Using a oil in your PC cooling system

[AnimeJanai]

Those window mount air conditioners are remarkably cheap.  For the price of all the cooling system parts, one wonders if you could simply put the airconditioner unit completely outside in its own shielded "doghouse" size protective shelter and have the cool air ducted thru one of those flexible ducts thru the open window to your PC.  The extra cold air should help your air-cooled heatsinks (no water cooling) a lot.  The noise of the air conditioning unit remains outside too.   If your room gets too cold, you can connect a 2nd flexible duct and mount a USB powered 120mm fan to push air to the outside.   Or you can *har har* run folding on your graphic cards' processor cores to generate some heat.  In the summertime, that air conditioner might come in handy too just to keep yourself cool.

[Micharus]

ATOMIC magazine actually made a PC that was completely submerged in some sort of fluid, everything except the PSU that is.

But, to be on-topic a bit, Brake fluid/Auto-trans fluid would probably do the trick nicely.

They are both very close to water as far as liquidity is concerned and I'm betting they are both non-flammable and non-conductive.

[datora]

.

But, to be on-topic a bit, Brake fluid/Auto-trans fluid would probably do the trick nicely.

Brake fluid is highly flammable.  It burns very much like motor oil.  We used to fill a can with chlorine tablets (used to treat pool water), then pour brake fluid into the can until full.  After a minute or three, it would auto-ignite and create a column of impressive flame a good few meters high.  Nice improvised 4th of July display. 

Trans fluid I can't speak to direct experience, but it is a petroleum oil, so I suspect that it will ignite at some temperature or another.  Suggest google and wikipedia as a first-stop check on that ... include "MSDS" or "Materials Safety Data Sheet" in google search string and you will get the exact ignition temperature.  Might be safe enough at lower temps and if isolated from oxygen.


There are specialized silicon oils.  I used to use a vacuum bell jar that used heated oil to pull a hard-space level vacuum.  Can't remember the details on it anymore; too many years ago.  But, I think it ran about 200 degrees C for normal operating temps.  Can't remember the proper name for the type of pump it's called (condenser oil pump?) ... but the oil in it handles high temp without cracking or igniting.  It's probably an acceptable material for this type of application.  I'd definitely want to look up its heat capacity to guess at its efficiency; there's actually almost nothing that can beat good ol' H₂O for heat capacity, though.

[kitamesume]

Fluorinert is the trademarked brand name for the line of electronics coolant liquids sold commercially by 3M. It is an electrically insulating, stable fluorocarbon-based fluid which is used in various cooling applications. It is mainly used for cooling electronics. Different molecular formulations are available with a variety of boiling points, allowing it to be used in "single phase" applications where it remains a liquid, or for "two-phase" applications where the liquid boils to remove additional heat via evaporative cooling. An example of one of the compounds 3M uses is FC-72, or perfluorohexane (C6F14). Perfluorohexane is used for low temperature heat transfer applications due to its 56°C boiling point. Another example is FC-75, perfluoro(2-butyl-tetrahydrofurane). There are 3M fluids that can handle up to 215 °C, like FC-70.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorinert

something to look at.

the best design would be placing a passive heatsink on the CPU while submerging it on Flourinert.

[Tegh]

The best coolant for a PC...I'd go with Liquid Nitrogen.  Sure you'd have to be running the PC in a vacuum, and change out the liquid nitrogen every week (less or more depending on the size of the system and boiling rate of the liquid nitrogen), but hey...it's worth it to say that your PC is running at -15 degrees at all times lol.

[Freedom Kira]

Uh, yeah, flash-freezing and keeping the computer frozen constantly is an excellent idea. As is living in a vacuum.

[bork]

And so cost effective also!

Its only $1,200 for a 20 liter storage Dewar and about $1,100 for a transfer container.  There will also be the cost of the Nitrogen and the delivery charges to keep your supply tank full.  
The tank will evaporate off its 20 liters in about 20~25 days.
Liquid Nitrogen has a boiling point of about -196C (-320F), it will condense oxygen out of the air.  This would be a interesting mixture of plastics and LOX.
Some semiconductors will stop working at Liquid Nitrogen temperatures, there is a limit on how cold you can make a CPU.

[Tegh]

Lol

I was simply trying to point out how ludicrous some of this was, with something even more so!

Can it be done? Sure.  Would you ever want to or would it EVER be worth it? Hell no!

There are as many ways to cool a computer as a person can think of really.  But, there is a reason for the "normal" methods; cost and usability.  Any time a person thinks about doing something with a computer they should cover those two things first.  Can i cool a computer with oil? Yes, it's cheap too, but it's not much cooler, it's a pain in the arse, and can cause more problems then solve...so usability is out.  All questions on computer cooling solved...NEXT!!!

[x5ga]

The best coolant for a PC cooling system is distilled water. There are companies that sell "high-end" coolant liquids, but their performance is similar, if not worse than that of distilled water. If you're worried about corrosion or something, there are corrosion-blocker substances that can be used to treat the distilled water.

Also, liquid nitrogen is not that cold... in many applications it's considered kinda hot actually (liquid helium is preferred in many cases). So at 77K or so that the LN2 has (note how I didn't even take into account the temperature "loss", which would make the CPU run at 100K or so probably), the state where the semiconductors become an insulator in most cases isn't reached. Cooling a circuit in 99% of the cases reduces resistance and improves conductivity. Dunno how the actual speed of the system would be affected tho :/

I've seen a few years ago a system cooled with liquid nitrogen and overclocked from 1.7GHz to 4.5GHz or so (because the mobo couldn't go further), and it was stable while running Q3Arena testdemo.

About oil cooling, a friend made an "ultrasilent" system by removing all fans and submerging the whole system (PSU included) except HDD/DVD drive into a fishtank filled with mineral oil, after following some sketchy instructions found on the interwebz. Funny enough, the thing worked... stable for 48hrs running burn-in tests. Afterwards her realized that it looked dumb and changed it back to air-cooling

[AnimeJanai]

Brake Fluid is highly penetrating of seals, so you will have to keep an eye out for it wicking out.

As for immersion into oils, some electronic parts are not made to withstand long exposure to oils and so the oils may get inside after time.  For example, electrolytic capacitors are not made with longterm oil-proof seals.  I suspect the person who immersed the whole motherboard had to mod any emergency sensor connectors like for loss of CPU fan speed.  Oil has thickness that resists fan blades, so I assume the fan in the power supply was disconnected since it would have problems trying to spin its blades in oil and that would cause the motor to heat up.

The world overclocking champions use liquid nitrogen to cool the CPU long enough to obtain an overclock value that meets the rules.  The CPU is destroyed by the process.  There are specific ways to have the liquid nitrogen flow onto the CPU without creating too much ice that gets in the way of cooling.  It requires careful precooling before powerup.  Ice forms on all nearby surfaces so you have to consider that you will have water on your parts and motherboard in short order which is why liquid nitrogen is usually a destructive process.  Use of liquid nitrogen is actually shown in one video by fansub group Doremi since the japanese documentary centered around 4 people of which one was a dedicated overclocker and it showed him prowling akihabara for parts culminating in a liquid nitrogen overclocking attempt to set another overclocking record.   There are two versions of the video.  The Doremi one is fansubbed and the other is officially dubbed with english narration explaining what is going on and giving background information.  I saved both because it gave a nice walkabout look at various parts of Akihabara I had missed visiting.

FANSUB VERSION:  [Doremi].NHK.Akihabara.A.St ory.at.the.End.of.t he.Year.[2005][09E84822].mkv

ENGLISH NARRATOR:  Akihabara_Geeks_[docu,DVDrip,x264]_-_OiNkERS.mkv