Does anyone know what the UK name for Mineral Oil is?

[Red Charlie]

Mainly the oil that features in this computer build?

Just I have been checking everywhere online for a defination after checking with the chemists and hospitals.

A friend of mine thinks it might also be used a horse laxative which is confirmed by the website that created the video but my darn vets aren't open til monday evening.

Anyway anyone know what the UK defination of it might be?

I'm gonna dump my old pc in and hook it up to a radiator and see how much I can overclock it by before it fries.
Setup looks awesome doesn't it?

[spartanhelmet]

According to this, your best bet is it goes by "liquid petrolatum" in the UK. The "other names" section mentions parafin, but that's one kind of mineral oil... who knows if it's the same.

Seem's the stuff's also mass produced and therefore cheap, so it might be a good thing to do cost wise

[Sable]

"Horse laxative" is really going to be your best bet.

That's the only way I've found to get gallons and gallons of the stuff - you might be stuffed till you can find a vet. The ones I've dealt with always give me a bemused expression, but hand over the right paperwork anyway.

[Beta-guy]

I want to do that soooo bad I bet you could overclock quite nicely... but I would still be afriad of frying my hardware, it just seems wrong submerging a computer in anything... but it's still cool, and I wouldn't mind trying that on old HW...

[huddlehouseninja]

Holy crap! I do want!!!!! That was sweet!

[Dr Frankenjam]

What the crap?
Why does that work?
Why doesn't everything just fry?

[Beta-guy]

What the crap?
Why does that work?
Why doesn't everything just fry?

Mineral oil is used in a variety of industrial/mechanical capacities as a non-conductive lubricant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_oil

without it conducting the electricity the system should run just fine... however I still don't feel safe sticking expensive parts in mineral oil...

[Dr Frankenjam]

If i could be absolutely certain that it would work, and i'd built the best PC i could afford i might think about doing that because for one... it looks hawt! I mean you could put any number of neons in there and get awesome looking results.

Apparently runs silent as well?

[mooseblaster]

In the UK, mineral oil is known as... mineral oil. The confusion occurs as to what grade and flammability it has changes it's name - everything from motor oil to liquid paraffin to Vaseline can be called 'Mineral Oils'.

Your best bet is Shimano Mineral Oil, used for bike lubrication for about £11 a litre:

http://www.cyclestore.co.uk/productDeta ... ctID=11184

[Red Charlie]

Bascially I have an old pc that I'll be using as my own experiment.

According the website thats in the description of that youtube page there maybe a certain problem with the oil interacting with the processor and causing it to degrade but they haven't noticed anything yet (they did try to seal it but apprantly it was really poorly done).

I have a nice sized fish tank, but like that video I'm gonna need in the region of 6-8 litres of oil to fully submerese it.

The tank already has pipes already built into it and I so happen to have one of those funny anti-damp vents underneth a floorboard in my room so that will be my ventalation using a similar prinicpal to this video, but underneth my house and no ice/water.

Do you think I should pipe cooled water into the oil or should I pump the oil out of the tank and into the air?

[Sable]

Bascially I have an old pc that I'll be using as my own experiment.

According the website thats in the description of that youtube page there maybe a certain problem with the oil interacting with the processor and causing it to degrade but they haven't noticed anything yet (they did try to seal it but apprantly it was really poorly done).

I have a nice sized fish tank, but like that video I'm gonna need in the region of 6-8 litres of oil to fully submerese it.

The tank already has pipes already built into it and I so happen to have one of those funny anti-damp vents underneth a floorboard in my room so that will be my ventalation using a similar prinicpal to this video, but underneth my house and no ice/water.

Do you think I should pipe cooled water into the oil or should I pump the oil out of the tank and into the air?

The guys from Puget - the same company you linked to - had a pretty screaming machine running some kind of looped demo at PAX last year. It was just in a tank with some bubbling and the usual fans running (CPU and PSU, no oil circulating) and they said it would run for eleven hours at 100% in a hot room with no circulation before it thermaled.

Unless you're planning on doing 100% run all the time, you probably won't need to do anything at all.

[Red Charlie]

The guys from Puget - the same company you linked to - had a pretty screaming machine running some kind of looped demo at PAX last year. It was just in a tank with some bubbling and the usual fans running (CPU and PSU, no oil circulating) and they said it would run for eleven hours at 100% in a hot room with no circulation before it thermaled.

Unless you're planning on doing 100% run all the time, you probably won't need to do anything at all.

I was thinking of using it for this purpose and hosting a game server so it might be running at 110% as I tempted to overclock as well if I can.

[Sable]

You're still not going to be running CPU/GPU/RAM/etc. at 100% of their rated power and heat dispersion doing that. You can overclock all you want, but if you're not stressing the machine to 100% all the time, you aren't producing 100% (or 110%, or whatever) of the machine's maximal heat output.

The machine Puget was using was actually stressing the components to near 100%, meaning it was outputting every watt of heat it could, continuously. It was doing this by running a realtime 3D demo (It might have been a Futuremark benchmark) on a continuous loop.

[Red Charlie]

We'll see how it goes. I'm not too bothered about the whole thing. If I tell you the truth I kinda hope to maybe push it really hard. Do you think the contacts would melt before the unit did? Or would all the heat be sucked into the mineral oil?

As a side note I wonder how fast mineral oil absorbs heat?


Back to my other question as well (since I'm gonna do it anyway). Do you think pumping water through in tubing through the oil is a good way to cool it or pump the oil itself? Just with water I will prob only need the one pump where as with oil to get it outside and back into again I may need two or three to keep the pressure up.

[Cake]

As someone who works in a data center and sees entire rooms cooled by chilly water (and glycol) I say yes. But remember your surface area to volume ratio. Also, we have CRAC units that bring the warmer air in, and kick out cooler air.

[Sable]

We'll see how it goes. I'm not too bothered about the whole thing. If I tell you the truth I kinda hope to maybe push it really hard. Do you think the contacts would melt before the unit did? Or would all the heat be sucked into the mineral oil?

As a side note I wonder how fast mineral oil absorbs heat?


Back to my other question as well (since I'm gonna do it anyway). Do you think pumping water through in tubing through the oil is a good way to cool it or pump the oil itself? Just with water I will prob only need the one pump where as with oil to get it outside and back into again I may need two or three to keep the pressure up.

Contacts are low-resistance current sources - the chipsets themselves (RAM blocks, CPU, etc.) are going to be your heat sources, which should transfer to the mineral oil as quickly as the oil will allow. While I don't feel like doing the specific gravity and heat capacity calculations for a tank full of mineral oil, I have no doubts whatsoever as to its ability to carry heat away from the components.

If you wanted to cool it, I would suggest using the existing tubes inside the tank to pump cold water through. You might want to install some kind of circulation (just a 120mm fan or something) to stir the oil around your tubes (which will act as a simple heat exchanger) for slightly better performance, otherwise pure convection currents should take care of everything indefinitely.

I still believe, however, that under the circumstances you are describing, simple passive cooling of the tank to the outside air will suffice. If you want to cool it, passing cold water through the existing structure of the tank will probably yield the best results.

[Dutch guy]

If you want to do this I would actually advise against pumping water through the tank. The whole reason to use mineral oil is that it does not conduct electricity. If one of the pipes on your cooling system leaked and water dropped into the tank it would sink to the bottom and start forming a layer there.Iif it's a fast leak it could short a few things out before you become aware of a problem.

Passive cooling should be enough to get things working as far as I know. If you really want some sort of cooling system, I think it might be a good idea to buy some heat-pipes and use an internal headsink linked to an external heatsink via these heat pipes (the basically are pipes with some sort of chemical in them that lets them conduct heat away really fast). You can then cool the external heatsink without danger using whatever method you want.

I have seen this done a few times, but never attempted it myself.

[Red Charlie]

See the thing is about the tank is that I might as well have some form of coolant running through because the tank has output/input pipes on it to move the oil. By the sounds of things having the oil out of the tank and circulated sounds better I'll just have to find a strong enough pump to run it.