The Oil Computer

Yeah this is real, but you use mineral oil not veg oil as stated before. I did this myself in 99-01 with an old (Well not that old at the time) Celeron 400.

I got the idea from this site: http://64.45.45.116/index.html

Actully it does work. Olive oil doesn't conduct..

For all non-believers:
1
set up a bowl with tabwater
set up a bowl with oil

2
buy yourrself a voltmeter, wires, battery, lightbulb (small one)

3
make a circuit with the bulb, voltmeter, wires and battery

4
leave two wires unconnected
close the circuit by placing the wire-ends in the water, LET THEM NOT TOUCH EACH OTHER!

5
watch your volt-meter

5b
add salt to the water (1 spoon or so), stire the water

6
step 4, but with oil

7
redo step 5

conclusion: oil does not short-circuit
conclusion 2: oil is an insulator
conclusion 3: added salt in the water = lover insulation (=higher conduction)

WARNING do not try this with ac homepower! you get killed or wounded!

Can anyone say: Science Project? I've tried this a time or two before with older systems (K6 crap). For my upcoming Junior science fair, I'm going to build my old P4 system into a fish tank. I'll use mineral oil and go all out with the fake aquatic plants and fake fish/ light kits. Woot.

how about some kind of adaptor that lets you put
your processor off your mother bord then you could cool it all sorts of ways!

ITS DONE!!! I built my Oil PC! I'll post pics on my homepage, and post that addy here as soon as I can find my digicam. Here are the stats:

1800 mhz Pentium 4
Nvidia Geforce 4 MX420 64 meg video card
256 M/bytes PC2700 DDR RAM
And a measly 6.2 gig hard drive which has just barely enough space for Windows XP Professional and some proggies like winamp and some good MP3s.
No oil yet, waiting a couple of weeks until my HS science fair to fill it up, but it looks really trippy.

Hey. The thing works. But it works WITHOUT any fans. To do this oil tank REMOVE ALL FANS. There is no need for fans with oil.

Besides, assuming the fans don't burn out from the resistance first, wouldn't they just turn oil into vaseline or margarine?

I wonder what he was thinking as he was pouring a bottle of cooking oil all over his new motherboard...

im pretty sure this is wat he wrote in his journal that nite

dear diary,
i got high today for the first time, it was fun and then i noticed my pc was running very loudly, well of course me being high made me very irratated. so i went to the kitchen to get somethin to eat, remember im high. i grabbed random things and returned to the computer. i grabbed wat i thought was a 2 liter of soda i of course soon found out wat it was, and dropped the bottle, uh oh oils not for computers. but then i noticed it was still runing i of course thought this was entirely possible so i ran to the local walmart, literally ran. i bout a fish tank and oil, i was set for this expiriment. i put all my computer stuff in the tank except for the cd-rom drive and psu then poored in the oil the computer was still working. i thought i was a genious. now as i look back, that took a hella long time to clean up and i never did eat anything.



this was of course in german

Oil for the most part is NOT conductive, so the computer will not short out. But, you would want to find out which oil to use as well. Technically water is not conductive either, the contaminants in the water (salts, minerals ...etc) are what the electrons travel on. SO! if u had a completely uncontaminated circuit you could submerge it in deionized water and get the same effect (of course any particles of material that flake off of the circuit will cause trouble.

Also, deionized H20 is constantly searching for electrons to fill its valence level. Electrical current will cause the water to become charged (ionized) over a period of time. LIke you said, any mineral deposits on the board would further contaminate the water, decreasing its dielectric strength significantly. H20 is very impractical. Even if you could run the 100% of the water through a redistiller in a constant cycle, I doubt you could filter it enough to remove the risk of a short completely, and it would obviously be very expensive. Technically, ethanol isn't conductive. Of course, running 120 VAC through ethanol would result in an explosion or fire of decent size. Also not recommended. Your best bet would be something like super-refined oil (mineral oil) because it has been broken down and refined so much that its hydrocarbon chains won't break down, unlike cheaper oils (cooking, vegetable, baby oils) which cause raunchy smells and high viscosity. Mineral oil is also, at least relatively, inexpensive. You can buy it by the gallon at a hardware store or through chemical suppliers, for more or less $30.00 a gallon. Depending on your budget, you could also go with something that isn't oil at all, but rather an industrial grade superconducting fluid for capacitors or transformer units. Transformer oils run about $150.00 per gallon for the cheapest, recycled stuff, and upwards of $450.00 a gallon for the top notch stuff. I wish I could drop some names, but they escape me at the moment.

Cheers!

is it possible that i could just throw my laptop in olive oil? that would be quite the fun and this thing has overheating problems...

No, you can't. Here's why: 1) the hard drive on a laptop connects directly to the laptop's motherboard. On a regular PC, the hard drive interfaces via a cable, so the hard drive can be placed out of the oil. Because you are submerging the board, you would have to have the hard drive submerged as well, and you can't do that because it would ruin the drive.

2) Unless you were using an external keyboard and mouse, your keyboard would get junked up pretty fast from the oil.

3) Just because a PC is in oil doesn't mean it doesn't still need its heatsinks and fans. With a laptop, the heatsink and more specifically the fan are much weaker than those of a desktop. The fan would burn up rather quickly and you would have no circulation, causing your laptop to overheat.

4) Unless you physically removed all of the laptop casing, you would do MORE damage to your laptop than good by submerging it. Think about it, if you have a big fish tank with several gallons of oil, the heat is relatively evenly distributed, and because of the sheer amount of oil, the oil can effectively radiate that heat. If you were just submerging a laptop with its casing intact, the oil would fill the case, the heat from the components would transfer into the oil but have no way to escape efficiently, so it would continue to get hotter until the oil temperature equaled the temperatures of the compoenents, which would continue to get hotter until they burned out. Without adequate circulation, oil computers of any type, laptop or otherwise, are planned disasters.

Hope this offers some insight. If you have any questions, just write back to this board or direct any emails to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and I will help you out as best as I can. Oil PCs are great, I am typing this on one of mine right now....

Ummm, I think he was kidding, thanks for the info though!

I had the idea to make a case which would be as small as possible, possibly 12 inches by 16 by 6 and immerse my motherboard, processor, video card, and power supply. Then I want to take this further and put a pump right above the processor, pumping it to a car's heater core with one fan cooling it, then have it pumped back into the case, underneath the motherboard. This would be very cheap since the plexiglass isnt much, mineral oil who knows, heater core about 10 dollars and pump 10 dollars on ebay. any thoughts? I would be pretty confident at it going below zero with that setup, just not sure how far below..

I've read about this before. There are numerous comments about fans burning up--yes, they would. You can't use fans in such a system. You use big heat sinks but no fans on them--remember, oil cools far better than air.

ashley the stuff they put in crays is made by 3m, im trying to find out how much it costs per gallon but from what ive read it sounds expensive, its called FC7100 but i cant find the price for it, ive heard good things about Fluorinert also by 3m.

Flourinert is just over $545.00 new for 14 pounds of it, which is like 2 gallons. You can find it for about $179.00 per gallon, used. Not exactly practical.

ok, ive just built myself a plexiglass case, been getting the leaks out.. then im modifying my plan and am going to run the pumped mineral oil out and into a very modified dehumidifier, just on the cold core obviously. This should make it supercooled mineral oil :cheese:

Wow, kenny, that is an awesome idea. The cooling core in a dehumidifier is a reallly cheap way to get things cold. If you dont have any objections, I'd like to try this one out myself as well!

the trick right now is.. if you know how a dehumidifier works.. it has a hot and cold coil. For my purpose the hot coil serves as a hinderence so I am going to try and make this site not work... dunno how yet, but its not attatched to the cold side from the copper piping...

go ahead and try it, if you make any breakthroughs remember it was my idea lol.. also share your results

if you go using a refrigerant and heat exchanger to cool your oil, the oil is gonna become a hell of a lot more viscous, and all the noise of the refrigerator pump, and pumping the cold thick oil!

If you use a water cooled system for the CPU and GPU and such... it is using distilled water (PURE H20) which does not conduct electricity. The ions in the water or liquid is what conducts the electricity. If you have your computer submerged in pure h20 or have a water cooling system, the ideal temperature to have is about 20-30 celcius. Overlockers love this because they are now able to run the processor and GPU at speeds not recommended by the manufacturer, because if you didnt have a water cooled system the parts would overheat and die. If your system is cooler it will allow you to run your parts harder since the heat won't be an issue for destroying them.

in answer to the guy about putting your pc in a deepfreeze, you will have to let your pc warm up before it will work properly, if all the parts are cold they wont function right (your talking like -23 celcius) and if you acumulate frost on the parts, you will most likely destroy them when it melts, don't be a fool and ask retarded questions ok?

I think you answered questions from the first page... Anyone have any luck on case ideas? Bad karma did you try my idea?

Nah, not yet. Hopefully soon, though. About once a month a check Craigslist for dehumidifiers and such, almost got lucky a couple of weeks ago, but it was taken before I called the guy.

I'll keep you all posted tho.

I havent worked on mine in awhile.. had the plexiglass case built with one or two minor leaks.. using water to test for the leaks. So I have to fix that first, and my dehumidifier I accidently broke.. I realise it wasnt a good idea to try and seperate the cold and hot sides.. Theres a big pipe that carries all the gas/liquid inside, and it appears thats the only tube needed.. theres a little, what appears to be a wire on the other side, which turns out is just a skinny pipe (my guess a safety overload sortve thing) and I had cut that in attempt to seperate and had leaks and even though patching it back up.. it no longer works, big surprise. The reason why I wanted to seperate it in the first place was to make it flatter, since its sortve bulky. If you try doing what i did, you arent really allowed much room to flatten it because of the shortness of the pipe, I did however bend the big one so that instead of being located above the resivour, it was right on top of it, in a compact little form. Hopefully this is helpful in your design, and maybe will spark you to get working on it lol.

I work in the high-voltage power industry and can confirm that oil is one of the best insulators around. it is used in the largest transformers in the world insulating up to 1 million Volts. It is used because of its insulating and cooling abilities.
Therefore, direct-immersion oil computers ist the best cooling method.
For best result use low-viscosity oil, it moves more easily by own convection. Do not use motoroil, it is too thick and not clean enough though it would work. Ask your utility for a liter or so transformer oil. It can be aggressive to your skin and eyes so be careful!
A friendlier choice is veg oil. The cheapest will do. It also is a good insulator. However, veg oils are not as stable as mineral oils. It is a good idea to change it after 6-12 months.
Dont put the computer into liquid CO2. It is so cold it can crack plastic parts and IC housing. And you definitely can't reach superconductivity, this occurs at -190 C or so and would destroy your circuitry.

actually, i cant remember where i saw it, but some techies deep froze a laptop. the results turned out to be that it ran up to 25% faster, but they said not to atempt it, because frost will form on all your hardware creating condensation, creating shorts... and you know wat happens after that

Pastryhat, an interesting note. As most tech-savvy people will know the use of coolants for superconducting hardware is pretty common, especially in the field of radioastronomy; the aerial pickups and some of the computing gear is bathed in liquid nitrogen or liquid helium to increase both run speed and the sensitivity of the equipment to small signals that might be lost in resistance static.

A point brilliantly used in the end of the Bond movie "GoldenEye" when that Russian hacker though he was sooooo cool . . . Then the tanks burst and he _was_ 😊

Speaking of fictional approaches, has anyone else read the Ben Bova short story "Lowering The River"? An electronics engineer is put under a Management Facilitation Acountant who once read a copy of "wired" magazine and tells him to develop a room-temperature superconductor for the company in, say, a week or two. ( Deadlines are a prime management tool and always produce results.) The engineer does - By a rather lateral method.

If you guys want a bigger project you should look into an effective way at cooling the mineral oil before it goes into the case, I had talked about using a dehumidifier, since it has a cooling part on it and is easy to get.. however quite noisy so maybe something quieter?

Is this a page for 10 year olds?
How stupid do you have to be to think oil is conductive?
Sure this Idea works and has benn done multiple times! You would have to take off all fans you moron! 4godsSake just google!
jeeeez...!

thats constructive...

@The Dude: STFU.

Regarding pre-cooling the oil, I am going to set up a new system using the cooling pipes of a minifridge . I will have a high-flow aquatic pump moving the oil from the PC tank to a separate reservoir with the cooling pipes in it, and then back into the PC again. It should yield a significant temperature drop.

um hello if you read the forum i already did that... a mini fridge might not work as well as when i used the dehumidifier since a fridge's cooling component isn't on 24/7 just short bursts..

No need to get your panties in a bunch there, Kenny. The cooling apparatus in a mini fridge is on as long as the temperature sensor senses it needs to cool things. Once it reaches the desired temp it shuts the pump down until it rises above that temp again. Any oil-cooled PC would produce heat as long as it is on, meaning, presumably, the pump would stay active until it was manually shut down (usually with the computer). The only concern is that mini fridge pumps aren't designed to be running 24 hours a day, they need to cool down on occasion, which is why the PC would need to be shut down when not in use, or otherwise design the apparatus in a way that the pump would shut down when the PC was in stand-by or some other low CPU usage mode.

I, too, have considered using the cold plate from a dehumidifier, but the problem is that while one end of that cold plate produces 40ish degree coldness, the other end gets incredibly warm in doing so. You would have to find some way to effectively radiate that heat without transferring any back into the oil, which is somewhat hard to do because the cold plate would presumably be submerged in the oil and thus so would the hot side. Even if it could be designed an a way that this was not so, you still have to deal with the fact that the small cooling plate would likely not be efficient enough to dissipate more heat energy than was being generated by the PC components, whereas a mini-fridge would likely have the ability to subtract more heat energy from the oil and hopefully lower the equilibrium temperature of the oil significantly enough to make it worth it.

On that note, have you given any thought to some type of air-cooled system, where the oil is run through some type of device that drops its temperature down to ambient? I get that its not the most effective thing in the world, but I'd rather have my PC running at room temperature than 140 degrees...

http://www.flixxy.com/mineral-oil-cooled-computer.htm


'Nuff said.

EDM-500
High Performance Synthetic Dielectric Oil

A synthetic transparent fluorescent green dielectric fluid formulated from base chemicals so highly refined and purified that additional additives are not necessary. EDM-500's cosmetic-grade chemical formulation virtually eliminates skin irritation during use. Resists thermal degradation from high-amperage applications (withstands up to 400 amps) and offers the highest known dielectric strength of any commercially available EDM fluid. EDM-500 can be used with all types of filters; including: paper cartridge, diatomaceous earth, and edge wafer disposable cartridges.

Power and distribution transformers are oil cooled rather than fan cooled. The oil is also a constantly replaced insulation material.

As a deaf IT person who did electrical engineering this makes perfect sense. I would use ultra pure transformer mineral oil though.

For safety I would recommend a thermal fuse in the PSU that will trip at a temperature below the flash point of the oil.

The fans in conventional computers will destroy your hearing and are a bigger safety concern.

Hint: suspend the MB in the oil tank and have rear connectors at the top.

My question is what cools the oil? For example, you put oil in a pan on a stove and turn the burner on low. Wouldn't after awhile that oil heat up? So if the computer was constantly running, like a server, wouldn't the oil start heating up? I don't see this as being practical at all. I think a liquid cooling system is a much more practical thing to use. It's just a cool thing to look at, but I don't think its worth it.

You would have to do a similar idea to liquid cooling in having a radiator to cool it down otherwise just from being open to the atmosphere and room temp it might cool the oil down as well. The idea I had before was using a dehumidifier to supercool it.

Would lavender oil work??, sure would smell better, aromatherapy and quiet pc.

i am a truck drier and work on computers as a hobby, instead of a dehumidifer, has anyone tried a cooling unit from a 12volt cooler the one i have in my truck is a colman 12volt cooler runs about $70.00 usd the cooling unit itself looks like a large heat sink built into the lid. the top gets hot but the bottum getts down to 34degree 0r so! mounting it out side the oil would be the best aproch and using copper flex tubing woven throw the cooling side and a small pump to circulate the oil, and as far as it getting to cold couldent you power th 12volt cooler and pump off the mother board fan plug it would have a temp sensor already and turnn them on and off at the apropreate times and levels! and i have sean several postings as well on frezing the board as well the used a silicone caulking to prevent condensation build up in the circuits!

Well even if that worked, may as well just go liquid cooling. I run normal liquid cooling and i get around 28 degrees or so. Not trying to ruin your idea though. Im not sure if itd work because im not sure if those kind of coolers have a high enough rate of heat transfer. Yes it may get cold/cool but the rate of heat transfer im sure would be too low and itd just overheat.

This is old news, and true!
There are already retail oil PC's

Even a mix of oil, water and electricty I believe in the highest end model.
Which is stupid if you ask me...

An Air cooled system is cheaper and can produce the same results, just with an audible humm.
Approx 45-50dba on each High speed fan these days

These are just designed to run silently and/or OC.

I agree. The mineral oil idea and fridge ideas are interesting but most air cooled systems and a good liquid cooling system can definitely out perform them without the weight or mess

Thanks P100 and go to work overclocking :D

this works grate i did it the downside is if you spill it you will have a hard time getting the oil out of your carpet.