Fill Your PC with Vegetable Oil!

[TheKeck]

Extra Life (http://myextralife.com) pointed me to this (http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/09/strip_out_the_fans/) over at Tom's Hardware.

Common sense dictates that submerging your high-end PC in cooking oil is not a good idea. But, of course, engineering feats and science breakthroughs were made possible by those who dared to explore the realms of the non-conventional. Members of the Munich-based THG lab are only too happy to confirm this fact. And not only did we find that our AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra equipped system didn't short out when we filled the sealed shut PC case with cooking oil--but the non-conductive properties of the liquid coupled created a totally cool and quiet high-end PC, devoid of the noise pollution of fans. The PC case - or should we say tank - also offered a new and novel way to display and show off your PC components.
This has gotta be the coolest thing I've seen in...some impressive period of time!

[51|RandoM]

cooking oil goes rancid.

other than that, stuff like this works fine, just don't put your hard drive in the oil too.

Has been done a number of times before.

[Suicidal ShiZuru]

Yeah its been seen before. As a novelty its cool but for practical use its stupid.

[agentgray]

Yeah, saw this on digg today.

It looks like 3m makes a substance that doesn't corrode like oil and works better.

[GrinR]

I think I saw this on HardOCP a long time ago, or maybe Tom's, using mineral oil and a refridgeration unit. Looked very cool but set my OCD off.

[Evil Avatar]

I'm not sure which to be more appalled by, that this worked or that someone thought of it in the first place.

[bobbler]

When I had more time (during high school), I did silly stuff like that... Vegetable oil isn't the best choice if you're doing it for cooling, there are oils (or other fluids that don't conduct electricity) made for it.

I had my first comp OC'ed!

[Mr.Green]

I'm sorry but what's cool about that again?

[Schnoogs]

Very cool...perhaps they could do something smaller and more isolated for just the CPU.

[Schnoogs]

I'm sorry but what's cool about that again?

Lower temps without having to use noisy fans.

Unless of course you're being sarcastic with the obvious pun.

[DeadPixel]

So if you OC your CPU and GF6800, will your case turn into a deep fryer?

[Subbacultcha]

Awesome experiment. Theoretically there isn't anything risky with putting solid-state electronics in a non-conducting medium, but it takes balls to risk hardware to prove this is so. Then again, Toms Hardware were the same guys who ran CPUs without heatsinks just for the fun of it, so I suspect frying hardware isn't a huge problem for them.

Like other people have mentioned, cooking oil is a bad idea as it'll go bad. You'll have a PC smelling like week-old french fries.

[gojira]

This could be the solution for the Xbox 360 overheating problems. MS just has to tell everyone to go down to the grocery store, get eight gallons of Mazola, and a big plastic tub. Fill the tub full of Mazola, and dunk your 360 in it.

Presto! No more overheating. Plus, after a couple of hours of Halo 3, you'll be able to make some fries! How cool is that?!


What?

[H.Bogard]

Cant wait to see PC casings like these break into the mainstream market.

[Schnoogs]

This could be the solution for the Xbox 360 overheating problems. MS just has to tell everyone to go down to the grocery store, get eight gallons of Mazola, and a big plastic tub. Fill the tub full of Mazola, and dunk your 360 in it.

Presto! No more overheating. Plus, after a couple of hours of Halo 3, you'll be able to make some fries! How cool is that?!


What?


HAHAHAHAHHA!!!

[TheKeck]

One wonders if this might be the rudimentary precursor to what future computers will actually be like.

I doubt it, but one wonders.... :)

[Schnoogs]

One wonders if this might be the rudimentary precursor to what future computers will actually be like.

I doubt it, but one wonders.... :)

You have to imagine that someday the air cooled approach simply won't work. Liquid cooled might be next followed by even more exotic means like the one in this article.

Cars have numerous components submerged in oil for both friction and heat dissipation purposes. I don't see why PC's can't benefit from this.

[TheKeck]

You have to imagine that someday the air cooled approach simply won't work. Liquid cooled might be next followed by even more exotic means like the one in this article.

Cars have numerous components submerged in oil for both friction and heat dissipation purposes. I don't see why PC's can't benefit from this.

That's a good point. I guess I was thinking about the issue of how much something like this would weigh, plus the possibility of it leaking.

Then again, even I said it would only be a rudimentary reflection of the future. I'm sure a more contained version of this idea would be entirely possible.

[Tyrant]

I'd imagine upgrading components in a PC like that must be a bit on the messy side. I wonder if their warranties would be voided as well.

[bapenguin]

can you cook fries in it? I bet the prescott CPUs from Intel will get the oil hot enough to do it. :)

[51|RandoM]

I'll save my mazola for the twister mat.

[Phanto]

Ya, i see the article early today, I'm reading it now :) .

[F3nyx]

You have to imagine that someday the air cooled approach simply won't work. Liquid cooled might be next followed by even more exotic means like the one in this article.

Cars have numerous components submerged in oil for both friction and heat dissipation purposes. I don't see why PC's can't benefit from this.IIRC there are already supercomputers that use liquid helium for cooling, but it might be a while before PCs get that hot. Oil is nifty though, and the article mentions that, as a result of being immersed in liquid, the PC runs completely silently.

[Schnoogs]

IIRC there are already supercomputers that use liquid helium for cooling, but it might be a while before PCs get that hot. Oil is nifty though, and the article mentions that, as a result of being immersed in liquid, the PC runs completely silently.

Oh yeah...that reminds me of college. If I remember correctly the SGI's they had used some form of liquid colling that wasnt water. Might have been helium or nitrogen.

These were the big Onyx servers.

Didnt the old crays have some form of waterfall display built in them? The water used to cool the computer ran down the front in a display case that was both decorative and functional?

[51|RandoM]

Aircooling will be fine pretty much indefinitely, at least for the majority of computers.

Why? Well, lots of reasons. The main reason, which is tackled in many different ways is efficiency.

The only time you go to exotic cooling is when you're solving a software problem by throwing faster hardware at it.

The days of the monolithic, very long pipeline, insanely high clockspeed CPU are history. Thanks to better OS, better Compilers, better software, we can take the distributed approach, spreading the load across multiple CPU or multiple cores, all of which run at a lower clockspeed, and dissapate less heat than the previous monolithic solution.

[XenonCJ]

I think I'm going to submerge my computer in gasoline and see what happens...

[Schnoogs]

The only time you go to exotic cooling is when you're solving a software problem by throwing faster hardware at it.

You might want to rethink this statement. You've just described computing as a whole and Moores Law yet you make it sound like it's the exception to the rule.

I'm a bit confused by what you were trying to illuistrate.

In the case of PCs companies like Intel they were only able to get performance gains by increasing the clock speed which in turn created more heat than could be properly cooled with air (in the case of overclocking).

This is not because Intel was tailoring to some unique software problem like you stated. They did this because it was the only way to keep up with AMD who's architecture didnt require such high clock speeds.

Now the big buzz is around multi-cores so that might take some of the pressure off of obtaining high clock speeds but I'm sure over the next few years we'll see both AMD and Intel ratchet up the clock speeds and once again push the threshold of what can be cooled with air.

Their options are too either shrink the die size which does have its limits or once again add more cores and change the pipeline.

[MrMeatshake]

Yeah, saw this on digg today.

It looks like 3m makes a substance that doesn't corrode like oil and works better.

that is 'mineral oil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_oil) ' to quote someone on hackaday (http://www.hackaday.com/):
Oil Cooled Electronics are not new, though oil cooled computers may be, but why use cooking oil, it will go rancid and start to smell bad after a short time. Mineral Oil is cheap, and easy to find (try a pharamacy) does not go rancid, is clear, and is a good dialectric (better then cooking oil), it is used in transformers, and other oil filled electrical parts.

from oil cooled computer article here (http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000050050192/)

[dead]

how do you remove the display card, sound card and the like?

[TheKeck]

how do you remove the display card, sound card and the like?

Well, THESE guys installed a valve to drain the oil when necessary. Still, it would be a messy business.

[ElectricMonk]

you could use mineral oil, i believe other people have done that

[mister_slim]

Personally, I recommend only using substances aquatic life can survive in.

[dead]

I really wouldn't like to be a goldfish living inside a computer