Want a Cool and Quiet PC? Dunk it in Oil 402
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.
Not new (Score:3, Informative)
Cooling With Oil? Welcome to 1999 (Score:5, Informative)
http://web.archive.org/web/19991122030011/www.acc
Re:Put an Intel in there (Score:3, Informative)
how about using oil especially made to cool electronics instead?
what about changing out hardware? what about leaks?
Re:Duh (Score:5, Informative)
Note on water damage to electronics (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Transformers have used oil... (Score:5, Informative)
BTW: I saw a tranformer on a pole catch fire once. Spit oil and other stuff all over the cars below it. Very impressive.
Reionionized water & bacteria (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Transformers have used oil... (Score:2, Informative)
So did the Heathkit dummy load. A 1 gallon paint can to be precise. It used an SO-239 connector gasketed to the top.
With the proper gasket and connectors this will work well. Actually I might suggest a vertical Pelikan case not too different looking from an ammo case. As for fires that is generally 20 year old oil in overloaded transformers. So when was the last time you fired up your Apple II ? Just do not use cooking oil!
Re:Rancid Oil? (Score:1, Informative)
Dot 5 Brake Fluid (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
Oil-filled electronics is fun! (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [3m.com]
Some people [parallax-tech.com] 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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:Not new (Score:3, Informative)
And yes, slashdot definitely had articles about oil cooling PC's predating 180 days ago.
Here's one from 05/05
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05
Still, I'm guessing that this article has techniques of particular interest. Their main emphasis seems to be on a more self-contained refined design.
Seems worthy enough of a slashdot story to me. Nothing says that only the first attempt at doing something is newsworthy.
Re:What about the hard drive? (Score:1, Informative)
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?
Just because 9 months have gone by... (Score:3, Informative)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05
Re:Put an Intel in there (Score:2, Informative)
Hard Drives aren't completely sealed (Score:2, Informative)
But until then, it's the niftiest (if ugliest) case mod out there, at least from a technical standpoint.
mineral oil is what you want in there (Score:5, Informative)
Deionized water... (Score:3, Informative)
Definately not the dumbest idea I've ever heard -- making a hat out of a plastic bag, for example, would be worse.
Re:Motor Oil... Use Jet Turbine Oil instead!!! (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Duh (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Duh (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Very expensive overkill (Score:2, Informative)
Or LHM (Score:3, Informative)
Re:mineral oil is what you want in there (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:mineral oil is what you want in there (Score:3, Informative)
Highly inert though they are, fluorocarbon liquids can damage teflon and other fluorocarbon plastics and rubbers, as well as many epoxies. This isn't as dramatic as acetone on acryllic, but teflon will swell and soften dramatically, while rubber will stiffen. Epoxies may become soften and lose grip on some surfaces.
This isn't an insurmountable problem. But given the prevalence of teflon as an electrical insulator, and of epoxy for bonding, potting and encapsulation, it seems a likely one. Add in the fact that you're buying components — motherboard, RAM, graphics card, PSU — from many different vendors, and the fact that the designers of those components weren't planning on having them dumped into a bucket of refrigerant, and it becomes a more uncertain question.
I'm not saying your computer will fall apart. Fluorocarbon liquids are often used to clean circuit boards during manufacturing, so they can't be all bad. But it's simply not guaranteed that pouring refrigerant into your case is safe, and there are reasons that mineral oil or highly refined vegetable oil could be a safer choice.
Re:Oh No! Not de-ionized water... (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deionized_water [wikipedia.org]