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  1. #11
    Vanilla Server Manager ethe334's Avatar
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    The website says "Used For: Freshwater Fish, Saltwater Fish or Reptiles"Says nothing about a computer case


  2. #12
    So are you gonna take it to the next level and use use the liquid nitro method?

    I thought of the oil method but I heard ya gotta have a big pocket book for that.

    How much did that run you and how much more work is it replacing parts?

  3. #13
    TFC admin DigitallyFidget's Avatar
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    Well, really it didn't cost much. The computer is the expensive part, not the cooling.
    I bought all parts in the US, so all numbers are in USD.

    The cooling setup consists of 5 main parts.

    1: Oil for submersion
    2: Mounting brace for Mainboard
    3: Fish tank
    4: High flow water pump
    5: Radiator(s)

    For the oil you can use:
    Car motor oil (I reccomend the most watery type you can get)
    Vegetable oil (Not reccomended, it goes bad and smells)
    Mineral oil (Best, it never goes bad, only needs to be cleaned by coffee filters once a year)

    I got my mineral oil at Acoma Animal Clinic (a local veterinary office, or animal clinic). They have access to buy bulk gallons at a time, since mineral oil is commonly used as a laxative for horses or mid-sized animals, such as large breed dogs. At the time of purchase, I got it at a rate of about $13/Gallon, spending $192 for 15 gallons at a cost of $11.50 per gallon to them. Vellco(?) I think is the brand I got. I do reccomend getting mineral oil from an animal clinic because you will get the purest quality. I've noticed a lot of the on-shelf mineral oil when I was shopping around tended to be cloudy, and not in bulk quantity.

    The mounting I actually made myself, it's a sheet of acrylic, about 1cm thick that I picked up from Home Depot for arround $8. I cut it to make it two pieces, the back mounting and then the 'back plate' for suspending the whole thing that I mounted it to an old broken fishtank top and used metal posts to suspend it all in the mineral oil. The backplate I just drilled the holes into for the stand off posts to mount into, and then cut out squares between the screws to allow the oil to better flow against the back of the board.

    The fish tank I think I walked out of PetsMart with only spending like $16 on it after tax.

    I ordered my water pump online from FrozenCPU. They're an expensive store and slightly overpriced, but they don't sell crap. They only sell reliable products, so I'll pay the extra bit for a reliable product. My pump is still going strong, and it's about 4 years old. It's pushing two radiators@½inch guage with a Y split, it's a very high performance pump. The importance of a good pump is that oil is extremely thick and much harder to move than water, so the pump remains submerged to let it cool itself down and not burn out from the stress and resistance of not only the thick oil, but also from pushing through two 40x240cm² radiators. The pump I got was about $80. Given it's lasted 4 years, that's cheaper than buying crappy $30-40 low stress fish tank pumps that would die yearly (not something you ever want to have happen).

    The radiators are going to be the real pricey bit here. Ideally you want to mix the size of radiators with the performance of your pump so that your oil has a long linger time within the radiator in order for it to be there long enough to cool down before re-entering the system. If the oil passes through the radiator too quickly, it won't get cooled down enough. This is why I used a Y split and have two large radiators, because one radiator wasn't coming close to being able to cool the oil down. I believe each radiator costed me about $140 a piece, so $280 in total, and they're very good quality, I have no complaints on them at all.


    FAQ & Notes to think about:
    Q: Doesn't that damage the components?
    A: No, it doesn't. Though it can damage older capacitors from components older than 2008 as they have a large piece of rubber at the base of them that the mineral oil will cause to swell up and push the capacitor out of the circuit board. On newer parts, they're using newer capacitors, usually full shelled ones that do not have this problem at all, and the others have enough standoff that this problem doesn't exist along with the capacitors being made with less rubber at the base (cost cutting for the production side). So don't do this with a computer from 2006, not that you'd even want to.

    Q: Why do you have fans inside the oil?
    A: Though the oil is meant to cool the system and components, it does still need to move around, much like air. CPU heat is still an issue, you do still need a good heat sink to pull heat off the chip and disperse it into the oil, similarly as you would with air. You could use a liquid cooling block and piggyback a hose from the radiator output directly to the CPU block to also help with keeping the CPU cool.

    Q: What is the advantage of this? Why do it?
    A: Well, it looks cool, right? There's more to it than that. Mineral oil submersion cooling alone is not enough to allow you to do extreme overclocking. What it does more than that is it highly efficiently keeps your video card cool, and it keeps all of your components cooler than air cooling can do. I can get my CPU to 90C with enough overclocking, but I have never seen any component of the motherboard reach 40C, and the memory hasn't ever hit 45C before. This extends the lifespan of all my components. I have my RAM overclocked and overheating isn't a concern to me.

    Q: How much did you spend on this?
    A: About the cost of a very high end video card, between $500 and $600.

    Q: Can you even change out components after you do this? What if you want to upgrade something?
    A: Yes I can. I built it so after I disconnect everything, I simply lift the system up and out, usually I put it into a black trash bag and then transport it to the bathroom and set it down in the tub to be worked on. It's just a motherboard mounted to a frame, it's not much different from a standard case mounting at this point, except lots more space to work around. The heavy duty black trash bags seem to be free of static, unlike kitchen bags, probably due to the material).

    Things to note:
    Basic physics on this one, but this will not mean your computer makes -any- less heat than it did before. This only keeps the components cooler by dispersing the heat into the air more efficiently than normal cooling methods. If I stand behind my radiators, it's like standing near my oven when I'm cooking something. The room will still warm up just as much as before, possibly more (as more heat is being pulled off).

    You have to be careful with the wires and cables. The oil will wick through wires. So do not submerge the connection ports for USB/ethernet/video card ports/ect. I have seperate power supplies, one inside, and two outside, so I don't have oil wicking through that. The submerged power supply has a short power cable going to a connector at the top, and the oil can't wick through the solder points, so it's terminated there. You can do this same thing with the SATA cables if you're handy with soldering. I simply used 1meter long cables and deal with the small amount of oil that wicks through them. I lose maybe 10ml a year through all 12 cables for my HDD's.

    Mineral oil will petrify rubber. This means cables and the tubes you use to pipe the mineral oil will become solid and plastic-like over time. So keep that in mind when placing things. Silicone will not petrify to mineral oil.

    Mineral oil will destroy glues. If you have stickers and labels, they will come off, so peel them off ahead of time.

    Fake plants bleed dye. I have green tinted mineral oil now because I used fake plants in my system, so I have an ever-murky look to my mineral oil. The fish tank rocks do not seem to cause this.




    I think that's everything to be noted about this. I hope it answers everything, if not, feel free to ask me more!


    I'm a cat!

  4. #14
    HOLY. GOD. DAMN. HELL!!!!! This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen! How, the heck did you get that. My computer runs at about 60FPS and drops to 0 at irregular intervals for about 5 seconds......... I need that computer
    Last edited by talon6758; 21st April 2014 at 06:13.
    Gotem team

  5. #15
    Wow such wow, mine only runs 30-40fps on vanilla munecraft. But in AMP it will crash.... Its better than the one had before, it would run 5 - 10 fps xD and would freeze for 5 minutes in AMP

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