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

It really sucks that you're encountering so many problems, the curse of a true innovator is that you encounter all the weird engineering troubles before the rest of us have even gotten started.

All the same, I'm certain you'll get it sorted out. Your work has been of jaw dropping quality throughout this entire log. You're brilliant, don't let a few setbacks convince you to the contrary. How many bodyparts did Frankenstein have to go through before he built Frankenstein's monster?

 

Bwahaha. One thing after another. Today's is: The 1 gallon milk jugs that I drained all of the oil into were leaking all over my god damned bedroom floor. Gah! I had them sitting on an oil soak pad and I walked into my room after work and decided that I definitely filled the jugs more full than that. So I picked one up to check under and yup, freakin' leakin'. The oil must have eaten through the thin plastic. I thought I had read online that the oil in milk jugs was resistant to mineral oil; guess not.

Now all of the oil is back in the original 5 gallon steel containers in the garage.

On the other hand, this has given me an excuse to purchase some new hardware! I picked up the following:
Asus M4A78T-E 790GX AM3 mobo
AMD Phenom X2 550 BE 3.1ghz cpu
OCZ ModXStream 700w modular psu
OCZ 3x2gb DDR3 1600 ram
MSI GTX275 gpu (holy crap this thing is a lot faster than my hd4850's)
4x1Tb Hitachi HD's (at $75 a pop, it's kind of hard to resist)


New hardware in a temporary case until I build up enough will power to get oil all over myself.


And as a side note, my wood case is making a come back! I bought a new mini Crystalfontz LCD for it and took the metal inner frame to get powder coated glossy black.

 

Too bad about the leaks and motherboard.

But that wood case is really cool!

 

Good to see that wood monster back in action

 

Oil orgy at legoman's!!!

 

Yes, yes! YES! All to Legomans to do manly oilwrestling!




sidenote: really sucks about the case Lego, but I'm sure someone able to build an entire computer submerged into mineraloil is able to fix it.

 

Thanks! It's been out of action for about 3 years. I heard it calling my name.

I know! It had been demoted to the position of monitor stand.

You alone of everyone here should know how much that oil stinks! No thanks

Lol. While I am probably able to fix the leaks and such, I don't want to. The oil smells and gets all over the damn place. Oh well, it'll have to get done eventually...

And finally for some good news, I'm happy to announce a new sponsor: Crucial!




Kelly Sasso has kindly agreed to supply me with a brand spankin' new 128Gb CT128M225! Sweeeet. These just came out a few days ago and the reviews are trickling in.

Here's a few:
http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=351&Itemid=60
http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=850

Performance is almost dead equal to the OCZ Vertex (which I almost pulled the trigger on two of for some RAID 0 hotness). Can't wait to get it installed, thanks Crucial!

 

Well now you *have* to get it fixed.



edit: What happened to the subframe to the wood case? And are you planning to watercool it again?

 

Hah! I know

The metal subframe is at the powder coaters. I will hopefully be picking it up tomorrow or wednesday. I want to water cool it, I already own all of the necessary hardware. We'll see. I'm not 100% certain my block will fit on the CPU.

 

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=173608

I picked up the frame from the powder coaters. Pics are about halfway down in the new thread. It looks awesome!

 

Suggestions and Brain Ticklers

First off, astonishing work! I've always been curious about modding, but never had the cash to do it. In any event, here's some ideas to improve upon your current rig, or when V2.0 comes to mind.

So, having problems with joints? Why not get a molded piece of acrylic? Have it molded into a rectangular tank with no top. Granted, the corners won't be as tight, but that is what you need to help with oil flow. You don't want eddies getting stuck in corners. Another option is heat bonding the joints (melting them together).

Make your inlet, outlet, and drain plugs out of acrylic with nylon (or other non-organic) seals. This will take some machining, but the end-product would be "air tight" if you will. The seals would need to have some expansion/contraction abilities. I'm sure there is something other than rubber seals. I saw you mentioned something someone at work suggested, what was it? Non-petroleum based seals?

Circulation. You need it. I was thinking that if you placed 1-2 high speed fans (Scythe FM-121s or Yate Loons) at 12v, it should have enough strength to push the oil. Granted, you do have some circulation now, but my opinion is it isn't enough. Eddies are bad (hence the molding idea).

Now this next part is something I was discussing with a good friend of mine. I've seen many many many posts about extreme cooling solutions and how they all tend to have the same issue of condensation. I think you have the perfect setup to ignore that. Only problem I can think of is how the viscosity of the oil will change as the temps drop. I'm not an expert by any means, but in theory if you were to chill the oil, you would be able to seriously push the limits of your board/gfx. Maybe throw the rads into a small freezer and see if you can reach 30C at the CPU/GPU at load.

I assume that if the oil gets colder, it gets thicker (condenses) which requires more work from the fans and pump(s) inside the fluid. I guess then depends on how much the oil thickens up at certain temperatures.

All in all, you've done a great job so far and learned alot (I know I have just from reading the work-log). I'm interested in attempting this and I see alot of potential for overclocking (Mini-ITX chill box anyone?).

Thanx for your time and for publishing your work.

 

Thanks! This was a rather expensive mod indeed. In any case, more than I had intended to spend.

Just 1 joint I think, I guess the acrylic wasn't 100% square before I glued it together. I didn't really have a problem with eddies or circulation; I had pretty good oil flow throughout the entire tank because of the fan on the CPU. I have this fan on the HSF: http://www.petrastechshop.com/12x38scdfuka2.html as seen here:


It's 3000 RPM 133.6 CFM @ 45.90 dBA. In the oil, it spins at 209RPM and makes no noise In the air it sounds like a jet engine.

You can seven see the little bubbles in the oil moving around pretty good in the video I posted a while back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nEeTLKZvLs&fmt=18

Yea, the folks at work suggested cork seals. We use cork for gaskets on oil filled transformers, oil filled breakers, oil filled load tap changes and oil filled voltage regulators at work (a power utility). They last about 40 years before going bad. I'm sure they'd be more than good enough for my application. I'm going to see if I can get a few made.

I'd be afraid of the oil getting too thick On top of that, cooling the oil would require even more power and thus produce more heat. My room gets ridiculously hot already. My original plans called for peltier cooling on the CPU, but I scrapped it since it was going to add a ton of heat and expense to the project.

Thanks for your comments/suggestions! I'll take them into consideration. Check out this log over at [H]: http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1351232 There are far better liquids to cool with besides oil if you're interested in chilling the liquid way down to ridiculous temps. This guy has tried kerosene and isopropyl alcohol with varying degrees of success.

Good luck!

 

I was looking at those fans for my radiator. 46 dBA seemed pretty loud... thanks for the precaution.

 

Hey! where do you go to school??? Because my school follows the Quarter system, and the Co-Op system also.

BTW, this is an awesome case =]!! i read through the entire thing.

 

University of Cincinnati. I have about 3 weeks of co-oping left and then I go back to school I am not looking forward to it. Thanks

Hahaha, no, you don't want those. Try something more like this: http://www.petrastechshop.com/12sckaflsaca1.html or http://www.petrastechshop.com/12yalod1cafa1.html and attach them to a fan controller.

 

All I can say is DAYUM!!! This is one of the craziest mods I've ever seen great work I saw some little kid tried to criticize you on youtube about the mod ignore it. Is there anynoise comming from the case?

 

Thanks! Yea, that little kid didn't bother me too much. I noticed he didn't have the balls to badmouth on [H]. He probably would have been ripped to shreads.

The noise is minimal. The pump, an Eheim 1250, makes a slight hum, but it's only noticeable when you turn it on or off. Besides that, the only noise comes from the 6 Noctua fans on the radiators. Since they are temperature controlled, their noise varies with the thermal load, but for the most part they are pretty damn quiet.

Cheers.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138123

I've been poking around looking for a motherboard with as few solid aluminum caps as possible. It looks like this will fit the bill. The few that it has I will seal around with.... something. I don't want a repeat of what happened to my GA-X38-DS4 (solid aluminum caps popping off because of rubber bases).

 

I guess you could somehow solder heatsinks that cover the whole thing onto them.

 

Have you got a picture of the caps on your blown mobo?

Off topic:
Petra's is a pretty awesome place to buy parts. A bottle of PT-nuke arrived today with a hand-written note. A $3 order and he wrote the instructions and a thank you.

Nothing big, but it was pretty nice to see that.