Been there, done that. Useless in a home/lab environment. For a data-center - maybe.
In my experience, the oil is far from odourless. It seems that way at first, but after a while it saturates the room/house with very annoying smell. Several months later, and I had to get rid of that smell. Even went as far to build stainless steel tanks with gaskets used for car motors. But, when airtight, the whole thing looses it's thermal properties and starts overheating again. I guess because of pressure build-up. So, it is either endure the mineral oil vapors, or nothing.
On top of all that, pray you never need to replace/upgrade a component... getting the whole thing out of the oil and cleaning it up so you could handle it again - a nightmare.
>when airtight, the whole thing looses it's thermal properties and starts overheating again
Were you pumping the fluid through radiators? It doesn’t really sound like you were, which would be the obvious reason it would overheat. You have to actually transfer and dissipate the heat. What makes the immersion cooling so good is that it conducts heat so much better than air, you can add giant radiators and dissipate an ungodly amount of heat, so can run your equipment ungodly fast. You can’t just drop it into an aquarium of mineral oil and expect it to do much.
If it was airtight and there were heat transfer problems, the first thing I'd think is the pressure is probably below atmospheric and the fluid is boiling (or cavitating the pump if there is one). Say, if it was filled to the top while warm, then sealed, the pressure would drop as the oil dropped to room temperature and contracted (or not, depending on differential rates of thermal expansion cf the container).
Some air space at the top of the sealed container (preferably dry air or nitrogen) would fix that. Make sure there's a pressure gauge and some means of preventing overpressure, though.
It sounds like they didn't circulate the fluid through radiators and were just relying on natural convection to circulate the fluid and the open tank allowed for heat from the fluid to be dissipated into the air. So sealing it would cause it to overheat immediately, same as if you saran wrapped an air-cooled PC.
As a matter of fact it wouldn't overheat immediately but some 15-20 hours later. Very strange. As soon as it wasn't sealed, it would stop overheating and would transfer the heat steadily for weeks. Keep in mind that the whole tank was stainless steel with some 50 liters of oil inside, hence the oil-to-air transfer was more than adequate.
That makes sense, because it took 15-20 hours for all that oil to become fully heated and reach its carrying capacity. Your stainless steel tank and passive conduction was obviously not adequate, or you wouldn’t have overheating problems. When it was unsealed, the air convection across the top of the tank carried enough heat that it wouldn’t overheat. In another comment you say you use a passive cooling Noctua heatsink. If you seal up your PC with shrink wrap, your CPU will still overheat due to the lack of that same air convection. In a sealed system, you have to actively move liquid through radiators. You can move as much heat as you want into a heatsink, if there isn’t a way to move heat quickly out of the heatsink, then you aren't doing anything.
Additionally: Sealing the tank would turn the airspace on top into an insulator, much the same concept as a double pane window. It would convert the entire top surface from a primary way heat is moved out of the system, through that convective circulation of room air, to a primary way to trap heat in the system.
Losing just the top surface would leave the steel sides largely in place for oil-to-air heat transfer. I'd think, given the odour problem, evaporation actually played a role in his cooling.
Could be. But, as soon as I would drill a tiny hole, just to release the pressure, the temps would go back to nice and cool, even though the top gasket/lid/cables is still in place. So my bet stays with pressure build-up. It's not that I tried the whole thing once. I had several prototypes and spent at least two years trying various things before I finally gave up and switched to passive air cooling exclusively.
Distilled water is surprisingly corrosive. Water is actually a very good solvent, but most water you encounter is already so saturated with dissolved minerals and such that it seems mostly inert.
Distilled water would work for a while, but will literally dissolve the metals on your board. Conductivity will of course creep up over time, but your main concern should be that the widget you're trying to cool is getting eaten by the coolant.
As an example, you may have noticed that air conditioner condensate can damage concrete. The condensate is pretty pure water, and physics really wants it to be less pure. The water is so reactive that it can rip the minerals out of cement, leaving just the aggregate behind.
If all that weren't bad enough, once you put a PCB in pure water and it starts leeching ions, you suddenly have an electrolysis bath with dissimilar metals. If you can't maintain the purity of the solution, you'll have a very bad time.
>In order for the light from these shockwaves to reach the sensors, the water has to be cleaner than you can possibly imagine. Super-K is constantly filtering and re-purifying it, and even blasts it with UV light to kill off any bacteria.
>Which actually makes it pretty creepy.
>“Water that’s ultra-pure is waiting to dissolve stuff into it,” said Uchida. “Pure water is very, very nasty stuff. It has the features of an acid and an alkaline.”
>“If you went for a soak in this ultra-pure Super-K water you would get quite a bit of exfoliation,” said Wascko. “Whether you want it or not.”
>When Super-K needs maintenance, researchers need to go out on rubber dinghies (see above) to fix and replace the sensors.
>Matthew Malek, of the University of Sheffield, and two others were doing maintenance from a dinghy back when he was a PhD student.
>At the end of the day’s work, the gondola that normally takes the physicists in and out of the tank was broken, so he and two others had to sit tight for a while. They kicked back in their boats, shooting the breeze.
>“What I didn’t realise, as we were laying back in these boats and talking is that a little bit of my hair, probably no more than three centimeters, was dipped in the water,” Malek told Business Insider.
>As they were draining the water out of Super-K at the time, Malek didn’t worry about contaminating it. But when he awoke at 3 am the next morning, he had an awful realisation.
>“I got up at 3 o’clock in the morning with the itchiest scalp I have ever had in my entire life,” he said. “Itchier than having chickenpox as a child. It was so itchy I just couldn’t sleep.”
>He realised that the water had leeched his hair’s nutrients out through the tips, and that this nutrient deficiency had worked its way up to his scalp. He quickly jumped in the shower and spent half an hour vigorously conditioning his hair.
>Another tale comes from Wascko, who heard that in 2000 when the tank had been fully drained, researchers found the outline of a wrench at the bottom of it.
>“Apparently somebody had left a wrench there when they filled it in 1995,” he said. “When they drained it in 2000 the wrench had dissolved.”
Part of that story sounds suspect. Hair is dead, besides the root/follicle. How could you remove nutrients from your scalp by doing anything to the end of your hair?
I wonder if the reporter didn't catch on and he actually had his head hanging in the water (so the water was touching his scalp).
Also the "even blasts it with UV light" isn't actually that weird. We have a well and we treat the well water with a UV light disinfector. What's stranger is why you'd need to worry about bacteria growing in ultra-pure water. What would the bacteria eat?
Unfortunately, not, because water is very corrosive, and easy gather many non-inert substances just from air.
This is very serious problem. I once talked with old support engineer from USSR, who have some experience with old water-cooled computers.
And he said, it was just nightmare, all those pipes periodically leak (some because rot, others become fractured) and in many cases, if water reach pcb, its broke.
Really problem was solved on Cray-2 (and later models) by use Fluorinert, which was so inert that was safe to literally drop boards into liquid.
Some persons even thinking, Soviets Elbrus was not successful just because USSR don't have companies like DuPont or 3M to produce something similar to Fluorinert.
Exists sea grade of electronics, which are covered by thick coating layer, but it is also non-ideal solution, could become fractured, and you cannot make coating on dip switches or on connectors.
I think distilled water would begin to leach metals and whatnot from the PCB making it conductive again. Certainly would need to be continually monitored and watch for corrosion. Flourinert is super expensive, we use it at work for gross leak inspection and filing a single small tank is i think 3-4k USD.
There was a project on reddit some years back where someone did exactly that. They had all the pumps and radiators in another room and ran the tubes through the wall, so it was an absolute monster PC running totally silent. A quick googling didn’t turn it up so I don’t know where to find it now.
LTT water cooled a whole room of workstations in a house some years ago. Those were some fun videos, in a horrifying sort of way. (And decided he wanted to do it again with his new house.)
I think you misunderstand the purpose of immersion. You still have to dissipate and radiate the heat. You can’t just do it with “any approach” because air, as a medium, cannot conduct as much heat. You will reach a maximum in air long before you reach a max in mineral oil. But it isn’t magic. The heat has to go somewhere. That is why liquid coolers have radiators and why air-cooled cases have vents to the outside.
Yes, a stainless steel tank has thousand times more surface to disipate the heat away than a bare CPU. Same with 1-kilo heatsinks, like, for example, Noctua NH-P1 which I am using for passive air cooling today.
Absolutely. It's all about heat exchange contact area, nothing more. Contact area can be increased by fins, or simply by mass. A cubic meter copper cube would still cool down a CPU adequately even without a single fin. Of course, fins are space-saving so everyone uses them.
It seems so. I would drill a 1mm diameter hole at the top to release the pressure and the temperatures would immediately drop. But then we are back to that horrible, horrible smell. I'm guessing that's why nobody sits next to powergrid AC/AC transformers (also submerged in mineral oil) but they are always secluded in a small room or left hanging high up on the pole. It's simply inhuman, that oil.
> It has also allowed an overclock of a QX9770 from a stock frequency of 3.2GHz, to an overclocked frequency of 4.6GHz!
I never understood the over-clocking obsession. Wait 6 months and the new hardware coming out will run faster than your mineral oil computer and cost the same as it always has.
a) finding out what's really possible vs what it says on the box can be fun
b) buying a lower cost model and getting similar performance to what you get from a higher cost model out of the box is a good value
c) sometimes you really need more performance, so nothing else will do
d) modern overclocking is more about tuning voltages lower, but not too low, so you generate less heat and can clock a bit higher, which can end up saving energy.
My buddy and I did this with a $1/ gallon fish tank, 8 gallons of horse laxative (heavy mineral oil - real cheap way to buy it in bulk) and a spare gaming pcs guts. it worked but wasn't impressed after it heat saturates - you definitely need to cool the oil after say 8 to 12 hours otherwise it probably is worse than air cooling.
the other downside is you absolutely need to dishwasher anything that was submerged and it makes one hell of a mess.
We did this in the late 90s with an old 486 to see if it actually worked. That's the earliest I recall seeing this. We played doom on it. As you note, it created a giant mess and pretty much immediately went in the trash as soon as we'd proven it worked.
I tried that approach and my experience was not positive. Over time, the oil embrittled the plastic parts on the motherboard so that the PCI slots just crumbled.
The smell was not an issue for me, I put the entire contraption onto a balcony and used a long VGA cable.
Unfortunately, while the Novec family had ideal properties for immersion cooling applications (and have been fairly widely used in these applications), they are also PFAS. Many of their "advantages" relative to mineral oil fluids come from a handling perspective (e.g. no smell, no obvious residue on immersed items, not flammable), but any handling just means you're unknowingly spreading PFAS around your working area. If you have to treat (appropriately) immersion-cooled systems using Novec as containing persistent environmental contaminants, the handling "advantages" aren't so clear.
Wow, I had no idea you could get such a turnkey kit today! I seriously doubt I'll ever have a need for an immersion-cooled machine, but I will definitely dream of the cool setups that could be built in this case.
At this point you are running thousands of dollars of sensitive electronics outside their design and testing whilst voiding your warrenty. Wearing out a few fans is probably tolerable.
Try it out and see has worked for a lot of people. Not all fans are engineered with no wiggle room, and likely most would fail sooner, but on the other hand, an immersed computer is more likely to run continuously, and startup is harder than continuous running.
The oil likelu provides better heat disipation for all parts of the fan as well, which could also prolong life.
Otherwise, with better disipation, you can probably remove fans from many components, possibly swapping heatsinks in some cases.
- "Unfortunately our mineral oil aquarium PC kit project has been alleged to infringe on the patents held by a company who holds several patents related to mineral oil cooling of PCs."
What risible clowns. How could you dream of patenting this—oil-immersion cooling, in computing, goes back *at least* to 1961 [0] (and there's probably even earlier prior art, I can't find citations for the vacuum-tube era but it'd be very likely they had tried something like that). It's the most obvious solution in the world. "Oil-dunk hot thing for more cold" is a bronze-age blacksmith's wisdom.
My comment was a bit harsh as I wrote it, but, it's genuinely so depressing to read about the cool things people create, and then seeing them vanish from the internet, as morals-less lawyers swoop in and claim various falsehoods—on the calculation that the victim won't have the resources to fight against professional patent trolls. Against experts who specialize in legal extortion, such as this example.
- "...regardless of how we felt about the validity of this patent pressure, we could not devote the time, finances and energy to take up that battle"
These types of predators are the natural enemy of HN.
You could patent this, but it would be on specifics of the process & design, like how the chassis are constructed (down to the fabrication steps), special/unusual components, and exactly how the heat dissipation works.
It should be basically impossible for some hackers in a garage to accidentally infringe on a patent without reading it. If it was infringing, it would be 1) extremely unlucky, or more likely 2) the patent was fatally vague to begin with, and should be invalidated.
Been there, done that. Useless in a home/lab environment. For a data-center - maybe.
In my experience, the oil is far from odourless. It seems that way at first, but after a while it saturates the room/house with very annoying smell. Several months later, and I had to get rid of that smell. Even went as far to build stainless steel tanks with gaskets used for car motors. But, when airtight, the whole thing looses it's thermal properties and starts overheating again. I guess because of pressure build-up. So, it is either endure the mineral oil vapors, or nothing.
On top of all that, pray you never need to replace/upgrade a component... getting the whole thing out of the oil and cleaning it up so you could handle it again - a nightmare.
>when airtight, the whole thing looses it's thermal properties and starts overheating again
Were you pumping the fluid through radiators? It doesn’t really sound like you were, which would be the obvious reason it would overheat. You have to actually transfer and dissipate the heat. What makes the immersion cooling so good is that it conducts heat so much better than air, you can add giant radiators and dissipate an ungodly amount of heat, so can run your equipment ungodly fast. You can’t just drop it into an aquarium of mineral oil and expect it to do much.
If it was airtight and there were heat transfer problems, the first thing I'd think is the pressure is probably below atmospheric and the fluid is boiling (or cavitating the pump if there is one). Say, if it was filled to the top while warm, then sealed, the pressure would drop as the oil dropped to room temperature and contracted (or not, depending on differential rates of thermal expansion cf the container).
Some air space at the top of the sealed container (preferably dry air or nitrogen) would fix that. Make sure there's a pressure gauge and some means of preventing overpressure, though.
It sounds like they didn't circulate the fluid through radiators and were just relying on natural convection to circulate the fluid and the open tank allowed for heat from the fluid to be dissipated into the air. So sealing it would cause it to overheat immediately, same as if you saran wrapped an air-cooled PC.
As a matter of fact it wouldn't overheat immediately but some 15-20 hours later. Very strange. As soon as it wasn't sealed, it would stop overheating and would transfer the heat steadily for weeks. Keep in mind that the whole tank was stainless steel with some 50 liters of oil inside, hence the oil-to-air transfer was more than adequate.
That makes sense, because it took 15-20 hours for all that oil to become fully heated and reach its carrying capacity. Your stainless steel tank and passive conduction was obviously not adequate, or you wouldn’t have overheating problems. When it was unsealed, the air convection across the top of the tank carried enough heat that it wouldn’t overheat. In another comment you say you use a passive cooling Noctua heatsink. If you seal up your PC with shrink wrap, your CPU will still overheat due to the lack of that same air convection. In a sealed system, you have to actively move liquid through radiators. You can move as much heat as you want into a heatsink, if there isn’t a way to move heat quickly out of the heatsink, then you aren't doing anything.
Additionally: Sealing the tank would turn the airspace on top into an insulator, much the same concept as a double pane window. It would convert the entire top surface from a primary way heat is moved out of the system, through that convective circulation of room air, to a primary way to trap heat in the system.
Losing just the top surface would leave the steel sides largely in place for oil-to-air heat transfer. I'd think, given the odour problem, evaporation actually played a role in his cooling.
Could be. But, as soon as I would drill a tiny hole, just to release the pressure, the temps would go back to nice and cool, even though the top gasket/lid/cables is still in place. So my bet stays with pressure build-up. It's not that I tried the whole thing once. I had several prototypes and spent at least two years trying various things before I finally gave up and switched to passive air cooling exclusively.
> Make sure there's a pressure gauge and some means of preventing overpressure, though.
Sure, if this was my data-center investment job. For home use, I simply switched to passive air cooling.
I mean, you can still get Flourinert (!!) and you can pretend you have a Cray.
But more seriously, would distilled water work? It should have minimal conductivity in theory.
https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/b40045180/
Distilled water is surprisingly corrosive. Water is actually a very good solvent, but most water you encounter is already so saturated with dissolved minerals and such that it seems mostly inert.
Distilled water would work for a while, but will literally dissolve the metals on your board. Conductivity will of course creep up over time, but your main concern should be that the widget you're trying to cool is getting eaten by the coolant.
As an example, you may have noticed that air conditioner condensate can damage concrete. The condensate is pretty pure water, and physics really wants it to be less pure. The water is so reactive that it can rip the minerals out of cement, leaving just the aggregate behind.
If all that weren't bad enough, once you put a PCB in pure water and it starts leeching ions, you suddenly have an electrolysis bath with dissimilar metals. If you can't maintain the purity of the solution, you'll have a very bad time.
As an aside about pure water being corrosive, ultrapure water is something else, as seen in the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector
https://www.sciencenewslab.com/this-beautiful-golden-chamber...
>In order for the light from these shockwaves to reach the sensors, the water has to be cleaner than you can possibly imagine. Super-K is constantly filtering and re-purifying it, and even blasts it with UV light to kill off any bacteria.
>Which actually makes it pretty creepy.
>“Water that’s ultra-pure is waiting to dissolve stuff into it,” said Uchida. “Pure water is very, very nasty stuff. It has the features of an acid and an alkaline.”
>“If you went for a soak in this ultra-pure Super-K water you would get quite a bit of exfoliation,” said Wascko. “Whether you want it or not.”
>When Super-K needs maintenance, researchers need to go out on rubber dinghies (see above) to fix and replace the sensors.
>Matthew Malek, of the University of Sheffield, and two others were doing maintenance from a dinghy back when he was a PhD student.
>At the end of the day’s work, the gondola that normally takes the physicists in and out of the tank was broken, so he and two others had to sit tight for a while. They kicked back in their boats, shooting the breeze.
>“What I didn’t realise, as we were laying back in these boats and talking is that a little bit of my hair, probably no more than three centimeters, was dipped in the water,” Malek told Business Insider.
>As they were draining the water out of Super-K at the time, Malek didn’t worry about contaminating it. But when he awoke at 3 am the next morning, he had an awful realisation.
>“I got up at 3 o’clock in the morning with the itchiest scalp I have ever had in my entire life,” he said. “Itchier than having chickenpox as a child. It was so itchy I just couldn’t sleep.”
>He realised that the water had leeched his hair’s nutrients out through the tips, and that this nutrient deficiency had worked its way up to his scalp. He quickly jumped in the shower and spent half an hour vigorously conditioning his hair.
>Another tale comes from Wascko, who heard that in 2000 when the tank had been fully drained, researchers found the outline of a wrench at the bottom of it.
>“Apparently somebody had left a wrench there when they filled it in 1995,” he said. “When they drained it in 2000 the wrench had dissolved.”
Part of that story sounds suspect. Hair is dead, besides the root/follicle. How could you remove nutrients from your scalp by doing anything to the end of your hair?
I wonder if the reporter didn't catch on and he actually had his head hanging in the water (so the water was touching his scalp).
Also the "even blasts it with UV light" isn't actually that weird. We have a well and we treat the well water with a UV light disinfector. What's stranger is why you'd need to worry about bacteria growing in ultra-pure water. What would the bacteria eat?
Well, surely you just need a sacrificial anode - nice block of zinc or magnesium wired to earth that you replace once a year.
Air conditioner condensate is not pure water though, it contains dissolved CO2 from the atmosphere aka carbonic acid.
All water in contact with atmospheric air does this. Same with other acid gases, but CO2 is the main one. See also acid rain.
> would distilled water work?
Unfortunately, not, because water is very corrosive, and easy gather many non-inert substances just from air.
This is very serious problem. I once talked with old support engineer from USSR, who have some experience with old water-cooled computers.
And he said, it was just nightmare, all those pipes periodically leak (some because rot, others become fractured) and in many cases, if water reach pcb, its broke.
Really problem was solved on Cray-2 (and later models) by use Fluorinert, which was so inert that was safe to literally drop boards into liquid.
Some persons even thinking, Soviets Elbrus was not successful just because USSR don't have companies like DuPont or 3M to produce something similar to Fluorinert.
Fluorinert was absolutely something the USSR could produce. You need fluoromers and fluorine chemistry for nuclear technology.
> Fluorinert was absolutely something the USSR could produce
May be. But in fact - not produced. And Soviet Elbrus computers used water cooling with extreme problems.
- I'm 100% sure, if it was possible for Elbrus designers to use Fluorinert, it would be used, but it was impossible, so not used.
Exists sea grade of electronics, which are covered by thick coating layer, but it is also non-ideal solution, could become fractured, and you cannot make coating on dip switches or on connectors.
I think distilled water would begin to leach metals and whatnot from the PCB making it conductive again. Certainly would need to be continually monitored and watch for corrosion. Flourinert is super expensive, we use it at work for gross leak inspection and filing a single small tank is i think 3-4k USD.
Distilled water is pretty inexpensive, so flushing it once a month or so would probably work.
I just had the funny thought of flushing my PC like a toilet.
> Useless in a home/lab environment.
Could you do something like a mini-split and put that half outside?
There was a post last month? The guy who built a lan party setup in his house. He used optical cables to reach the desktops from the rack.
There was a project on reddit some years back where someone did exactly that. They had all the pumps and radiators in another room and ran the tubes through the wall, so it was an absolute monster PC running totally silent. A quick googling didn’t turn it up so I don’t know where to find it now.
LTT water cooled a whole room of workstations in a house some years ago. Those were some fun videos, in a horrifying sort of way. (And decided he wanted to do it again with his new house.)
Yes, but then again, you could do that with any approach, even turbine-grade fans for loud air cooling. It kind of defeats the purpose.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of immersion. You still have to dissipate and radiate the heat. You can’t just do it with “any approach” because air, as a medium, cannot conduct as much heat. You will reach a maximum in air long before you reach a max in mineral oil. But it isn’t magic. The heat has to go somewhere. That is why liquid coolers have radiators and why air-cooled cases have vents to the outside.
Yes, a stainless steel tank has thousand times more surface to disipate the heat away than a bare CPU. Same with 1-kilo heatsinks, like, for example, Noctua NH-P1 which I am using for passive air cooling today.
And a radiator the size of the tank probably has another 1000x better heat transfer than the tank.
Absolutely. It's all about heat exchange contact area, nothing more. Contact area can be increased by fins, or simply by mass. A cubic meter copper cube would still cool down a CPU adequately even without a single fin. Of course, fins are space-saving so everyone uses them.
that is only for conduction, convection - the air mass flowing over the surface area is also a variable in thermal transfer
> when airtight, the whole thing looses it's thermal properties and starts overheating again. I guess because of pressure build-up
Does the oil actuallly avoid heating up that much by expanding?
It seems so. I would drill a 1mm diameter hole at the top to release the pressure and the temperatures would immediately drop. But then we are back to that horrible, horrible smell. I'm guessing that's why nobody sits next to powergrid AC/AC transformers (also submerged in mineral oil) but they are always secluded in a small room or left hanging high up on the pole. It's simply inhuman, that oil.
> powergrid AC/AC transformers (also submerged in mineral oil)
Older ones might use toxic materials like PCB though.
>The custom mineral oil pc project has always been intended as a cool conversation piece
Sounds like it worked :)
> It has also allowed an overclock of a QX9770 from a stock frequency of 3.2GHz, to an overclocked frequency of 4.6GHz!
I never understood the over-clocking obsession. Wait 6 months and the new hardware coming out will run faster than your mineral oil computer and cost the same as it always has.
a) finding out what's really possible vs what it says on the box can be fun
b) buying a lower cost model and getting similar performance to what you get from a higher cost model out of the box is a good value
c) sometimes you really need more performance, so nothing else will do
d) modern overclocking is more about tuning voltages lower, but not too low, so you generate less heat and can clock a bit higher, which can end up saving energy.
Factually untrue
Is that right? Was there some kind of ceiling at 3.2 GHz?
Where'd I say that? Clockspeed isn't everything
My buddy and I did this with a $1/ gallon fish tank, 8 gallons of horse laxative (heavy mineral oil - real cheap way to buy it in bulk) and a spare gaming pcs guts. it worked but wasn't impressed after it heat saturates - you definitely need to cool the oil after say 8 to 12 hours otherwise it probably is worse than air cooling.
the other downside is you absolutely need to dishwasher anything that was submerged and it makes one hell of a mess.
We did this in the late 90s with an old 486 to see if it actually worked. That's the earliest I recall seeing this. We played doom on it. As you note, it created a giant mess and pretty much immediately went in the trash as soon as we'd proven it worked.
I tried that approach and my experience was not positive. Over time, the oil embrittled the plastic parts on the motherboard so that the PCI slots just crumbled.
The smell was not an issue for me, I put the entire contraption onto a balcony and used a long VGA cable.
More moden take https://immersion-cooling.thermaltake.com/
3M has a whole paper [0] on their use of NOVEC for whole datacenter cooling and had a really cool demo [1] of it a decade ago
[0] https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1838765O/3m-fluids-for-d... [1] https://www.cablinginstall.com/data-center/article/16477494/...
Unfortunately, while the Novec family had ideal properties for immersion cooling applications (and have been fairly widely used in these applications), they are also PFAS. Many of their "advantages" relative to mineral oil fluids come from a handling perspective (e.g. no smell, no obvious residue on immersed items, not flammable), but any handling just means you're unknowingly spreading PFAS around your working area. If you have to treat (appropriately) immersion-cooled systems using Novec as containing persistent environmental contaminants, the handling "advantages" aren't so clear.
Wow, I had no idea you could get such a turnkey kit today! I seriously doubt I'll ever have a need for an immersion-cooled machine, but I will definitely dream of the cool setups that could be built in this case.
I really doubt that the fan motors in typical PC components, designed to move air, were made to endure the relatively extreme viscosity of oil.
At this point you are running thousands of dollars of sensitive electronics outside their design and testing whilst voiding your warrenty. Wearing out a few fans is probably tolerable.
Try it out and see has worked for a lot of people. Not all fans are engineered with no wiggle room, and likely most would fail sooner, but on the other hand, an immersed computer is more likely to run continuously, and startup is harder than continuous running.
The oil likelu provides better heat disipation for all parts of the fan as well, which could also prolong life.
Otherwise, with better disipation, you can probably remove fans from many components, possibly swapping heatsinks in some cases.
The authors of the article report that the fans ran just fine in oil, contrary to that same assumption.
If you really want to have fun, use ln2 (and make sure you have a well ventilated room, unless you want to asphyxiate).
when i was a kid i loved these setups. Now i just panic at the idea of loads of mineral oil everywhere
Still it's cool to see people making it work
It has been 25 years since the first PC immersion into a cooling tank.
It should be available for wide-spread commercialization, patent-wise.
Fluorinert was used as a coolant in some 80s/90s computers, including one of the first SFF PCs, the Ergo Brick.
I used to have that tank.
Biowheel filtration is the only way to go.
- "Unfortunately our mineral oil aquarium PC kit project has been alleged to infringe on the patents held by a company who holds several patents related to mineral oil cooling of PCs."
What risible clowns. How could you dream of patenting this—oil-immersion cooling, in computing, goes back *at least* to 1961 [0] (and there's probably even earlier prior art, I can't find citations for the vacuum-tube era but it'd be very likely they had tried something like that). It's the most obvious solution in the world. "Oil-dunk hot thing for more cold" is a bronze-age blacksmith's wisdom.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7030_Stretch ("The memory was immersion oil-heated/cooled to stabilize its operating characteristics")
My comment was a bit harsh as I wrote it, but, it's genuinely so depressing to read about the cool things people create, and then seeing them vanish from the internet, as morals-less lawyers swoop in and claim various falsehoods—on the calculation that the victim won't have the resources to fight against professional patent trolls. Against experts who specialize in legal extortion, such as this example.
- "...regardless of how we felt about the validity of this patent pressure, we could not devote the time, finances and energy to take up that battle"
These types of predators are the natural enemy of HN.
You could patent this, but it would be on specifics of the process & design, like how the chassis are constructed (down to the fabrication steps), special/unusual components, and exactly how the heat dissipation works.
It should be basically impossible for some hackers in a garage to accidentally infringe on a patent without reading it. If it was infringing, it would be 1) extremely unlucky, or more likely 2) the patent was fatally vague to begin with, and should be invalidated.
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