Cooling a PC with vegetable oil.
No mention of how much that sucker weighs with eight gallons of oil inside the case, but I bet it’s pretty hefty.
Vegetable oil is approximately .89 g/cc[sup]3[/sup]. 8 gallons is 30,283.2 cc. Total weight is therefore ~26,952 g or 59.3 pounds plus the weight of the PC. Yeah, a little on the heavy side. But, what do you expect when your PC is filled with fat?
It’s been done by several OCers and hardcore cooling enthusiants for years now.
But it KILLS your fans. They are meant to move air, not oil.
But I wonder…how often do people use a watercooling system and just replace the water with oil?
If you follow the pages in the link, you’ll see that they ditched the fans for that reason.
Not very often, if they’re smart. Water has about 2 1/2 times the heat capacity of oil. Plus, it’s considerably less viscous, so it takes less energy to circulate it. Overall, water wins as a coolant, hands down. Unfortunately, it readily dissolves many, many things and dissolved gases and stuff can make it corrosive, and can make it more electrically conductive, so for some things it’s not well-suited. Filling your PC with it is one of those things.
I wish they posted temperature readings.
I like the idea, but why vegetable oil; OK, it’s cheap, but it has a tendency to turn into sticky goo and is otherwise perishable. Why not a light mineral oil?
They did post the temperatures later in the article, the last couple of pages I think. And they actually recommended lightweight motor oil rather than vegetable oil as more stable, but they didn’t use it because it wouldn’t have looked as cool. I think a mineral oil might cause problems, wouldn’t it have more ionizing agents present?
Q.E.D., they actually tried out distilled water first. It would make it about 5 minutes, then short out. But it didn’t hurt any of the components.
I read something a few years ago about a kid who did this and had some pretty good luck. The case was a styrofoam cooler (although I seem to recall he made it) and he used aquarium pumps to move the oil around.
I sort of found the article I remembered. The mod was done by “Dr Freeze” back in 1999.
Here’s the slashdot entry for it.
I forgot the bit about dropping an air conditioner cooling unit in the oil. 
Rustlick EDM-500 looks promising; low viscosity, high dielectric strength, transparent, odourless, resists thermal degradation…
Oh, Man! I just found a picture of the stuff - the colour is a case modder’s wet dream.
Actually they reveal this in the first 4 words of the heading.
One fluid that is used is “florinert” - it is an ozone safe liquid floricarbon.
Non conductive, good thermal properties, etc. Not cheap though.
It is / was used to cool Cray supercomputers. Someone has used it in a home computer.
Brian
Ahhh. For some reason, I thought oil had a higher heat capacity.
What about antifreeze? Is that a better coolant than water? Is there any common chemical one can buy that won’t completly ruin a water cooling system or kill you that you can use?
Hmm, distilled water with Watter Wetter should work like a charm. It’s used in motorcycles to replace coolant. Added to water, in increases the heat capacity, has anti-corrosive properties, and is a cool pink color to boot!