Cooling Non-Submersion Mineral Oil Coolant

We should start a list of random readily available liquids to compare against each other in a loop

 

Has anyone tried coffee?

Back in my noob days I used tap water and redline water wetter. Surprising my tubes didn't dissolve.

 

amazing you have rep.

 

Redline water wetter was a pretty standard additive for water cooling back in the day. Made your tubes a bit opaque, but didn't eat them.

I have a dual Opteron setup watercooled in a Midi tower. Plenty of space.

And if you want inert, non-conductive and effective coolant try Fluorinert. The king of coolants. I can highly recommend it.

 

That looks like an interesting coolant, although certainly not cheap I need to look into that, I've been looking for a high performing inert liquid as part of my plans for a multi-computer loop.

One of the first search returns on Google for Fluorinert shows a fully submerged system in Fluorinert, with the liquid cooled by liquid nitrogen! Looks like a great experiment (although not too practical with the cost of Fluorinert combined with the cost of LN2).

 

Redline was supposedly bad for pumps but I never had issues with it. It used to crystalize in air.

Never tried flourinert for reasons of cost.

I had some Thermochill EC6 leak onto GPU power transistor because I didn't tighten a nozzle properly. The GPU didn't even notice.

Also had some spray out over PSU and power connections when I was careless again. Again no issues whatsoever.

 

That's good, because most 'non-conductive' coolants will short out a PSU (given that it contains higher voltages than the rest of the PC).

Fluorinert costs about £70,-- a pint. Not cheap but it lasts a lifetime. Given that most people think nothing of paying £300,-- for a GPU that needs upgrading 3 years later I think that is good value.

 

I vote for Vodka.

 

Yes, Feser for example. The UV Feser coolant will kill parts if it leaks out. It has 10 x more conductivity than their non-uv bi-distilled water.

 

thanks to all who checked this out. i too had known the mineral oil would perform worse than water, the experiment was just to see how badly it would do. i never imagined it would barely beat out a stock intel heatsink

anything you have to mix with water would kind of negate any non-conductive and anti-corrosive properties.

thats very possible. the little pump was really struggling with the mineral oil and flow was down to barely a trickle.

the case is an old dell dimension 3000. the motherboard, cpu, and psu are out of an HP pavilion. i suppose if you cut a whole in the side panel you could put the 240 rad in it, but, its really not that attractive of a case...

probably a little of both. the oil does not readily exchange heat at the CPU block or at the rad and the pump cannot pump the more viscous liquid nearly as quickly as it can water. in my research, ~1gpm seems to be the magical tip-over point where good cooling starts. anything below that is inefficient and anything above that has a minimal improvement on cooling. im relatively certain this was well under that 1gpm mark. probably closer to .5, maybe less.

 

- Rep if I could.

 

So a couple of D5 pumps might actually be able to yield some interesting results? Although the pumps might actually overheat from pumping such a sludge-like material around a loop.

 

Or how bout just use the 2 pumps with lower viscosity coolant?

Was thinking of buying a second EK DCP 4 and having push/pull. Maybe this week.

 

possibly, although i dont have any other pumps to experiment with at the moment. however, i could slow my current pump down with water in the loop to achieve a flow more like i had with the mineral oil, then compare the results....hmmm....good thing i didnt tear that rig down yet

 

3M has a replacement for Fluorinert now, called Novac. Cheaper and better, and still dielectric.

If you want other nonconductive choices, try Midel 7131. Transformer oil, but rather better than simple mineral oil.

There's no reason NOT to experiment. You guys should see some of the coolants in use here.

 

yep, but it also readily leaches free ions from the atmosphere, its container, your loop, and pretty much anything else it comes into contact with. in other words: it doesnt stay non-conductive for long, even in a closed system.

 

How about Heavy Water, as in Water enriched with Deuterium to make D2O; as a coolant?
As far as I recall it has a higher Heat Capacity than H2O water but should have less issues with ionization if my weak grasp of chemistry is correct.

I guess keeping it in a non-ionizing state would be difficult if using any additives, and there's the supposed issue of metallic molecules from blocks and radiators contributing to conductivity..

 

Wasn't Flurinoite used in the Armari X PC, that was at LITS with bit tech?

 

Yes it was, IIRC it was Fluroinert out of an old Cray supercomputer. From what I remember reading the original CPC article, Armari couldn't afford to buy 'new' stuff. Also the PC was built the way it was because the type [formulation?] of fluroinert they used evaporated at room temperature/pressure. So the made the PC case an airtight box and when you needed access to the components, all of the the coolant was pumped into the reservoir so you could access the parts without a load of very expensive coolant evaporating away.


note: as i said the above is based on what i remember reading in the original CPC article, it was a while ago so if any of it is incorrect I apologize.