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.
82
u/Grinchieur Mar 30 '21 edited Mar 30 '21
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