Scratch Build – In Progress The Mineral Oil PC - 3/24/2011 - More leaks :(

Yup, I just picked it up today. I got lucky--mine smells like gasoline. >_< They didn't like my 55 gallon drum so they were like "You can have one of our old ones" and gave me one labeled "race fuel." Which I find mildly scary, hehe. The best part is they told me if I needed more to just give them a call.

I submersed a PSU and a few fans and they've been running like champs for about 7 hours as of this post. Guess the only thing left in there was the fumes. Mine isn't quite as clear as yours though. (At last how it looks in the photos) It's a sickly yellow--almost like fresh synthetic motor oil.

Now I just need to finish building the lid and figure out how to mount all this crap.


I should actually start taking pictures and like...blog it or something.

 

Well, I just registered to keep up with this topic lol! I am thinking about doing my own oil rig in the future and I'm anxious to see if you can get that GPU up to 4GHz with adequate flow from a fan...

 

I just realised the front of case LCD is missing from the latest rounds of pics. What happened to it?

 

Windows 7 didn't like it. Since there were no DDC pins, I had to configure it manually. Every time I changed my monitor configuration something went wrong with it. I eventually gave up and sold it. I've been meaning to replace it with a LCD picture frame or something.

 

So apparently the ATI stock fans on the 5850 have some sort of rubber/PVC in them. I watched my 5850 fans slowly die over the course of a month or two. They worked great for a while, then slowed down, and then completely stopped. Even when they didn't work at all, I could keep the machine on as long as I didn't run any 3d applications.

Since they're non replaceable, I acquired 2 Prolimatech MK13s and 3 ridiculous 120mm Delta fans.




It was interesting to see if all of my thermal paste was still there without the silicone seals. Most of it seems to have survived. The mess you see is from after I removed the HSF.


Also weird was this. The cable shielding was completely dissolved by the oil.


But only on 1 of the cards!


My new coolers.


I scraped off the thermal tape (tape doesn't fair well in oil) Then I put a dab of TIM in the middle of each chip and a dot of super glue to keep the ram sinks on. I've used super glue in oil in the past and it has worked great.






Both cards ready to go.






Installed and running!


Temps are great on the primary card. For some reason, the secondary card was hitting ~135C after only 1-2 seconds of furmark, I'm thinking either GPUz is lying or I need to reseat the HSF. I'll see if a reboot fixes it some time.

That's all for now. Hopefully there will be a nice update in a month or so

 

You have some balls dunking those 5850s in oil

Love this project i would like to say i would do it myself but im too much of a chicken

 

Temps should be much better then the stock coolers with those bad boys bolted on. If you are having temp inconsistencies I would recommend re-seating the cooler. It's unusual that it's the second card that's hotter, I would have thought the first card would have been because it initializes the crossfire process.

 

Is it possible that the card with the dissolved shielding is the one that is getting the hottest? Maybe the oil around that card is getting way hotter than around the other card and that caused the rubber to dissolve quickly.

 

Could the fan be giving reduced flow to the second card?

 

That's the plan, sir I just hate opening the case because it makes the entire 2nd floor of the house smell like oil for days.

I'm not sure. My best guess was that the two cards used 2 different types of plastic. The oil should never get anywhere near hot enough to melt it.

Probably, but I think the main cause is bad mounting. I jostled one of the coolers a lot during the installation process. The holding plate didn't really seem to get tight enough for my liking, I might have to jury-rig something to make it tighter.

Thanks guys!

 

Every time I see this thread I feel the urge to build a fluorinert submerged pc...
But I could never afford that kind of thing so I Just watch

 

Pick up some cheap/used hardware to play with, then after you're done playing, make it into a media center or fold with it


BTW super sweet project

 

Flourinert costs like $1000/gallon

 

Hey,

I just built my own mineral oil submerged PC and I've been using your shining example as a guide for my project. I had the same heat problems you did, thinking the same idea that the oil would act as a TIM. Quickly found out that was wrong. But I fixed that by adding a dab of Arctic Silver to both GPUs and the CPU. It's only been like that for a couple of days and I haven't noticed my oil getting murky or anything. Wondering if the thermal paste on your GPUs are still doing their job since it's been submerged longer than mine...

Anyways, my real question has to do with my radiator, which seems to be busted. I've never had one before so I don't really know much about why this happened. To me, it seems like the oil got too hot and then preceded to melt part of my radiator, probably because the oil never cooled because the intake and outake where right next to each other in the oil (oops)... Though I can't really be sure that's the case. On the back side of the radiator (the face without the fans screwed on), has portions that seem really warped. The funny thing is, I never noticed any leaks, but it doesn't look normal at all. It looked fine when I got it. The radiator I have is the 'Black Ice GT Stealth 240 XFlow Highest Performance Radiator'. Not sure if it was a wise decision to get this one. I was wondering what was recommended for cooling down mineral oil and preventing this problem from happening in the future. One thing to note is that I have 15 gallons of oil in this beast. Unfortunately, due to my poor planning and this is my first DIY project ever (besides your good old fashioned air cooled PC), I made the case too big. So any ideas how I can keep my PC cool instead of only being able to play games for a few hours before the oil gets too hot?

Came here because the job you did, legoman666, is so sleek and professional looking I figured you would be the right person to ask.

TLDR: My radiator is busted (probably from partial melting) and I'm wondering what would be a good replacement to use to cool down 15 gallons of mineral oil.

 

Always glad to see more people take the plunge I'm having more heat problems with my GPUs; the shim on the back of the mounting bracket is made out of PVC. It's becoming soft and decreasing the pressure on the GPUs. Agggg. I intend on replacing them with wood soon. As for the TIM, it all dissolved after I put the new GPU heatsinks on. The TIM that came with the heatsinks must have been really oil soluble. I replaced it with arctic silver alumina and haven't had any problems.

As for the radiator, can you post some pics? Remember that the amount of oil doesn't matter with respect to cooling power. More oil just means that it'll take longer to get up to temperature than having less oil. If you want to talk, I'm generally available on gtalk at legoman666 at gmail dot com.

 

Glad to hear the arctic silver is working. Looks look like you'll have the joy of taking parts out of the oil. It's always a messy situation; at least for me anyways.

I noticed that the oil at the bottom of the tank never really heated up either, which makes sense considering all the parts are there and the heat doesn't really have any other place to rise within the oil. I've also been in contact with Puget Systems, who experimented with an oil submerged PC. They told me they used my radiator for water cooling in the past with good results but never with oil. They said they used a more robust radiator:

http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=21621

Looks nice, but pricey. Unfortunately, I'm at work at the moment so I cannot get pictures. I'll get them up when I come home tonight so you can see the damage as well as see my overall setup.

 

Ahaha, I hate taking the PC out of the oil. My room ends up smelling like oil for a few days (and oil invariably gets everywhere). You might consider putting a high powered fan or 2 in there to circulate the oil.

As long as the radiator is metal, I don't think anything else matters. Just make sure you have enough cooling capacity for your entire setup. With 2 5850s and an i7 820, my PC pulls over 600W at full load (furmark), which is a lot for 2 radiators. Just remember that almost every watt pulled from the wall is going to end up in the oil and you'll need to get rid of it. More oil does not equal more cooling capacity.

I'd love to see a work log if you kept one Always interested in seeing how others made their oil machines.

 

I didn't really keep a project log (next DIY project I definitely will), but I can show you some pictures of the build process that I took. Should give you an idea.

I built my concept to scale in a 3D modeling program:


Since I never worked with acrylic before, I decided to get some scraps to practice:


Here's an image before I cemented the panels together:


Cementing the first piece:


Filling it with oil:


Some pictures of the finished case:




Here's a picture of the radiator to give you an idea of the damage. Unfortunately it's the best picture I good take with this camera:


So there you have it. I want to keep a more detailed log next time I build something. I've learned a lot from this project and it was both a lot of fun and frustrating at the same time. I'm definitely thinking about getting some fans to circulate the oil. It seems like it would be a waste of all that cool oil in the bottom if I didn't circulate it some how.

As for the radiator, not sure what to think besides that it got damaged somehow...

Edit: So I ended up getting the same radiator as the Puget System's aquarium PC. It works great. The temperature of the oil now stays nice and even throughout. It hovers just bellow 100F after running prime95 for several hours. I think I'm going to add some more oil so the CPU and GPU heatsinks are more submerged and get some high powered fans to circulate some of the cool oil at the bottom of the case to improve temperatures even more.

 

I was featured in Custom PC Magazine! Check out the top line of issue 84: http://www.bit-tech.net/latestissue/

 

Wow! Grats!