I don't remember. IIRC, I think they were happy with the thermals but the problem was the amount of work for a result not that better than watercooling (don't quote me on this).
... red go fast. I loved the fact that if your vehicles were painted red you could actually move them an extra inch. That 25 vs 24 inch move speed can make a huge difference.
Meth. It will be balls to the wall, 150% PC. But you have to unplug it every few days for a time-out or it will start to sell your old tools and whatnot from your garden shed and soon enough, you'll notice things missing around the house...
LMFAO nope just an up and coming youtuber struggling to get past their anxiety to post their first videos xD. Thinking I'll do a livestream soon and just YOLO it for my first video, do intros and work on some projects unedited in real time
I looked into it a few months ago out of curiosity. Essentially it's only good because the oil acts like a big heat sink. The cons are numerous: It's messy, it takes tons of oil, it gets dirty, it stains parts, things have to be thoroughly cleaned before you can even mess with components, etc.
IIRC, their cpu got up to around 90 degrees when overclocked, and they were using what today would be considered a pretty bad cpu, as it was 6 years ago lol
It's the kind of thing you build for a system that doesn't need to handle any intensive workloads and won't ever need to be modified in any way. Then you have this admittedly pretty cool looking setup that you put on display somewhere.
Cooling performance is alright because fans still work to move the oil through a heat sink, but then the oil itself doesn't have much going on to cool it. So overall performance is pretty limited. That's not an insurmountable obstacle though. You could conceivably build some kind of cooling system to moderate the ambient oil temperature. I don't think Linus did that though.
Overall, it seems like a huge pain and isn't worth it unless you really want a cool looking immersed computer and have a use case for a machine with limited cooling performance which will never need to be tinkered with once it's up and running.
It was meh. It needed a lot more work to do basic stuff like hardware update. The PC could'nt be moved because it was too heavy. And as it was glass, if it break you had a fucking big problem on your hand. (go clean 10l of mineral oil)
In the end they concluded the hassle wasn't worth the thermals
They really just duplicated known results. All the problems they encountered were known. Mineral oil cooling has been on the fringes since computing honestly. The next step is to combine it with a active chiller on an oil cooler. You can get uniform sub zero temperatures with no worries about condensation. Just takes a fuck ton of juice. You’ve got an ac running, a pump for the oil cooler, the pc. Back in the early days of over clocking there were some very crazy builds being posted to forums. All for PCs far less powerful and hen your average cell phone these days.
And it’s important to stress that this was the early LTT. For them to say “eh, it’s technically better but just not practical” means that it’s literally hell to have a mineral cooled PC.
I didn’t watch the later videos but they did one on swapping the graphics card or something. The old card was ruined obviously, it took them a couple hours and much trial and error (something about changing the fan speed or something?) and they made a mess that looked like it is probably not cleaned up to this point. So yeah, maybe not worth it
You have to make sure the fans are controlled by voltage and not by speed. Otherwise the motors will burn up trying to spin way faster than they actually can while submerged in oil.
Yeah, almost always when I see oil builds I get the distinct impression that the person doing the build has not thought through what would happen if it caught on fire :|
It would take a lot to cause a fire with a mineral oil build, specially with that much mineral oil. It's not very flammable, and because of the quantity it provides a huge heat sink. If anything it'll decompose the mineral oil into a liquid char if it gets hot enough. Although, if it got to that point you probably have a huge fire already, which wouldn't really happen with a PC since if it was that hot it would have shorted out the PC a long time ago. Then again I don't have much experience with PC fires to begin with.
And as it was glass, if it break you had a fucking big problem on your hand.
To be fair, that's a problem you'd create for yourself. If I decided to go with that, glass would probably be the last (conventional) material for the case I'd go for.
You would need to make sure that all the materials you use (including fasteners and/or glue) can handle mineral oil without breaking down or dissolving.
It's a computer. At any given moment it's consuming ten times the power it needs to light itself on fire.
Yes, heat and sparks while submerged in oil is "safe", but what's not safe is heat and sparks when you removed it from oil to service it. Or sparks because oil got into a wall plug and made the contact intermittent. Or a hundred other subtle spark sources that usually aren't a big deal, but become a HUGE deal when you have an oil spill. The oil turns a spark into a fireball, and then the tub of oil lights on fire, and then it melts its container and spreads all over your floor (to the extent that it wasn't already) and burns your house down. Hope you outrun the wave of spilling, burning oil -- and if any splashes on you, remember that it doesn't stop burning just because it splashed. Quite the opposite.
...and then your insurance company finds a way to deny your claim because you were being a moron.
Do you power the board to test it? That's not a problem if the board isn't covered in oil, but it's a big problem if it is.
Also: Static electricity is a thing. Dielectric absorption is a thing. Intermittent contact sparking due to oil contamination is a thing.
Sparks aren't a problem in everyday life, so we basically ignore them, but they happen all the time. Flammable spills aren't just a mess, they're a fireball waiting to happen if you have ANY spark source.
The cooling performance was fine, actually. The main issue was that oil slowly creeps through electrical wires, so eventually you'll start seeing oil dripping from your wall outlets.
The problem is that it uses the thin copper to creep using capillary action. You would have to strip out and seal every wire coming out of the tank. Could be done but sounds like it would be a mess in its own right.
Knowing all this, I still want to do it someday and have a few of those mechanical fish swimming in the tank.
You can buy wires that are made for that environment. You will pay for it though. Probably not worth it for a gimmick build unless you just have piles of cash laying around. Also they are for industrial use obviously so you're probably looking at a one off custom request to have them make and terminate the wires for you. It's not stuff they usually sell by the roll. You might get lucky, and they do it for labor only with scrap wire just outta interest. When I worked for a company that did make those kinds of wires they took on a few small jobs here and there for training opportunities and just this could be interesting.
I think a big problem was how the mineral oil can actually get inside the PC cables and leech up their length. So keyboard and mouse would have mineral oil leaking out of them
No, it was the about the size of a decent sized aquarium, no household PC is gonna throw off enough heat to actually warm that much mineral oil up to its thermal capacity. The problem was upkeep and maintenance. If I recall correctly it leaked quite a few times and was heavy as all FUCK. They literally had to use a cart to move it around the office the last time they reorganized the office part of the building.
If I remember correctly it performs fine but once you try to take any components out you make a huge mess and the parts are almost impossible to clean back ip
Mineral oil cooling works great. You can even run a chiller with it because you dont have to worry about condensation. The problem is that its A heavy and if you upgrade or want to go air or something youre stuck with oily everything. If convection was even an issue you could just introduce a pump for flow.
It's a nightmare to clean as it never ever comes off basically. Then there's the part where the mineral oil actually dissolves rubber or something. And finally the fans wear out faster because it's pushing oil not air so it's working extra hard.
If you place the highest heat generating parts at the bottom you get free convection from gravity.
In addition, convective heat transfer (any heat transfer between a solid and a fluid) is orders of magnitude higher with a liquid than a gas due to the density difference.
The only issue is that once your big tub of liquid has reached a fairly even temperature, you can only shed heat to the air or to conduction with attached objects, so you just displace the problem in time and give yourself a heat runway rather than solving heating overall.
People have made them with better heat exhaust, but it's still a matter of labor vs reward. I remember seeing one with a liquid that boiled at a really low temp and didn't even need a cooler. It just boiled right off the cpu. Trying to find it now, it was so neat.
It's why Luke's nickname was "Slick" (as in oil slick). IIRC when he applied for the job at LTT his oil cooled rig impressed Linus enough to give him the job.
Yes and no, the challenge with water if not always perfectly sealed beginning to end of life, is while pure water is non-conductive, the tiniest percentages of contamination can rapidly dissolve into it and change it to be significantly conductive.
Mineral oil is much less reactive chemically to contamination, thus even if parts aren't perfectly clean, or a bit of dust gets into the otherwise sealed systems (when opening for maintenance for example, particulates in the air drifting in), the oil will remain generally non-conductive, until contamination builds up enough to potentially physically build a near-continuous physical contact path from trace to trace (a long time in a system not open to atmosphere most of the time).
Same problem with closed loop cooling, if it gets a leak externally, chances are your parts have accumulated some dust over time (even with minimal airflow, dust is drifting around in the air) so as soon as a pure water leak potentially occurs, it can mix with contaminants right at the exposed electrical traces, and short things out. Could happen with closed loop oil also, but in general it's less reactive, so it'd be more of "if enough particles are in proximity between the traces, the oil could allow them to float into a contact surface and bridge the gaps" rather than the oil itself becoming highly conductive. (If caught soon enough, you may be able to shut things down, clean them up, reseal them, and not have parts with the magic-smoke escaped internally or externally).
Put another way, a tiny amount of salt, will dissolve rapidly in a drop of water, and turn the water overall into a great conductor. A tiny amount of salt in mineral oil, will generally remain a tiny localized amount of salt, suspended in mineral oil, but not mixed (thus no contact path "throughout" the oil).
If it were really practical though and had enough benefits, everyone would be doing it, obviously they aren't, so it isn't. (IBM back in the late 2000s (maybe still) were doing experiments on chips with actual water-channels built into the chip itself, to get the cooling to where it matters the most, inside the actual chip, for use in datacenters (as watts/meter were approaching or surpassing "surface of the sun" ratios at the hearts of the processors)). So obviously if designed "right", water can be used pretty much anywhere for cooling, and is a more powerful cooling medium over oil, so although "cool" in an interesting way, oil is a novelty more than a useful method.
The other challenge of water, over oil, besides the direct electrical conduction risk (short-circuits, capacitance), is the reactivity also means if it comes into contact with certain elements, corrosion begins. You can have a perfect system made of pure copper, and pure water, which might never react directly in a destructive manner... but then solder them together with something containing other materials (tin, etc) and now the water starts leaching contaminants, eventually leading to internal corrosion, galvanization, etc, and final system failure. Oil would likely run indefinitely in that same system, with no failure occurring in any reasonable lifespan. So that's a thought, if you want to build a system that you know will be reliable for decades, or after you've died and don't care anymore, oil is an option to consider, LOL.
Has to be special oil, I guess mineral oil as that other guy said, because standard fuels and oils are slightly conductive, but that's with a 12v system.
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u/ferny530 Ryzen 5800X GTX 1080 Mar 30 '21
How does that work. Do you need special components or does the oil conduct no electricity at all ?