Tom's Hardware put together a DIY guide on how to implement a vegetable oil cooling system for your PC back in January and I just saw a little iptv show on it. Because it uses no fans it is silent but I wonder how well vegetable oil dissipates heat? (All they say on Tom's is that the oil reached 40C.)

Tom's Hardware guide: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/09/strip_out_the_fans/

Video with Tina Wood and Laura Foy demonstrating: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8shVDvMdo4

EDIT: Video from Tom's: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ8L1Prl6tk

Wow, that's awesome. I'd love to try something like this sometime. Sounds like it's pretty cheap, too.

Why are French fries and chicken fried in oil? Why is heat-treated metal quenched in oil? Because oil is very good at transferring heat (to the cold fries and away from the hot metal).

Water is better (which these fools actually tried to use). The difference is that oil vaporizes at a much higher temperature.





Yeah, but don't mess around with the cooking oil, do it right with PCB: http://www.epa.gov/pcb/

And the prize for worst presenter goes to...

(Who want to try the maple syrup cooled pc?)

Sweet!

the problem is that it's not 100% silent as the hard drive can't be put into oil, the HD is dust resistant but not waterproof so you'll still have it's noise :-/ you can achieve a nive passive cooling without having a such ugly thing.

the other problem is that the temperature could looks nice at beginning but if you're at full load for a long time the oil will warm up and nothing is set to cool it down. it's just like watercooling: putting water don't make temp drop, it's just a way to use a bigger radiator and water helps to slow down the temperature grow

Why don't any of the parts short out? I figured any liquid would do it, whether its thick or like water.

Think of oil as being like liquid plastic. Whether it is liquid or solid has to do with its temperature and does not change its conductive properties much.

Or look at it another way, some solids like metals conduct while others like plastics do not. So the state of a material does not determine whether it is a conductor or not.

While there can be different mechaisms for a material to conduct charge, they all are based on molecular structure or atomic composition.

to get electriv problem you need a liquid with ion inside, you can put electrical compionent in distilled water and you won't have any problem

Distilled water is not completely de-ionized. If you read the article they actually tried this and had problems.

everythings depend on quality of distillation, i already tried myself distilling: you need super clean elements to distill the water and i distilled the distilled water 3 times then i tried: put 5L of the distilled water in a recipient then you use a cable with a bulb on one side and 220v plug on the other, cut 1 of the 2 cable and put it in water and magic: no problem at all, just like you had nothing between cable. even the 30mA circuit breaker didn't react

It looks kinda danger to your PC. I wouldn't do it even it I got a chance.

I heard of this. Its kinda cool untill you want to make an upgrade. Then all your components are all oily and {censored}. I wouldnt do it.

40-odd degrees? BAH! This one gets to -61 degrees celcius. And it was posted earlier than Tom's version.

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?SCID=&CIID=26054

I meant the "distilled water" that one can buy at a grocery store. What you made obviously qualifies for what I would call "deionized water".

Yeah, I remember in one of my electronics classes in the Navy, one of our instructors asked the class if pure water was a conductor or an insulator. Of course pretty much everyone got the question wrong by saying that it was a conductor. The trick to the question was that he said "pure" water, meaning 100% H20 (deionized).

This idea sounded awesome. However, imagine having to swap out a stick of ram, or pretty much anything. It would be a mess. But it still sweet...I don't know...Maybe a server that you wanted to be really quiet and you didn't want to touch.

That server would still need to be cooled since the oil starts heating up after a while ..
Does the PSU needs to be on to of that pc or can it be in the oil too ?

Cheers

How about some Antifreeze/Coolant? The neon green stuff.

Vegge oil is a bad idea.... impurities are going to cause motherboard death before too long...

High grade industrial mineral oil... used for cooling transformers.... is what you'd rather use... like Dr. Ffreeze did with his mineral oil submersion of a 300mhz celeron A overclocked to 600+mhz in 1999....... pump running mineral oil up onto the cooling fins of an AC unit.... then dripping down into the case..... his mobo died because of condensation....

New improved method... would be to extend the tubing on the AC unit... use 2-3 times more oil..... and submerge the entire condenser side of the AC unit........

to go even colder.... you could submerge condenser in mineral oil........ run a pumping loop... and run it through a closed set of Peltiers... with heatsinks on the hot side.... then run a 2nd cooling loop over heatsinks on the cold side of the same peltiers.... (108mm peltiers would be a good idea.....) then run the mobo submerged in the first loop....... with a waterblock on the processor.... and the secondary cold loop running pumped through the water block...

That lets you run the secondary loop up to about 60 celsius (in practice, no better than 30-40c) colder than the primary loop.... if you have a high enough power AC unit... you'll be able to hit about 10c on your primary loop..... and -20 to -30c on your secondary loop......

To stop micro-water droplets and condesnsation from being a problem..... run the motherboard vertically as if it was in a tower.... with the AC unit vertically BEHIND the motherboard backplane..... and make sure the bottom of the AC unit is lower than the bottom of the motherboard.... and make sure the AC condenser has fins at the low point of the system.... angled bottom... (possibly for the heat sinked peltiers and the pumps for the secondary cooling loop)

This way if you DO get water in the system, it will hit fins on the condenser and hopefully freeze... or settle... since viscosity increases as temperature decreases.



Yeah.... you can tell I've thought about doing something like since 1999... unfortunately every time I've priced something out... you'll spend enough on cooling alone where you could just build two systems and use normal cooling.......

One system I fully priced, dimensioned drawings and everything.... involved two motherboards and the entire cooling system in a 7U rackmount case..... (8U after radiators) two AMD 760MP chipsets.... dual morgans per motherboard..... 4 gig ram per motherboard..... built in 8 port ethernet switch.... three power supplies to run the whole thing......

And the cooling STILL cost as much as the rest of the system..... when you talk about peltiers.............. the cord extenders, the copper heatsinks... the ultra-compact super high efficient AC unit.....

On the flipside, it would have been the most ultra-badass 220 pound LANparty box....... (Pair of shoulder straps and back surgery and chiropractor visits not included....)

Now... if I have the right AC unit fall into my hands some day.... I might build a P3 box just to do it out of scrap parts.....


PS: even better than mineral oil is 3M florinert... completely inert... 15 pounds per gallon.... used as artificial blood in experiments, and used by CRAY to cool the Cray2.... just don't freak out at the $700 per gallon pricetag....

I thought that only mineral oil or alcohol based substances NOT containing water were suitable. APC here in oz tried to build the fastest desktop PC by putting the PC in mineral oil.