Markus Leonhardt has come up with an ingenious way to cool his computer. He
immerses the entire thing in vegetable oil:
Markus Leonhardt has taken the shortest route possible to liquid cooling.
1. throw motherboard in fish tank
2. cover in vegetable oil
3. there is no step 3
Markus has been using this system for over a year. it is quiet and is cooled by the still functional fans circulating the oil. he has swapped components and even successfully used pulled hardware in other pcs.
This just boggles my mind. Wouldn't immersing your computer in vegetable oil short circuit it, or something like that? I also would have thought it would overload the fan motors. There are
color pictures of the Oil Computer here, as well as more description, though most of it is in German. (via
Reality Carnival)
Comments
I got the idea from this site: http://64.45.45.116/index.html
1
set up a bowl with tabwater
set up a bowl with oil
2
buy yourrself a voltmeter, wires, battery, lightbulb (small one)
3
make a circuit with the bulb, voltmeter, wires and battery
4
leave two wires unconnected
close the circuit by placing the wire-ends in the water, LET THEM NOT TOUCH EACH OTHER!
5
watch your volt-meter
5b
add salt to the water (1 spoon or so), stire the water
6
step 4, but with oil
7
redo step 5
conclusion: oil does not short-circuit
conclusion 2: oil is an insulator
conclusion 3: added salt in the water = lover insulation (=higher conduction)
WARNING do not try this with ac homepower! you get killed or wounded!
your processor off your mother bord then you could cool it all sorts of ways!
1800 mhz Pentium 4
Nvidia Geforce 4 MX420 64 meg video card
256 M/bytes PC2700 DDR RAM
And a measly 6.2 gig hard drive which has just barely enough space for Windows XP Professional and some proggies like winamp and some good MP3s.
No oil yet, waiting a couple of weeks until my HS science fair to fill it up, but it looks really trippy.
dear diary,
i got high today for the first time, it was fun and then i noticed my pc was running very loudly, well of course me being high made me very irratated. so i went to the kitchen to get somethin to eat, remember im high. i grabbed random things and returned to the computer. i grabbed wat i thought was a 2 liter of soda i of course soon found out wat it was, and dropped the bottle, uh oh oils not for computers. but then i noticed it was still runing i of course thought this was entirely possible so i ran to the local walmart, literally ran. i bout a fish tank and oil, i was set for this expiriment. i put all my computer stuff in the tank except for the cd-rom drive and psu then poored in the oil the computer was still working. i thought i was a genious. now as i look back, that took a hella long time to clean up and i never did eat anything.
this was of course in german
Cheers!
2) Unless you were using an external keyboard and mouse, your keyboard would get junked up pretty fast from the oil.
3) Just because a PC is in oil doesn't mean it doesn't still need its heatsinks and fans. With a laptop, the heatsink and more specifically the fan are much weaker than those of a desktop. The fan would burn up rather quickly and you would have no circulation, causing your laptop to overheat.
4) Unless you physically removed all of the laptop casing, you would do MORE damage to your laptop than good by submerging it. Think about it, if you have a big fish tank with several gallons of oil, the heat is relatively evenly distributed, and because of the sheer amount of oil, the oil can effectively radiate that heat. If you were just submerging a laptop with its casing intact, the oil would fill the case, the heat from the components would transfer into the oil but have no way to escape efficiently, so it would continue to get hotter until the oil temperature equaled the temperatures of the compoenents, which would continue to get hotter until they burned out. Without adequate circulation, oil computers of any type, laptop or otherwise, are planned disasters.
Hope this offers some insight. If you have any questions, just write back to this board or direct any emails to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and I will help you out as best as I can. Oil PCs are great, I am typing this on one of mine right now....
in answer to the guy about putting your pc in a deepfreeze, you will have to let your pc warm up before it will work properly, if all the parts are cold they wont function right (your talking like -23 celcius) and if you acumulate frost on the parts, you will most likely destroy them when it melts, don't be a fool and ask retarded questions ok?
I'll keep you all posted tho.
Therefore, direct-immersion oil computers ist the best cooling method.
For best result use low-viscosity oil, it moves more easily by own convection. Do not use motoroil, it is too thick and not clean enough though it would work. Ask your utility for a liter or so transformer oil. It can be aggressive to your skin and eyes so be careful!
A friendlier choice is veg oil. The cheapest will do. It also is a good insulator. However, veg oils are not as stable as mineral oils. It is a good idea to change it after 6-12 months.
Dont put the computer into liquid CO2. It is so cold it can crack plastic parts and IC housing. And you definitely can't reach superconductivity, this occurs at -190 C or so and would destroy your circuitry.
A point brilliantly used in the end of the Bond movie "GoldenEye" when that Russian hacker though he was sooooo cool . . . Then the tanks burst and he _was_ 😊
Speaking of fictional approaches, has anyone else read the Ben Bova short story "Lowering The River"? An electronics engineer is put under a Management Facilitation Acountant who once read a copy of "wired" magazine and tells him to develop a room-temperature superconductor for the company in, say, a week or two. ( Deadlines are a prime management tool and always produce results.) The engineer does - By a rather lateral method.
How stupid do you have to be to think oil is conductive?
Sure this Idea works and has benn done multiple times! You would have to take off all fans you moron! 4godsSake just google!
jeeeez...!
Regarding pre-cooling the oil, I am going to set up a new system using the cooling pipes of a minifridge . I will have a high-flow aquatic pump moving the oil from the PC tank to a separate reservoir with the cooling pipes in it, and then back into the PC again. It should yield a significant temperature drop.
I, too, have considered using the cold plate from a dehumidifier, but the problem is that while one end of that cold plate produces 40ish degree coldness, the other end gets incredibly warm in doing so. You would have to find some way to effectively radiate that heat without transferring any back into the oil, which is somewhat hard to do because the cold plate would presumably be submerged in the oil and thus so would the hot side. Even if it could be designed an a way that this was not so, you still have to deal with the fact that the small cooling plate would likely not be efficient enough to dissipate more heat energy than was being generated by the PC components, whereas a mini-fridge would likely have the ability to subtract more heat energy from the oil and hopefully lower the equilibrium temperature of the oil significantly enough to make it worth it.
On that note, have you given any thought to some type of air-cooled system, where the oil is run through some type of device that drops its temperature down to ambient? I get that its not the most effective thing in the world, but I'd rather have my PC running at room temperature than 140 degrees...
'Nuff said.
High Performance Synthetic Dielectric Oil
A synthetic transparent fluorescent green dielectric fluid formulated from base chemicals so highly refined and purified that additional additives are not necessary. EDM-500's cosmetic-grade chemical formulation virtually eliminates skin irritation during use. Resists thermal degradation from high-amperage applications (withstands up to 400 amps) and offers the highest known dielectric strength of any commercially available EDM fluid. EDM-500 can be used with all types of filters; including: paper cartridge, diatomaceous earth, and edge wafer disposable cartridges.
As a deaf IT person who did electrical engineering this makes perfect sense. I would use ultra pure transformer mineral oil though.
For safety I would recommend a thermal fuse in the PSU that will trip at a temperature below the flash point of the oil.
The fans in conventional computers will destroy your hearing and are a bigger safety concern.
Hint: suspend the MB in the oil tank and have rear connectors at the top.
There are already retail oil PC's
Even a mix of oil, water and electricty I believe in the highest end model.
Which is stupid if you ask me...
An Air cooled system is cheaper and can produce the same results, just with an audible humm.
Approx 45-50dba on each High speed fan these days
These are just designed to run silently and/or OC.