords
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).
If only it didn't conduct electricity...
There are two types of people in the world: those who divide people into two types and those who don't.
This reference states the resistivity of pure deionized water as 18M.cm. That is not non-conductive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deionized_water