Cooling Non-Submersion Mineral Oil Coolant

While manufacturers of sealed loops may have low/no bateria in the loop from the factory, we can assume home made loops will be contaminated. Either way, it is a manageable thing.

As far as nanometallic cooling, I looked into that. With a 2% copper particle infusion with water, the benefit is only 3.7-3.9% better cooling (MIT study on nanofluids). This was done with distilled water with a pH of 7.3. Now, with an oil based fluid it may be a bit better, but it is still limited to the thermal conductivity of the fluid. You also make the fluid more alkaline by adding metallic particles. Speaking of, I'm been hiking across the internets for the last week trying to find the TC of mineral oil... anyone know where I can find it!?! Specific Heat i've got, but doesn't help so much with the calculations.

Can anyone recommend cheap compression fittings for copper? I like the look of BitsPower, but at $20/ea shipped, it hurts da wallet. I saw some permanent push-in style fittings, but they have a plastic sleeve that might disolve in mineral oil.

 

any local hydraulic/pneumatic shop or larger hardware store should have standard brass compression fittings in stock for $5-10 each. they arent as pretty as the bitspower fittings but its hard to argue with the price...

 

I remember this one time many years ago when I was using tap water and redline water wetter... I was using a modified alu air-conditioning radiator as my rad and it became full of black sludge after the water had been circulating for some months. It was kind of a metallic sludge. After flushing it all out the cpu temp went up quite a bit. The cooling was actually better with the black sludge.

Thankfully those days are far behind me and I have a very clean water loop now.

 

The first watercooling I've ever built was waaaay back in 1998. The CPU was a Celeron 300A shortly to be followed by a Celeron 400A. They were great CPUs for overclocking, ramping up speeds by 50% with watercooling running reliable at those speeds.
There was no manufactured parts around at that time at all and I used old aquarium-pump, heat-exchangers from cars/motorcycles etc etc...
The loops were so cheaply done, that I had to refill water every two weeks basically, as the water was simply vaporating through leaks or whatever.
In addition we didn't use any additives but simple distilled water and still everything went quiet nice.

I think that these days there's way too much focus on all those additives, cooling-abilities of additives/fluids used etc, it's not worth the efforts imho, especially when you change your parts and hardware every two or three years. In two or three years the professionally made equipment will hardly have any failures due to corrosion because of missing additives etc.
And the cooling-abilities of standard distilled water are 99% of the time totally sufficient for the majority of people who do overclock their rigs.

I myself don't do any more watercooling these days besides using something like the Corsair H60. It's not necessary anymore really and the only benefit I see these days is noise-reduction or when building rather small systems, where you can't use tower-coolers.

 

I think noise is the biggest reason for me... liquid allows quieter running and I have great flexibility in how silent the system is. The downside is the complexity and additional time needed to install... the cpu waterblock is actually far easier to install than a large air cooler but when you also have GPU waterblocks then you can no longer simply plug in a new GPU in a few minutes. It becomes a time consuming plumbing operation even though I don't drain my loop.

I've been using liquid since 2004 though and the one time I tried going back to air... I was bored within a few months. I still take an interest in the latest air coolers though to see what's happening.

 

I've never been brave enough to try it until now. I'm curious how "quiet" it's going to be compared to my current rig. I'm running 4 fans turned down to about 900rpm and I can't even hear it with my ear next to the case. My temps are at 40*C at full load (Q9550 @ 3.1GHz).

So I will be starting this project this weekend (I hope). Still need to find a pump and radiator though. Tight on cash, so spending $120-$150 on an experiment is not going to fly with the wifey. Up for donations tho

 

Maybe a 2 piece kit then?

For separates you might consider EK DCP 4 pump or even a lower one.

My first working pump was an Eheim 1060 mains. You wooden wanna put that in your PC.

I got an old Eheim 1260 pump around spare and a single 120 rad.

 

Festo solid brass pushfits are available from Aquatuning. No plastic at all.