News The Mineral Oil PC

Are the fans on the heatsinks truly necessary? i would have thought convection would take over from the need to force oil through them

 

I admire your optimism...

 

is there health effects from the evaporation of the chemicals?

 

Amazing machine and it looks great. Not even going to pretend I'd have the patience to do that. Nice one.

It is a pity about the pump but if you do ever feel the need to open it up and change that tube would raising the pump up a cm or 2 on a piece of plexi not help with the angle?

Also have you considered putting longer aluminium sections on the top cover? I think it would look cleaner if you couldn't see the level the oil stops at through the plexi but that may just be me.

 

theft deterrent xD

 

Nicely done Andrew & congrats getting featured , I just flicked through the pictures for now, I'll definately read it later.

 

"Tapping all 220 holes through solid 3/4in bar"
Sheesh, thats a nightmare amount of tapping to do on solid bar "I now twitch when I hear the word “tap”" I'll bet .

Nice use of draw rails for lifting the board out .

Beefy specs too, didn't catch anything about temps though, are they just passable/ok/good/excellent, anyway the end piece looks awesome mate .
But really how messy are parts when taken out, bet that part is a nightmare .

 

I didnt read it just looked at the pics but how much does this thing weight?

 

Yes, even though liquids convect (is that a verb? it is now) more than gasses, the fans are needed to push more oil over the heatsink in order to remove the heat faster. Additionally, they help circulate the oil throughout the tank so that the temperature is the same everywhere.

No , it's just oil.

112lbs!

Thanks everyone!

 

Are they necessary? Possibly not, but they do help. It's like saying that since natural convection can transfer heat in passively cooled aircooling you don't need a fan (can be done, just not with a high power cpu). In this case, your fluid is mineral oil in place of air, but you still see better cooling from forcing oil through the heatsink. If you care, I could go into tons of details and equations (I'm a mechanical engineer, and wrote papers on heat transfer at one point), but I doubt anyone really cares .

 

wow 112lbs eek lol 20 more pounds and it weighs as much as me lol.

 

What happened to the LED case feet, I can't see them in any of the final pics. Also Could you post a video of the oil in motion?

 

Is there any way to find out if any of my PC components have PVC parts? What are your temperatures like, how do they compare to a normal watercooling rig. I'm stuck between trying a mineral oil PC or shelling out for the chiller reviewed here a few weeks ago. Each has there pos and neg points.

 

By the way, do you know this:
http://www.pugetsystems.com/aquarium-computer.php

 

I would have had the case welded and not bothered with acrylic, also using copper pipes would have alleviated the pvc tube problems. Excellent idea though

 

Oil be damned...damned fine work young man.

 

I never actually wired them up. It would require me to bring a 3.3v line from the PSU to the LED lead. I've just never worked up the will to do it. I've done it when the case was empty though:

Not really. Its safe to say that most don't have PVC, but you might find a part with the same brand capacitors as my old motherboard. However, that's the only component I've used that I've had problems with.

Temps:

Oil temp after several hours of full load.



CPU hovers around 55C under full load. Regular load/idle is 35C.

Thanks sir and thanks to everyone for all of the praise. It's nice to see all of my hard work appreciated

 

This is pretty cool!

Every time i view the pics i wanna see some little fishes swimming around in there. even if they are fake fishes I still wanna see them.

AWESOME JOB!!

 

I don't really think fish find mineral oil to be a natural environment for them to swim around in.

I agree though; awesome job.

 

I have a few noob questions!

This submersion method of cooling (open system). How is it more effective than a closed loop of tubes (closed system)? Normally I would think that a closed system would be more effective at removing heat rather than having all the coolant floating around and randomly getting sucked back into the radiator. I have never looked into anything about liquid cooling before so please don't flame me >.<

Also, it would've been cool if you had put in some extra space around the edges of the case so you could fill it with water and put some fish in (make it look like there's fish swimming around in the case). But then you'd have to worry about a filter system for the fish and cleaning the tank so maybe it wouldn't be that cool .