The Mineral Oil PC

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I drained all of the oil into 1 gallon jugs. This was more painless than I thought it was going to be.

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Empty tank!

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Up and running in Louisville! No problems at all.

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Awesomeness everywhere. I'll try to get a few shots of any good looking cases I see.
 
Elledan said:
I can smell the geekness from here.
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Smells like... cheetos, pizza and BO. :D

tranc3 said:
As I've said, the system looks awesome, i need to go to one of those big lans that looks like so much fun. I guess you have a quick drain at the bottom of the case? Glade to see it worked out one of my main things holding me back from a liquid cooled, or submerged case is the lans and moving it around.
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Thanks. This is only the second big LAN I've gone to. It's usually too much trouble to take my custom cases, but I do like to go once in a while.

As for the drain, yes, there is a drain on the bottom. I was having problems with it leaking earlier because the tubing I was using was too small, but I switched to a larger size and there haven't been any more problems. It takes about 15 minutes to drain completely into 7 separate 1 gallon jugs. Refilling it takes about the same amount of time. It was a lot less hassle than I thought it was going to be.

More pics!

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My neighbor at the lan getting some rest after a hard day's action. He was the loudest snorer I have ever heard.

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I left Sunday morning at ~9AM. Most of the folks were still asleep. I had to pull off the highway once because my eyes were starting to get droopy. Over the 3 days, I think I managed to fit in 7-8 hours of sleep.

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Some of the people were smart and brought inflatable mattresses. I'll definitely be doing this if I go again, my sleeping bag on the ground wasn't exactly the most comfortable setup.

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I made another panorama before leaving. This one is almost a 360.

Overall, it was a fun time but I don't know if I want to lug around the oil cooled PC again. I need a SFF shuttle PC or something for lans.
 
I'd imagine that a nice, small, light-weight, oil-less rig would be somewhat easier to take to a LAN, yes :D
 
i was just kidding. i dont think a sff oil rig would be possible. :D
 
ekuest said:
i was just kidding. i dont think a sff oil rig would be possible. :D
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Some would take that as a challenge....

Final Photo Shoot! Click the images for a high resolution version.




























Me!

Future work on the case:
Buy and install 2 SSDs and submerge them in the oil.
Attach the reset button.
Attach the power LED.
Connect the wire for the power to the LEDs in the feet.
Installs a few CCFL's above the radiators but below the tank.

Thanks for reading and sticking with me through the 3 month break!

To finish, I would like to thank my sponsors:
Crystalfontz!
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The crew over at Crystalfont supplied me with the CFA-635 LCD module and UberSCAB kit that I used in this mod. Thanks! Be sure to give them a look.

Petra's Tech Shop!
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I'd like to thank Alex Venz for the support by means of a discount and answering my questions. PTS also be supplied a XSPC RX360 Radiator free of charge. Check them out, it's always a good idea to support the smaller shops over big retailers like NewEgg.
 
fantastic job with this mod, mate. looks great, and i'm loving the monitor setup...
 
So...... I bought 2 red CCFLs. Hotttttt. These are all CLICK FOR BIG. The first pic especially looks nice in the original resolution.










The lighting is much more even in reality. The rear of the case gets more light than the pics show.
 
soundguy said:
ooh fun... looking great right there...
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Thanks.

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I hope that this oil seeping out of the foot is from my first leak (I never really cleaned all of the oil out of the bottom) and not from a new leak. I'll have to take the back off tomorrow to check. I felt all of the tubing that I could reach from the front of the case and there was no oil on any of it.
 
Fack. It appears that I have a new leak(s). I haven't pinpointed all of the locations yet, but it looks like the damned seals on the bulkhead fittings are going to pot already. On top of that, the tank itself is leaking in the back. There may be more locations. I swear, I have the worst luck with liquid cooling. I've lost 3-4 video cards to the water cooling gods and now this is the second leak in my oil cooled machine. I want to literally throw the thing out the f*cking window.

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This is the bottom threading of one of the bulkhead fittings that transfer the oil from the tank to the rads. The seal is degrading rapidly or expanding or something. Either way, it looks like oil is leaking through 2 of the 3 fittings. Fack.

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Even more serious is this leak. I got $10 on this leak being due to the acrylic expanding. I f*cking knew I should have sealed the joints with silicone. fack fack.

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And so out all of the oil comes. I'll deal with this crap some other time when I'm not so angry.


And it was all going so well.....

:(
 
Sorry to hear about those new leaks :(

It does show how complex this kind of project is, I guess.
 
This is so great, This is my favourite Worklog on [H]. I was wondering if there's a way to isolate the Thermal paste from the Oil? so you would get better temps on the cpu and gpu(s). Also I hope you solve the leak problems soon.
 
sorry to hear about the leaks. hope you get this shit figured out. its definitely one of my favorite rigs. good luck!
 
master noran said:
This is so great, This is my favourite Worklog on [H]. I was wondering if there's a way to isolate the Thermal paste from the Oil? so you would get better temps on the cpu and gpu(s). Also I hope you solve the leak problems soon.
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I suppose you could apply the thermal paste and the heatsink, and then use silicone sealant around the base of the heatsink...
The only issue is the little door that clamps down on the cpu... Sounds like an interesting mod to me.
 
I finally went to take a closer look at the leaks yesterday. While inspecting, I noticed that all of the caps on the motherboard are starting to pop off. They have a plastic base (my theory anyway) that seems to be swelling with oil and causing one side of the caps to come loose from the motherboard. The weird thing is that only seems to be happening to the motherboard; the video card, sound card, and power supply are all fine. I guess it's brand specific.
 
Sucks to hear that :( Oil really doesn't seem to like plastics well, and apparently these caps use one type which are particularly susceptible.
 
Bwahaha. One thing after another. Today's is: The 1 gallon milk jugs that I drained all of the oil into were leaking all over my god damned bedroom floor. Gah! I had them sitting on an oil soak pad and I walked into my room after work and decided that I definitely filled the jugs more full than that. So I picked one up to check under and yup, freakin' leakin'. The oil must have eaten through the thin plastic. I thought I had read online that the oil in milk jugs was resistant to mineral oil; guess not.

Now all of the oil is back in the original 5 gallon steel containers in the garage.

On the other hand, this has given me an excuse to purchase some new hardware! I picked up the following:
Asus M4A78T-E 790GX AM3 mobo
AMD Phenom X2 550 BE 3.1ghz cpu
OCZ ModXStream 700w modular psu
OCZ 3x2gb DDR3 1600 ram
MSI GTX275 gpu (holy crap this thing is a lot faster than my hd4850's)
4x1Tb Hitachi HD's (at $75 a pop, it's kind of hard to resist)

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New hardware in a temporary case until I build up enough will power to get oil all over myself.

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And as a side note, my wood case is making a come back! I bought a new mini Crystalfontz LCD for it and took the metal inner frame to get powder coated glossy black.
 
And finally for some good news, I'm happy to announce a new sponsor: Crucial!
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Kelly Sasso has kindly agreed to supply me with a brand spankin' new 128Gb CT128M225! Sweeeet. These just came out a few days ago and the reviews are trickling in.

Here's a few:
http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=351&Itemid=60
http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=850

Performance is almost dead equal to the OCZ Vertex (which I almost pulled the trigger on two of for some RAID 0 hotness). Can't wait to get it installed, thanks Crucial!
 
legoman666 said:
I finally went to take a closer look at the leaks yesterday. While inspecting, I noticed that all of the caps on the motherboard are starting to pop off. They have a plastic base (my theory anyway) that seems to be swelling with oil and causing one side of the caps to come loose from the motherboard. The weird thing is that only seems to be happening to the motherboard; the video card, sound card, and power supply are all fine. I guess it's brand specific.
Click to expand...

ah yes.

Electrolytic capacitors have a rubber 'endcap' . It's the most 'sensitive' bit on a motherboard when it comes to submersion.When I did the thinktank 1 , I actually sealed the electrolytics to the motherboard with silicone conformal coating.

I did a quick re-read of this log , I did'nt see if you listed exactly what Oil you are using ?

Also do you know what brand of caps are failing ?

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Nice work tho mang !

:D
 
OK, here we go. It's time to get this damn thing back into operation.

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My last updates said that I was experiencing technical difficulties. The gaskets were swelling and leaking, the silicone was swelling and leaking, and the tank itself had a small leak.

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Here you can see the small bead of oil along the joint.

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And oil leaking out of the bottom of the tank. :(

I let the machine sit for ~6 months because I was so frustrated at it. It's time to fix it.

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I ordered Viton o-rings for the bulkhead-through-fittings. Viton is a brand of fluoropolymer elastomer rubber that is supposed to be extremely oil resistant. We shall see... The caulk tube is Dow Corning 735, a supposedly oil resistant silicone.

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Close up of the O-rings. These weren't cheap.

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You have no idea how difficult it was to get the old ones off. I had to stop and take a break because I was getting so frustrated.

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Here's the old ones; swollen, squished and leaky.

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I sealed the leaky corner with silicone. I hope the stuff is able to stick to slightly oily surfaces. It's impossible to get all of the gunk out of a corner.

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I took the motherboard off. This thing is junked now...

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It's hard to get a decent shot showing the bulging caps.

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Here's one that swelled so much that it popped completely off the motherboard. I picked it off the bottom of the tank. I'm about to place an order on http://www.mouser.com for new caps. My intent is to desolder all of the caps on my current AM3 board and replace them with caps of equal value that do not have the rubber base.

Another interesting thing to note, the PVC Tygon tubing I used is completely hardened. It does not appear to work well with mineral oil. It shrunk and hardened so much that I can't get it onto the 1/2" fittings anymore. I'm afraid it's going to crack or something, so I'm going to replace it with Viton tubing, which is expensive as hell. $28.73/ft. Luckily I only need about 2 feet. This is only for the runs between the rads and from the bulkhead-fittings to the rads.

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Oooh yay, glad to see this back up :) Good luck with everything this time, can't wait to see more! :D
 
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