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

The Mineral Oil PC | Aug 17 - New Sponsor!

The most disgusting PC hack ever! We build a computer inside an aquarium, and then fill it full of mineral oil, to see if full-on liquid immersion cooling will work better than air or water cooling. Watch as we take PC modification to the next level and put a PC in an aquarium, complete with a ship wreck and fake plants.

We've done some serious air cooling and water cooling of PCs... but we've never immersed one in oil.

So we jumped at the chance to drop one of our PC into Puget Systems Aquarium Module, build out a nifty looking aquatic PC, and see for ourselves what it does for CPU cooling.

The results? Better than we expected, but not nearly as good as we could get if we added in a pump and radiator!

If you can, buy your mineral oil in bulk from a vet or farm co-op... anyplace that sells supplies for horses. In the city we spent over $100 buying 42 16oz bottles, about twice what it would have cost in gallon bottles. Owch!

Want the ultimate cooling solution? If you've got the cash, check out 3M's Flourinert... just make sure you build a sealed case, or your investment will vanish over time!

 

I smell bot...


Haw! You got chewed out by a little kid...who is obviously very important!

 

...


what?

I'll get one for ya.


To the right of the front side USB connectors.


Below the MOSFET heatsink.


Directly above the CPU socket.

And yea, Petra's is awesome, my last 2 orders have had hand written notes in them thanking me for my repeat business.

 

Looks fixable with some soldering.

I'm sure mineral oil voids the warranty regardless

 

They would all need to be replaced with caps that don't have a rubber base first though. No sense in reattaching the faulty caps.

Edit: my free Crucial M225 128Gb SSD shipped. Win!

 

hey legoman, isnt your other nick legoguy? Like MM2 et stuff?

 

Negative, I use legoman666 for everything.

 

Amazing case, simply astounding work. Sucks about the leaks, i shall endeavour to smack anythin of any kind i see leaking with a smelly wet fish in thine honour.

On the point of lighting diffusion between 2 colours i had a thought. With most of the convection/flow currents being shown due to either air or water particles which within the oil moving about that in theory it really would be a simple case of havin different colored lighting in the top since the fact that it comes from a different direction will aloow it to refract through said particles in the same fashion as thhe light a the bottom but with the opposite result. In theory of course.

Also have you considered maybe yellow at the top and possibly a few orange hidden behind the LCD somehow? If it's possible then when flowing it could give a illusionary appearance of a lava flow.

A million out of ten for style, effort, skill and vision.
Minus several million out of ten for luck No one deserves that luck.

 

That is a really really cool idea! +1 (more if i could) for the lava flow idea! Great second post!!

 

A bloody shame on your motherboard there. Shouldnt be That hard to fix tho, if you've got some soldering skills.

Just a tip for the cooling. (If someone has'nt already written it.. it's a looong thread.)

When I were playing around with a mineral cooled pc in school (Last year project), I discovered that the oil gets pretty damn hot. This is (probably) because of it being great at catching the heat from the components, but awful at getting rid of it. I tried a few solutions for this.

The first one was simply adding a pump that took the oil from the top of the case and then pumped it through a radiator and out at the bottom. This worked, but it required external bits, and that's not always nice.
The second one was getting a cheap air-pump and modifying it a little bit. I made it pump air from the outside to below the cpu and graphics card. This improved the temps a whole lot, so this is what I eventually stuck with.
The third one was kind of a longshot. I built a paddle wheel from a fan and some plasticard. I then put this so that 3/4's of it was submerged. This, believe it or not, helped a little. However, it wasnt as effective as the air pump..

I hope that one of those three might help your temps.

 

So the air bubbles you introduced were heated by the surrounding oil and then transferred the heat to surface alot quicker than the convection..

Its early so if thats a dumb question/answer thingy leave me be!

On a side note, i think if you replaced the caps, or even re bedded them on the board after cleaning it down with buckets and buckets of alcohol you could then seal it all with clear nail varnish or my personal fav high temp hot glue gun.

 

Indeed.
That didnt really look like a question tho

 

Say, after searching watercooling-related bits, I've noticed you've really posted input places

I found your pic on Xoxide and the comment on DangerDen.


Have you found any replacement caps for the motherboard? Or perhaps start with the new motherboard you were looking at?

 

Hah, yeah I get around.

No, I haven't bothered yet. I keep meaning to bring home some oil soak pads from work so I can clean out the inside of the tank to replace the swelling O-rings but I keep forgetting. I'm going to attempt replacing all of the caps before buying a whole new motherboard.

 

I should really get back to work on fixing this thing. I'm working again (co-oping), so all of my time is not consumed by school anymore. Someone motivate me

 

Gogo, get back to work! You are almost there, it would be a waste to give up at this stage, when you have progressed so far

 

Motivation...
Get a new board.
Seal all the caps with industrial epoxy.
post more oil porn.
Go Go Go!

 

This ^^^

 

Wellp, I must say, this is so impressive I had to sign up to tell you how... Impressive... It is... Yeah.
But anyhoo, I couldn't help but notice earlier you were toying with the idea of dropping chunks of dry-ice into the oil to cool it down. My advice: DON'T. It's messy, ineffective, and costly. If you want to tinker with using dry-ice to cool it further, the best option is to remove the fans from the radiators (prevent condensation damage and all) and simply place your dry-ice within the radiator compartment. While I've not done this procedure exactly as I've described it, I HAVE had great success submerging my radiator in ice water. It was faster, cleaner, and alot cheaper than when I tried putting dry-ice in the oil directly, and when it was all said and done the motherboard's built-in temp sensor read the CPU and northbridge both at 16C (this system is an Athlon 4600+ over-clocked from 2.4GHz to 2.8GHz, not big but it was merely a test). I think that's as low as the sensor went though, as it never read any colder and it didn't get much warmer after 4 hours of Prime95.
Just a thought.

 

Back from the dead?

OK, here we go. It's time to get this damn thing back into operation.



My last updates said that I was experiencing technical difficulties. The gaskets were swelling and leaking, the silicone was swelling and leaking, and the tank itself had a small leak.


Here you can see the small bead of oil along the joint.


And oil leaking out of the bottom of the tank.

I let the machine sit for ~6 months because I was so frustrated at it. It's time to fix it.


I ordered Viton o-rings for the bulkhead-through-fittings. Viton is a brand of fluoropolymer elastomer rubber that is supposed to be extremely oil resistant. We shall see... The caulk tube is Dow Corning 735, a supposedly oil resistant silicone.


Close up of the O-rings. These weren't cheap.






You have no idea how difficult it was to get the old ones off. I had to stop and take a break because I was getting so frustrated.


Here's the old ones; swollen, squished and leaky.


I sealed the leaky corner with silicone. I hope the stuff is able to stick to slightly oily surfaces. It's impossible to get all of the gunk out of a corner.




I took the motherboard off. This thing is junked now...






It's hard to get a decent shot showing the bulging caps.


Here's one that swelled so much that it popped completely off the motherboard. I picked it off the bottom of the tank. I'm about to place an order on http://www.mouser.com for new caps. My intent is to desolder all of the caps on my current AM3 board and replace them with caps of equal value that do not have the rubber base.

Another interesting thing to note, the PVC Tygon tubing I used is completely hardened. It does not appear to work well with mineral oil. It shrunk and hardened so much that I can't get it onto the 1/2" fittings anymore. I'm afraid it's going to crack or something, so I'm going to replace it with Viton tubing, which is expensive as hell. $28.73/ft. Luckily I only need about 2 feet. This is only for the runs between the rads and from the bulkhead-fittings to the rads.

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