Comments on: Buy an oil cooled PC for $11k

By: Eric

Eric — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 02:58:15 +0000

There are several ways to improve on this oil cool phase that’s got so many people jumping up and down i mean when you actually sit down and dont just go lets dunk a pc you realize a few things one the power supply should be out of the oil it adds 20% more heat ALEAST and doesnt need cooling beyond what it has already and mineral oil is viscous you want something thinner someone should try and see if they can get something similar to kerosene in viscosity. I don’t want to go out and say kerosene will work it might actually but i mean its the kind of thing that you do a few tests before you go out and start submerging a pc in any liquid you can get your hands on.

By: Freeze4Life

Freeze4Life — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 18:07:01 +0000

Look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntsG3vzgeo8
Another good lookin oil cooled pc!
I think it’s low cost project

By: Anon

Anon — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:51:07 +0000

$11,000 what a mark up!

Do they think we are made of money ROFL! I can see them foing out of business very quickly. Maybe they dont know about the current economic situation, poor bastards.

By: Adam

Adam — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:44:35 +0000

ANYONE with a little engineering skill can make one of these. You can use nearly any watertight container and mineral oil. Id never pay 11K for it, just isnt worth it. Thats like buying a new car! for gods sake… what a rip off.

My 8 core computer was built for under $500 and could easily be modified to run under oil, and then, have the oil in the case fed thru a heatexchanger, and cool that using a custom refrigeration system based upon a household fridge compressor.

The fridge compressor can use propane as the refrigant. and it is piped into the heatexchanger to cool the oil.

lol 11K

By: jorge

jorge — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:51:01 +0000

where I can buy this oil?

By: zypher

zypher — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 09:14:31 +0000

I wonder if I got somehow get one of these donated to my site? hmm…

By: djrussell

djrussell — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:39:43 +0000

anyone that would buy this is probably an overclocker. overclockers change components all the time. have fun doing that with this oily mess.

By: draeath

draeath — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 01:10:16 +0000

@icefox:

If you open the article and take more than 5 seconds looking at it, you will notice that there are four fans and a radiator enclosed in once side of the case. The radiator is actually nearly the full size of the panel! As they state, this system is not quiet, but it much less noisy than an air-cooled system of the same ratings.

By: icefox

icefox — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:00:56 +0000

There’s one thing I don’t completely understand about this idea. Is there a cooling system for the oil? I understand that the oil is cooling everything and it’s moving around with a couple submerged fans, but how isn’t it turning into a nice vegetable oil and PC soup?

What I mean is this looks fully closed, meaning the oil would have to have some kind of radiator off of the back to keep it from heating up. Maybe I just don’t see it in the pic…

By: kevin mcguigan

kevin mcguigan — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:39:27 +0000

I saw something like this in the movie Sunshine only they were using a liquid refrigerant of some sort in a refrigerated room. I wonder if that could be done. The components were submerged and raised out of the coolant for repair.

By: matt

matt — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:59:18 +0000

Wouldn’t the Mains power transformers be prior art? they have used transformers dunked in oil for years.

By: draeath

draeath — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:45:05 +0000

You should know they have filed a patent with some generic enough claims to cover any liquid submersion cooling (where a radiator is used to vent the heat from the system).

U.S. Patent No. 7,403,392: “A portable, self-contained liquid submersion cooling system that is suitable for cooling a number of electronic devices, including cooling heat-generating components in computer systems and other systems that use electronic, heat-generating components.”

The full patent text is available here: http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7403392.html

By: Trez

Trez — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:51:38 +0000

I’ve always wanted to set up a bunch of motherboards with overclocked procs with tons of ram and a pixie booting nic in a cluster. Then dunk everything into a slightly modified old freezer filled with diesel or some other oil. The idea for the freezer was to set it up so that it would still cool the oil but add bilge pumps or other cheap liquid pumps to circulate the oil.
I never did it because I couldn’t honestly justify having a cluster. I don’t think I’d ever need it.

By: massimiliano

massimiliano — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:43:22 +0000

I did a little research and it turned out that mineral oil’s vapor may cause harm to your lungs.

See http://www.cdc.gov/Niosh/pdfs/0472.pdf and http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/m7700.htm
for reference. Some reports are even scarier but I can’t find them now.

By: jerell

jerell — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 08:07:57 +0000

yeah i saw an artical on home made vegetable oil cooled PC. me and my friends tried it the problem we had with it, you need a great seal to keep the oil in.