Mineral oil submerged PC test rig

http://www.driverstorer.com oil cools its first PC!

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http://www.driverstorer.com/oil-cooled-pc-test-rig/
for associated text article and high res photos.

What's in this video:

-Introduction
-Test setup
-Conductivity tests
-Arctic Silver 5/mineral oil emulsification conductivity test
-Windows installation
-Temperature readouts
-SuperPI stress test

PC Specs:
Dell Dimension 4550, P4, 1gb ram, Nvidia MSI 5200
Coolant:
Oil used: Walmart Brand Mineral Oil, U.S.P Lubricant Laxative

We've wanted to do a submersion cooling rig for quite a while now and we finally decided to get around to actually doing it. The coolant being used is mineral oil, since it is non conductive, relatively cheap, and won't harm the components on the motherboard. Mineral oil is used in industrial equipment as an electrical insulator, in things such as power pole transformers, and other high voltage equipment.

We had an old Dell dimension 4550 computer that was scheduled for execution, and we decided, why not use it to test the oil cooling, if it got fried oh well.

Oil cooling a pc has its benefits and drawbacks for sure. First, its kind of messy, you should probably take an existing system that works well and do a submersion cooling system, or on a new rig build, put it all together and get everything working perfectly. The usual swapping of components back and forth during a build should be avoided.

The oil will eventually evaporate, so you should have a system that can be completely sealed if you want to use it long term.

Fans will have to work very hard to push the oil around, in fact most fans will stall out or just twitch back and forth because there is too much resistance for it to spin. Hard drives can't be submerged because of the same problem. Solid state disks however have no moving parts.

On the other hand, the benefits could greatly outweigh the drawbacks in a properly setup system. It has the potential for completely silent cooling and many other benefits....

The project was successful, though the Dell fought us at every step. It took 2 or 3 hard drives before the dell decided it could use one, and it wouldn't even boot unless we plugged in the case fan, which on the dell case also acts as the CPU fan, there is no fan directly on the cpu cooler.

The dell also couldn't be over clocked, which cut the experiment short. Though at full load the P4 chip didn't exceed 105 degrees even when the fan was placed in a bad spot in the oil. We moved it back to a more optimal location and the temp dropped to 100. This is with no other cooling, simply the oil acting as a heat capacitor.

We also tested arctic silver 5 thermal paste in mineral oil, and the oil remains non conductive even with a rather large amount of micron size silver particles suspended in it, which is a good sign, incase there's any conductive silver thermal grease in any components that may leach out.

Since the concept worked well we decided to go ahead with the next stage, in which we will custom build an advanced submersion rig, with all the features we've come up with, and do a long term stability test using an AMD X64 3.5 ghz system with ATI 4800 graphics.

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Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• oil cooled pc
• msi
• nvidia
• ati
• amd
• dell
• cpu
• superpi
• windows
• driverstorer
• mineral oil
• oil submersion pc
• liquid cooled pc
• heatsink
• arctic silver 5

[alfredorss]

You think i could dip a whole server blade into a fish tank? its a small server blade. It might need a radiator?

[driverstorer]

@alfredorss hmmm, you would need to find the approximate heat dissipation of the blade, and compare it to that of an average 300W PC

[driverstorer]

@driverstorer and no submerged hard disks.

[JAF5537]

Can it run without the cpu heatsink on?

[driverstorer]

@JAF5537 no, there isn't enough surface area on the cpu dye to disperse the heat even in the oil. it would probably fail in a couple seconds.

[uber1337420]

Does thermal paste hold up well under mineral oil? Even though the CPU isn't attached to the heat sink, how is the GPU sink doing after running in the oil for a while?

[driverstorer]

@uber1337420

We plan on re-visiting this video in a followup and answer the rest of your questions.

[donOWNZ]

asus makes the computers for dell BITCHES...

[slicksqueegie]

Excellent demonstration gentlemen!

[liamorocks]

@chubiboi101 yeah and alienware is overpriced shit. it looks good but you could build a pc with the same specs for a quarter of the price

[bella0a]

i have a dell :(. promise you its not my idea

[chubiboi101]

love the dell jokes ahahhahahh keep it up. would change one thing though how you said you would only recommend if someone had a dell. well alienware is part of dell lol