Aquarium Full of Oil For PC Cooling 597
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."
Nothing to see here, move along. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Nothing to see here, move along. (Score:4, Funny)
Do you want fries with your websurfing?
Can we supersize it?
Re:Nothing to see here, move along. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nothing to see here, move along. (Score:3, Funny)
Or at least the guy making the fries at the local McDonalds.
Re:Nothing to see here, move along. (Score:3, Funny)
Not submerged... (Score:5, Funny)
And what about the CDROM drive eh, eh?!
Re:Not submerged... (Score:2)
Ironic.
Re:Not submerged... (Score:5, Informative)
The heads are design to fly over the platters on an air bearing so disc drives don't work in either a vacuum or in oil.
But, the holes are small and oil viscous. It might run for a while. Maybe someone with a PC-in-a-tank and an old hard drive could experiement to see how long one lasts.
Iz
Damn! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Damn! (Score:2)
Re:Damn! (Score:2)
Reported previously (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Reported previously (Score:5, Funny)
well, given the regularity of dupes around here, I'll go out on a limb and say as dupes go, this one is at least new to most of us.
Re:Reported previously (Score:4, Funny)
Long-haul Effects? (Score:4, Interesting)
Answering *these* questions would make for a much more interesting article than just "Hey, dude, I put my mobo in oil! I'm l33t!"
The problem, then and now... (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem the guy ran into six years ago was that the mineral oil seeped in between all of the connections and disrupted the flow of electrons; PCI cards, AGP card, CPU, IDE, power... everything. A stock motherboard simply won't cut it, you have to have a custom board with everything hard-wired to it to survive the submersion.
This story is a dupe because it doesn't solve the basic problem.
messy... (Score:2, Insightful)
New Headline (Score:5, Funny)
Slick! (Score:4, Funny)
Is he trying out for a new Jackass movie? (Score:4, Informative)
Did you see the parts about flammable and a respiratory hazard?
What's next? A guy who uses gasoline for liquid cooling?
May I recommend Fluorinert FC-70 [mmm.com]?
Re:Is he trying out for a new Jackass movie? (Score:5, Funny)
It makes a good laxative.
Re:Is he trying out for a new Jackass movie? (Score:4, Informative)
In that one, it said the stuff cost over $1k/gal.
Flourinert and F-5 Radars (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Flourinert and F-5 Radars (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is he trying out for a new Jackass movie? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is he trying out for a new Jackass movie? (Score:2)
Try RTFA
Re:Is he trying out for a new Jackass movie? (Score:5, Informative)
The forum still works, and he tells even in english how it works.
Here is the forum:
http://www.markusleonhardt.de/forum/viewforum.php
Re:Is he trying out for a new Jackass movie? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Is he trying out for a new Jackass movie? (Score:3, Informative)
Many laxatives have their laxative effect due to toxicity. The laxative effect generally comes at a lower dose than the dose required to cause serious and irreversible damage. In fact cyanides (in low doses) has been used as a laxative, and I wouldn't call those non toxic!
Re:Is he trying out for a new Jackass movie? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is he trying out for a new Jackass movie? (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdotted - Catch Fire (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Is he trying out for a new Jackass movie? (Score:2)
Apparently people should only play on the beach in positive pressure respiration equipment, and sand pits for kids; what are you nuts? :-)
Whilst silicosis is a real disease, and lots of people have actually died of ethanol toxicity, I'm not entirely sure that somebody isn't having a laugh at us when I read these sheets.
Where does the heat go? (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess he uses it for an hour, then the oil becomes the same temp as the cpu.. and then shuts it off? Since he says that the forum isn't in english, I didn't bother to check.
However, nothing is visible in his pics...
I'd say that the only reason this hasn't gone *boom*, is because it looks like a PII or Celeron (Slot 1 card).. and he hasn't really pushed it for long periods of time.
Re:Where does the heat go? (Score:5, Informative)
Except that the fans are still on, which supposedly moves the oil around. And when oil at the surface becomes warmer than room temperature, the heat is disappated into the air, with much greater surface area than is touching the heat source.
Re:Where does the heat go? (Score:2)
Apparently it's been running for a year or so to date... (supposedly)
e.
Re:Where does the heat go? (Score:2)
Re:Where does the heat go? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 t
Re:Where does the heat go? (Score:5, Informative)
However, This site [about.com] suggests a 75 watt heater to keep a 20 gallon tank 18 degrees F above room temperature, or a 150 watt heater for 36 degrees F.
The computer probably puts out less than 150 watts total. Even assuming an 80 degree F room, that would put the computer at 116 degrees F, which wouldn't upset the computer at all. Granted, the heater you put in a fish tank has a thermostat, and so it's not on all the time, but your computer will not have any problems at 116 degrees F inside, and could go a good deal higher safely.
But I do agree with the other guy to respond to your post -- I don't see the fans even turning, let alone turning enough to move the oil around. Perhaps if they were cut down some ...
Of course, I have no idea how well heat flows through oil, or how well it's transferred from oil to the air. But I imagine that the heat generated is low enough for it to not be a problem.
Re:Where does the heat go? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's probably moot because that's a ton of cooling surface area.
Re:Where does the heat go? (Score:5, Informative)
A large surface area (e.g., the sides and top of the acquarium) makes an efficient device for convective heat transfer to the room air. The mineral oil would certainly get warmer than the room air, but it would stay well below the temp of the PC components.
Given sufficient motivation, the steady state value can be calculated within a fraction of a degree. Lacking that motivation, however, a reasonable approximation is that the acquarium would be less than 10C above room temp.
These PC cooling tall tales are getting absurd (Score:2, Funny)
- PC kept lifted to tropopause to take advantage of constant -55C temperatures
- Armies of hamsters enslaved to turn multi-stage centrifugal fans
- PC strapped onto hood of 67 Camaro driven down freeway to maximize airflow
it's not mineral oil (Score:2)
Glycerin (Score:4, Interesting)
Whatever floats your.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Whatever floats your.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow... (Score:2)
I must not drink enough when I'm near a fishtank of mineral oil...
--LWM
A Slashdot Favorite (Score:2)
Maybe we should hold competitions to see who can make the best mineral oil cooled machine?
I'm tempted to make a dry-ice cooled block (dehumidified of course and allowing for temperature gradients...)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
To quote Fark (Score:3, Interesting)
There's not even a Google cache of the site. Oopsie.
For the curious, here's someone else [s3help.com] who had a similar idea.
obligatory - /.ed (Score:2)
its interesting (Score:2)
This would work great until the oil reached a temperature similar to the max temp for the CPU.
Now if he added a little fountain or a bubbler, or something, that would increase the surface area and thus increase the cooling.
Now if he added little neon lights, some racing stripes, and some anime stickers, we could get some of the les
Other advantages (Score:2)
-> Useful as a laxative (though this guy probably won't need this when he sees the bill from his provider)
-> Lubricant (what nerd doesn't need that)
-> Good for soothing baby's chapped bottom
A few notes... (Score:5, Informative)
I did this for a year or so using mineral oil, a plastic storage tub and a small dorm-sized fridge. I had a small electric pump that pumped mineral oil into tubing which was coiled inside the fridge (drilled and in and out hole on the side) and then back into the resevoir. I was a little worried about condensation but it ran fine for over a year before I got tired of the clutter and mess of it. I could have done it better but I didn't want to spend any money on it and just use what I had laying around.
It was mostly for fun with a few interesting things I learned from it:
* It allowed me to overclock about 30% more than I could previously squeeze out.
* The mineral oil did not harm the hardware at all that I can tell from a year of being submerged(it just was a pain to clean).
* If you have your resevoir higher than your mouse then your mouse will be full of oil in a few weeks (same goes for any component connected by wire I imagine).
* The only component I found that could not be submerged was a hard drive.
* The outside coating on the wires will harden and break away after being submerged long enough(but they will still work).
* There was no connection issues with PCI cards or any peripheral device that was plugged in even if they were coated in mineral oil(even jumpers could be changed while it was submerged).
* If a drop of some other liquid (that is lighter than the oil) accidently falls into the resevoir it will quickly be coated by the mineral oil and slowly fall to the bottom and can be sucked out (phew!)
Probably more but those were the most interesting things I remember of it.
Re:A few notes... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:A few notes... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A few notes... (Score:3, Funny)
Should have used extra virgin olive oil. Added lots of anchovies, some garlic and half a pound of butter.
mmmmmmm bana cauda....
Mr. Garibaldi would be proud.
Re:A few notes... (Score:5, Funny)
Considering the likely type of person who enjoys overclocking systems in tubs of oil, using "extra virgin" oil would just be redundant.
Re:A few notes... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm tryin' to figure out why a drop of anything ligher than mineral oil would sink to the bottom instead of floating on the top.
PC lava lamp (Score:3, Interesting)
it would show/highlight the oil currents/flow by the fans (that are still turning, BTW)
whoah
Canned air not recommended for cleaning... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:5, Informative)
Why wouldn't they? Oil doesn't conduct. That's why it's used for cooling in electrical devices such as transformers, dummy-loads and such. I recall one vendor who demonstrated the high breakdown voltage of their oil by running a TV set in a vat of the stuff. Almost anything has better heat removal ability than air and for silent running it's not a bad idea.
There is still the problem of removing the heat. If there is enough surface area to allow the heat to be removed then you are ok, otherwise the oil (and everything else) will get too hot. Encasing everything in a metal box with fins on the outside would probably keep things even cooler.
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:5, Funny)
then you could always make some killer fries by overclocking. i see no prob w/ that.
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:5, Interesting)
Oil isn't even necessarily the best material to do this -- it's probably just the cheapest and easiest for a hobbiest to get hold of.
Liquid Fluorocarbon [wikipedia.org] does an excellent job. The Ontario Science Centre used to have a great display of an operating television completely submurged in a small vat of the stuff. And fluorocarbon is effectively a plastic itself, and thus is harmless to plastics (unlike many oils).
Yaz.
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:3, Insightful)
What about the boots? (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you have to keep the cards perfectly still to keep a strong contact?
Can you swap cards in the tank?
Can you adjust a connection (USB) while the machine is on?
I looked in the forums and nobody mentions this in english. Just stuff like "bloody brilliant"..
Re:What about the boots? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't see why USB and card swaps wouldn't work. Unless the stuff is extremely thick, it wouldn't make any difference.
If he was a real man though, he'd immerse his CD drive and HD inside too
N.
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:5, Informative)
No, because the trace impedance is set by the dialectric between the layers in the motherboard - it's the dialectric constant of the PCB material combined with the spacing between the trace and the plane beneath it, along with the trace width. Whatever is above the trace, in terms of what would normally be free air, makes virtually no difference, particularly since the motherboards already have a conformal coating with a fixed dialectric constant anyway.
But there are probably plenty of other reasons why vegetable oil isn't so great for your computer.
-h-
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:3, Informative)
Big fans not a bad idea (Score:4, Interesting)
That is actually a good idea that really would make cooling more efficient. Larger fans can move as much or more volumes of air at slower RPMs than smaller fans. Lower RPMs means less wear on bearings and quieter operation.
IIRC that is the strategy used in the new BTX form factor cases--the heat sync on the CPU is really big with a lot of fins and a big fan that draws air through those fins and over the motherboard (to cool the chipset). Current ATX setups are most often laid out poorly for cooling, and you end up seeing high-end systems with 3 or more fans in the case. It is the need for multiple small fans that makes these PCs noisy, not the fact that they require fans at all.
I still think it would be great to see the return of the days when chips and power supplies ran cool enough to allow for practical convection cooling. My fanless Atari ST was blissfully quiet--even the comparable IBM ATs of the day that only had a single fan in the power supply were horribly loud next to it.
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:3, Funny)
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:4, Informative)
for any non-trivial power dissipation a heatsink with a fan is a far better bet on all of those criteria than a passive heatsink
while some heat leaves a heatsink by radiation a lot goes by conduction into the surrounding air. Whilst that air will move away by convection to some extent this isn't exactly a fast process especially in confined spaces like a computer case.
fans make the airflow both significantly faster and more predicatable.
the only real problem with fan cooling in such applications is noise.
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:4, Informative)
As for fan noise, most HSF have this flaw in common: they place the fan immediately on the heatsink. Every time a blade crosses a fin, this messes up the airflow, generating noise and pressure losses which reduce effectiveness/airflow. Another common issue with typical HSF is that because the fan is directly on top, the heatsink's center is an air flow dead-zone.
I have not seen them for myself but Intel's orb-like P4 HSF and their BTX reference design seem like good examples of proper designs, they both provide some clearance and avoid dead-zones.
Image mirror (Score:2, Interesting)
I've got a mirror of the images building here [lerfjhax.com]. The server is dying quickly, but I should be able to complete the collection.
Dielectric constant & high speed circuits (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I'd be more worried about the high-speed circuits in the machine. Oil does not conduct electricity, but that doesn't mean its electronically equivalent to air.
Oil has a dielectric constant of between 2 and 3 (depends on the oil) and that will affect the capacitance on and between the traces of the circuit-board. The signals will run a little slower on the board and have a bit more cross-talk. Its probably not a big deal -- the materials in the circuit board have a bigger effect -- but it could slow the signals enough to reduce reliability in a marginal design.
Re:Dielectric constant & high speed circuits (Score:5, Funny)
Very similar (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.octools.com/index.cgi?caller=articles/
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:5, Interesting)
The Good Eats episode on How To Thaw A Turkey did a great job of explaining that in layman's terms:
Cool running water melts a ice cube duck faster than a pot of water removed from the stove just as it started to boil.
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:5, Informative)
Its that density that has alot to do with it: more mass for it to offload the heat into per area vs. the air. Even if the fans were left off, oil is a much more effecient conductor of heat than air. To get straight to the point, the thermal conductivity (ie: how well it conducts heat) of air is 0.024Watts per Meter*degree Kelvin, vs that of Oil (machine oil in this case, but mineral will be on the same order of magnitude) at 0.15W/MK. Water would be better if it didn't tend to let the electrons go wherever they wanted, its conductivity is 0.58. The area of hot surfaces on the computer that are exposed is the same, since this is total emersion, and so long as the oil is moving enough to distribute the heat, the ammount of oil in the container is enough to serve as a decent heat sink, and the large surface areas of the top of the oil and sides of the aquarium would be sufficient for distributing that heat for the air to convect away.
How much heat this would work for would require thermo equations on the surface area of the exposed tank surfaces using convection (q=hA(dt)). h is the thermal transfer coefficient, and depends on velocity, density, geometry, flow pattern and a few other things, and since Im lazy Ill leave that as an exercize to the reader. Once you find h though (and for a flat plate like the aquarium walls and oil/air surface is, it should be easy), calculating the saturation point is simple.
been too long since I touched thermo...
tm
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, here is some nifty stuff from 3M:
Fluorinert [3m.com].
Re:In case of slashdotting (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
so it sucks if you want to use the unused slots
at a later date
Re:Wow (Score:2)
so it sucks if you want to use the unused slots
at a later date"
Actually, according to a post in his english forum, he's put in/replaced cards before with no ill-effect (supposedly). he's even removed a ram stick and put it in a non-submerged PC (although that's less of a feat)
*shrug*
rampy
Water isn't conductive! (Score:5, Informative)
The US Navy was using water cooled computers long ago. Just flooded all the circuit cards with distilled water.
Note that you have to do this with pure water. If you dissolve much of anything in it, then the SOLUTION begins to conduct.
Most of the water you come into daily contact with (puddles, rivers, flooded basements, even tap water) has quite a bit dissovled into it, which is why generally electricity and "water" don't mix.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
This has been done before. Interestingly, some projects have looked to it for outdoor computer use (stationary) due to the water-repellant properties of many oils.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Oh wait...
-
Re:Wow (Score:3, Informative)
The oil will certainly be more difficult on the fans, im not sure if it has any corrosive effect.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
It's been done, it works (Score:5, Insightful)
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/03/16/2023221.sht
As everybody says here: nothing [new] to see here, move along.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Funny)
Can we do the same thing with water instead?
So *YOUR* the reason my Hairdryer has that warning label saying "Do not use while taking a shower". Wow, i thought you people were a Myth. =)
The Universal Solvent (Score:3, Insightful)
You might want to do a Google search on this term and see what is considered the "universal solvent".
Re:Interesting (Score:2)
The actual thermodynamics involved are a little trickier than that, since the motion of the fluid changes the transfer characteristics. Moving air can be 5 or more times more efficient at moving heat than non-moving air.
You could use distilled water an
Re:This is cooler - how? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:why not sink the HD too? (Score:3, Interesting)