This is way cool. A friend pointed this out to me. It seems that the boys at tom's hardware have made a PC that is cooled entirely by 8 gallons of cooking oil.

The Vegetable oil is non-conductive, and is a wonderful heat conductor. No fans required, so operation is 100% silent. Seems as though the system ran cooler than with stock fans in the open air.

THere is a step by step article on how it can be done. Seal off the case, remove fans, install hardware, pour in oil, and off you go. Damn cool.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/09/strip_out_the_fans/

Interesting, but what do you do when the oil gets rancid? :puke: Ugh, and what a mess to install upgrades!

Interesting, but what do you do when the oil gets rancid? :puke: Ugh, and what a mess to install upgrades!


I guess they hadn't heard that the high power electrical world has been using 'transformer oil' forever, it's clear and is refined especialy for it's electrical and thermal properties.

Lefty

http://www.dowcorning.com/content/power/powerfire/why561.asp?DCWS=Power%20and%20Utilities&DCWSS=Fire-safe%20Transformer%20Fluid

I believe they operated the cray-2 supercomputers immersed in a special Fluorinert type solution.

And I remember doing some high voltage research where the final result would be potted,but silicon dielectric fluid was used for insulation during development.
we'd build it and immerse it before powering up.

if I remember right Fluorinert is really exspensive

I'm all for great performance, but that picture makes the it look like someone took a crap it the computer and didn't flush it for a few weeks.

....And I remember doing some high voltage research where the final result would be potted,but silicon dielectric fluid was used for insulation during development.
we'd build it and immerse it before powering up.

This procedure was used at Zenith for flyback transformer development.

This procedure was used at Zenith for flyback transformer development.

I was at NI-Tec in the early 80's.. we/they were a spinoff of Zenith, the image intensifier stuff. Second generation, and third generation image intensifiers.
(Ferd Fender, John Tegethoff and a few? others IIRC). Ni=Tec moved to DFW, TX and became part of Varian later....

Really cool stuff....

Here's a thread from a PC board that I keep an eye on.

http://discuss.futuremark.com/forum/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=techmobocpu&Number=5817741&page=&view=&sb=&o=&vc=1

They discuss using mineral oil, which I think would be a far better and less rancid solution.