Toms Hardware Cooking Oil Comp!!!!

Did anyone ever read this? If not here is your chance to be stuck in the face with toms hardware modding glory. Comment on what you think.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/09/strip_out_the_fans/

Yep. Crazy alright!

(by the way...)
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic41421.html

They're crazy. Read the feedback from readers they've posted. DO NOT TRY ANYTHING LIKE THIS.

If you are, do not use cooking oil, they have special oils for that (engine oil for one, I'm sure there are more specific ones).

If I can afford that much engine oil (and time to mod the casing), I might be crazy enough to do it.

Its very wild... and... I had no idea there was already a thread about it. Sorry. I don't believe I would ever try submerging a $2,000 comp in 8 gallons of vegatble oil. Thats insane. Lol. I might go with a standard water cooling system in a few months but... no more than that.

if you actually read the article they mention that motor oil is far better and less corrosive - especially if it is synthetic, however that amount of oil is expensive. At a certain point you would have to cool the oil once it heated up.

Lol, you don't really need to cool it down furthur, and if you do, just slap on some HUGE heatsinks onto the casing itself. The same types you can get from your local electronics store.... Here's from my local store:

http://www.jaycar.com.au/productVie...&pageNumber=&priceMin=&priceMax=&SUBCATID=751

Its not copper, its not beautiful, its not.... very efficient.

But for this purpose, it'll cool down that oil of yours pretty darn fast.

If the pc starts getting hot, just throw in some chips.

Not to rain on anyones parade, but that is actually an old idea, which has been floating around on the net for several years... There was an interesting discussion about which oil was the best for use due to heat-conduction, whilst being electric non-conducting...

One of the original designs used the oil to remove the problem of condensation when using Liquid Nitrogen/dry ice. It works very well, except for the fact that you can't have any drives, or the psu, in the oil.. Not to mention the problems of upgrading the system.

I seem to recall someone creating a similar case to THG's, but with a dry 5.25" bay and a special compartment for the PSU. Can't quite remember where he placed the cooling though...
Unfortunately, my interest in exotic cooling solutions died down, and I don't have any of my old bookmarks, so I can't give out links. But I think overclockers.com has one or two setups for use with oil...

Thats wild, also these extream cooling systems wouldn't help me any. My CPU (even when overclocked from 2Ghz to 2.2Ghz is Idle at 28c and under load 40c) My 6600gt is the hottest thing in my case (Idle 40c Load 50c) I would NEVER use oil to cool my system... thats to much.

Why don't people just go with liquid cooling with 3 pumps and 10 radiators.... You can liquid cool your HDDs as well. Need something for PSUs now.

Scary is all I can say. I don't think I will be doing this.

A lot of people use liquid cooling, this is just a way to go more extreme.

Liquid cooling has a nasty way of creating condensed water if you haven't insulated well enough, and if a tube comes loose you're entire rig is gone. But if you submerge the rig in oil, those problems go away

Also, the way Tom's has done it makes it noiseless, which a water cooled rig is not...

And lastly, because there are more bragging rights if you have a case full of oil, than if you have a liquid cooling system. (Unless you're running a bong cooler, or similar)

With an oil system, you can't really bring it around to LAN parties.... if its possible, its gonna be really tough bringing it over (maybe start one in your own basement??)

Therefore, limited bragging rights.

Personally don't have a watercooled rig, but I had the impression that the pump is very quiet.

Im going to buy a xeon mobo, and get some bitchen cpus, two 7900's. all OCED, and throw in some frenchfries

first of all, if you build it right... tubes don't come loose

second of all, thats why you use a non-conductive coolant... so that if your rig springs a leak, it won't damage anything.

FYI... CMH, inline pumps tend to "hum" or "whine" a bit, but a submersible pump inside a resi (my setup is a Mini-Jet660 inside a 4" plastic electrical box) is almost completely silent

Almost true... Even if you build it right, there can be something with the tube that makes it crack. But yeah.
And as you say, using a non-conductive coolant does solve that problem... Of course, it still leaves the frying cpu due to no coolant

CMH> Just because you're a computer nerd, doesn't mean you can't be strong
If you ever go to a large LAN party (or at least one with compo's for modded cases & such), you'll find that a lot of people are quite willing to build and move extreme cases.
And you don't even need to look at extreme cases. My desktop weights in excess of 13kg, with no components in it (Black Antec File server case).
So if you build a new case of plexiglass, and keep it small, then it doesn't need to be too heavy, even when filled with oil...

I think the whole point Mr G made of upgrading an oil immersed PC ruins it for me, too messy.

It would be an interesting idea to use a thermalelectric cooler (TEC) on the CPU with a decent size heatsink. My bet is the case fan would provide enough cooling acroos the heatsink. A good TEC, not even cascaded can get a deltaT of 80c nowadays. A little innovation in the mobo market so they have on-board temp control would be nice too. Then again it could be done with a PCI card.

not really... unless you have a really really cheap motherboard, it will automatically shut down the PC if the CPU overheats.

if for some reason it leaked out it's coolant (very unlikely) or the pump stopped working, then it would basically have the same effect as the fan on a heatsink failing. The CPU would heat up, reach the auto-shutdown "trigger-temp" and the mobo would shut the system down to protect the CPU.

Unlike air cooling where the load temp will typically be 5C~10C above idle temps, water cooling tends to keep the temps pretty consistant (at least in my experience with 3 watercooling setups on 3 different machines). this means that you can set the "trigger-temp" on the overheat protection to a much lower temp than it's default temp, which pretty much rules out any chance of frying the CPU.

to sum it all up... water cooling is as safe as air cooling when it's done correctly.

I personally would never try the iold tank idea. If the case cracks or springs any kind of leak... good luck cleaning that stuff up... lol

...also... this may be a stupid question (please forgive my electrical ignorance ), but one thing about the oil filled rig I don't understand is if all the other electrical/electronic components in the system can be submerged, why does the PSU have to stay dry??

The PSU has to stay dry probably because of the high voltages in there. A substance is said to be non conducting when it has a high resistance, but with enough voltage, everything is a conductor (except total vacuum I suppose, but thats technically nothing).

Either that or there's a component in there, but I'm betting its the former.

Also, if you want to submerge the PSU, you probably need to open up the PSU and place it somewhere else. Oil still heats up, and the small space within the PSU is just not enough to dissipate the heat. Not to mention you'll need to do this to remove the fans.

I didn't mean it that way. What I meant was that its going to be very messy loading a tank of oil into a car. Don't forget the oil musn't reach certain components, and removing those components (PSU for example) probably will create openings to leak oil into your car . Generally not a good thing.



Also, when I create a watercooled rig, I'm making sure I'll submerge the pump . Will probably use a fish tank pump...

OCing ability gone with the wind.