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.

Comments

Put an Intel in there

[homerules]

...and make french fries.

What's that, boss?

[mmell]

The quarterly financials? Sure. Oh, and the software projections? You've got it.

Would you like fries with that?

Duh

[shawnce]

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.

Re:Duh

[tjebe]

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.

Re:Duh

[Fishead]

I don't know, the last place I worked at had a LASER welder that used De-ionized water flowing over the flash lamp (~400 volts) to keep the bulb at a set temperature. We would buy distilled water from the grocery store and change the water about once every 3 months. What probably made the difference though was that there was de-ionizing resin in a chamber that the water would flow through on its way to the Flash Lamp. It was really expensive if I remember correctly. I don't know much about it, but it consisted of really tiny plastic like beads about .5mm in diameter that also had to be changed at the same time as the water.

Ugh

[voice_of_all_reason]

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...

Cooling With Oil? Welcome to 1999

[ferrellcat]

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...

http://web.archive.org/web/19991122030011/www.accs data.com/drffreeze/FAQ.htm

Re:Shortening, as in

[Arhat]

So would this mean a machine cooled in such a fashion could be a Crisco Router.

Oil-filled electronics is fun!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Rancid Oil?

[Kadin2048]

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

mineral oil is what you want in there

[swschrad]

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.

Re:mineral oil is what you want in there

[scottp89]

Actually I used to use Shell DialaAX in the laser power supplies I used to build. It is mineral oil based, but it has stablizers in it that makes it last and not oxidize. The best (but most expensive) solution is 3M Flourinert. We use FC-77 at my place of business. But it's $350 for 11 lbs. (about 3/4 of a gallon).

Oil comes with some problems. It is more viscous (thicker) than FC-77, so it won't circulate or flow as well, it's a lot less dense and has a lot lower specific heat. This means that it won't cool as well.
It's also a huge mess. Everything gets covered in it. It will slowly leach through even the tiniest of cracks. Any oil that collects on the ouside of the case will attract dust and dirt. It attacks many plastic and rubber materials including most silicone sealants. I remember it causing one type of shrink tubing to expand to about 2 times it's length. Some capacitors unwrapped themselves, and I've known some people to be mildly allergic to it.

FC-77 on the other hand is beautiful to work with, (other than the cost). It's water clear, when you remove the electronics from the tank, the FC-77 evaporates away in a few minutes leaving absoultly no residue. It boils at 97 deg C. So if you have a really hot part, the boiling (phase change) takes away even more heat. It attacks almost nothing (inert). Won't stain, or mess up your carpet and is practically non-toxic. You do need to protect it from evaporation though.

Just a note on De-ionized water, anyone who ever worked with it knows it's very corrosive. It tries to bond with ions in anything it can get it's hands on. It dosn't stay deionized for very long if it's in contact with any metals.

And for those one-handed computing sessions...

[R2.0]

the lube is right there!

Pre-warmed, even.