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I have a question, instead of using water for my custom loop could I use j20a hydraulic oil?J20A Tractor Hydraulic Fluid is formulated to resist leakage. It contains detergent/dispersant, anti-wear, anti-rust, and anti-foam additives. it's cheap and I have lots of it sitting around the house

Where to start? Preamble So I saw Linus' Mineral Oil Build Log when it came out and I thought it was amazing. When it came to doing my A2 Project for Graphics (UK) I was obsessed with Mineral Oil PC's. The only Problem being, I was a Graphics student not a Resistant Materials student. So without any thought on the matter I switched to fulfill my stupid fantasy of making a Mineral Oil PC from scratch. I have plenty of CNC experience but no wood or metal working skills to speak of. I have built a couple of PC's before which were quite high end, but have never water cooled let alone oil cooled. Concept I Initially wanted to copy the Puget Systems build idea as it would literally just involve me Laser Cutting and gluing Acrylic panels. This idea was superseded by imagination and ambition which got the better of me. I decided the easiest way to achieve a high grade in a subject I have not much experience in was to create a circular design... Anyway its use is as a media server for my Dad and the design must fit in with his house (Hardwood was everywhere). Airflow for the Rads is one 120mm outtake fan with a vent on the back, and a 5mm gap in the lid for the difference in air pressure to draw air in. I was banking on the system being low power enough for the 400l/h pump and thick rad to keep the oil cool. I know the spec isn't really server focused at all but I had to next to no funds to build this after buying materials. Spec List I know the spec isn't really server focused at all but I had to next to no funds to build this after buying materials. I had a Budget of £400, which I found later was not nearly enough as Mineral Oil is sooooo expenisve. I persuaded my school to give me a grant of £100 for the oil. The rest of the money was spent on the spec: - Phenom x4 965 - MSI Twin Frozr3 R7850 - 960GM-VGS3 FX - 128gb Non branded SSD - 1Tb HDD - 120mm Magicool Rad - Phobya 220 12v Pump - Blu Ray Slim drive - Windows 7 64bit - 8Gb DDR3 - 450W CoolerMaster PSU (I think I removed the sticker so can't quite remember now) Materials The only thing I had to buy pre-made was the acrylic tube for £60. The wood was sourced locally and is an eclectic mix of Hardwoods. I spent £30 on copper piping and fittings. Another £25 was spent on switches and wires. I had to perfectly laser cut a circular disc to fit perfectly inside the tube and then glue it in place. I also laser cut the hanging piece of acrylic and bend it to a right angle to mount everything. The upper section was Laminated together from wooden rings I cut out from the hardwood. I had a fair amount of help to build this due to my inexperience. Finale Well unfortunately not quite. I started the build in Jan 2016 after much planning. "Finished" in May 2016. I say finished because it was only finished to the level of allowing me to get a grade. Unfortunately the GPU artifacts horrendously after installing the drivers. After Messing about for hours before the deadline I found out the problem is the PCIe connection. I don't know whether or not the Motherboard or GPU is broken as wiggling the card around in its slot fixes it incredibly briefly. This is probably my fault as the I/O shield had to be scrapped to finish the build in time and as such the card is zip tied to the wood to stop it wobbling. Because the GPU is broken I didnt put the oil so I also don't know if the pump system works annoyingly. I believe this is what you call a 50ft mod. I am incredibly proud of how the PC turned out but when you look inside at the mounting system you can tell the rush and manic solutions I had to find to finish in time. Aftermath For those wondering my practical grade was a B due to the interior being very rushed, but my overall grade was an A. I have just got the computer back and intend on finishing it but just need to save up for a GPU and fix some fittings and pray to god the oil hasn't gone off or something. As well as the pump working and being fast enough to keep everything cool with only 1x 120mm rad (although it is very thick). I did test the tube for leaks with water, but I am slighlty worried about oil dissolving the glue or heating up with the system and leaking somehow (When i eventually put it in). Pictures below of water test, and system booted into a BIOS. So yeah hopefully I can fully finish it soon! Photos

Linus since you have made your mineral oil pc log in 2014 I have wanted to make one. Now that my computer need upgrades I want to do it but Puget doesn't sell the case anymore. That's why you should build another one to show people how to make this pc without the Puget case that we can't buy now.

I have a neat idea.(famous last words) what if we could use mineral oil in a sealed system which encases just the cpu socket of the mobo. Heat from the cpu goes directly into the oil which can be run through rads or something else crazy. No blocks or heat pipes.

Hi, I intended to make this a few months ago after I finished my Oil build, but never go around to it. So I thought I'd make a summary of the experience so that anyone else who is planning on doing this can reference it. So about 7 months ago I decided to throw caution to the wind and purchase all the stuff for an Oil cooled PC, it's something I'd always wanted to do but had never had the time or money to do. So the first iteration worked extremely well for about 12 hours and then the fish tank that I'd used developed a crack and spilt oil everywhere (Note, washing up liquid is your friend). No worries, I went to the pet store a few days later and got myself a more expensive fish tank which I felt confident would be able to hold the oil. I then bought a cheap case to cut up so that I could use it as a motherboard tray and lid. I put the newly built PC in the oil and filled it up and it worked. I began testing and all seemed fine until about 1 hour of gaming had passed, at this point the oil had heated up to such an extent that the CPU and GPU were both pinned at 90C even whilst idling, the fish tank was radiating so much heat that it was uncomfortable to be in the same room as it and it burnt my hand to touch it. I began just using it as a media PC, which wasn't ideal as it made a lot of splashing noises.Eventually, I stopped using it all together and it started to gather dust, at this point the oil had splashed along the top and it meant that everything stuck to the PC so it was extremely dirty. So a few months passed and the place I worked decided that they needed to me to do some Video editing (Before working there I used to do a lot of free-lance content creation for companies), this was all well and good, so I drained the PC and hauled it to work, re-filled it and then it just went tits up. First, it wouldn't boot, then when it did the CPU was pinned at 40C and starting any task would overheat it. At this point I retired the PC and decided to put it back to an Aircooled one.I've not seen any documentation of this so I thought I'd give you guys a rundown of what I did. First, I took my system out of the tank and placed it in 5 bin bags and then a box to transport home, Once home I left it outside in my shed to drip dry for 2 days, after this I sat all day drying the system with a hair dryer on the cold setting and 2 rolls of kitchen roll. After a day and a lot of disassembly, everything was dry enough to put into a dry system (It's still got a fair bit of oil on it, but it's not coming off). One new PSU, Case and CPU cooler later it's still not working perfectly, but it's allowed me to type this on so it'll do for now. If you are going to do an Oil cooled PC build please for the love of God follow the below advice; - Don't buy cheap, you'll buy twice and it makes a mess - Washing up liquid is your friend, use it. - Be prepared to spend a good few days on maintenance - Don't expect it to work straight away - Never move it around - Keep it as clean as possible - Plan ahead. If you've got any questions let me know, I'm happy to answer anything regarding the subject. For reference, this is the System I had submerged - Intel i7 4770K Stock cooler MSI Gaming 3 Z97 Board 8GB AMD Gaming RAM Zotac GTX 970 Corsair CS650W PSU Sandisk 256GB SSD

Hi! So I've been working on a mineral oil pc for some time now, I just got some new rads and flushed them through with water to clean them out, nothing in them at all which was nice. But I'm just curious has to how long it will take for the water to evaporate and dry out inside the rads, I'd like to avoid having water in my system. The config is 2x Dual rads 120mm. Thanks!

Hey Guys! So I finally completed my Mineral oil pc recently, it's been running really well. I decided to stress test it using heaven benchmark over night to see how hot I could get the oil, as I still hadn't got it past 20c. I managed to get it to around 45-50c, but I also noticed by the time it had reached this temperature, my USB RGB LEDs had all colours dimly lit, and my mouse was flashing dimly while not working. The only peripheral that seems to be working is my keyboard, I figure this is because it doesn't require much power. Any ideas as to why this might have happened? Or how I could fix it? at this stage I'm thinking I'll try a powered USB hub. Thoughts?

So I ran across this on Ebay. http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/401110345669?lpid=82&chn=ps&ul_noapp=true Can someone tell me if this is the actual tank? If so I may go buy it for a Mineral Oil PC.

Lately I've been strongly considering building a mineral oil cooled PC and I was wondering if it is safe to submerge my H110i in oil and mount the radiator off of the side of the tank. Thoughts?

Hi, I live in the toronto area in Canada. I am trying to build an oil immersion cpu. Where do you think I could order 8 galons of Mineral oil here in Canada? I saw STE from the states. Is there any alterantive? Thanks in advance.

Is there any reason why I've never seen anyone use an oil filter on a mineral oil PC? I'll admit I haven't seen too many mineral oil PCs, but it seems like a simple fix to one of the biggest mineral oil PC problems, dirt.

So I was watching the mineral oil builds on LTT and got a crazy idea could you take something like the hydro 212 submerge it in mineral oil? maybe create a box around it or flip a motherboard upside down on a tank?

Hello lads, A thought crossed my mind, What if I put Mineral oil inside a closed loop system, and frankly what I've found out on some older posts that my necromancy skill didn't allow me to resurrect, was astonishingly miss informed, I currently have an AIO, my system barely needs even that amount of cooling, so with some key points I'd like to point out, I'd like to discuss with some crazies that done/ want to do, some more unusual liquid cooling solutions. First things first let's dive down to some numbers: Specific heat of water is around 1 kcal/kg, and its viscosity is around 1 cP@20ºC, but let's be more realistic and place it at 0.9cP@40ºC, the idle temp of most loops. The specific heat of Mineral oil is around 0.4 kcal/kg, so it transfers heat at more than double the speed of water, so that fluffer that keeps saying in every single forum that I've visited that mineral oil is an insulating liquid can go plow a troll, it's viscosity is around 44cP@20ºC or ~15cP@40ºC, so it would require a larger than average pump to maintain a steady flow, but before you scream that at a minimum it's 15 times the viscosity, I'll say it now, NO you don't need 15 pumps worth to pull that liquid a single D5 per block SHOULD be ok. Next and for now last is 99% isopropyl alcohol With a specific heat of 0,6 kcal/kg, a viscosity of ~2cP@20ºc or ~1.6cP@40ºC, this is the fun part, Isopropanol has a boiling point of 80ºC@1atm, so theoretically he should vaporize with a random AMD'esque spike, pulling even more heat with his latent energy and even more heat if he becomes a gas since his specific heat is even smaller when in gas form, but there are many problems with isopropanol, main one being that he tends to vaporize in ambient temperature something that requires a whole post just how to deal with that. But now for the elephant in the room, that I haven't addressed, seals and o-rings, in short, I'll make a general rule for exotic liquids: EPDM (the usual run of the mill rubber seal): Water, acids and Ketones, grade A, against every other compound, DON'T TRY IT. NBR: A monster of a rubber, he's resistant against most forms of chemical attack, and he's made for oil like substances, just get ketones away from him. Some other words of advice, All acids will corrode all metal parts in the loop, and mineral oil will break apart PETG, Acrylic is fine for mineral oil, but I wouldn't recommend it for Isopropyl, it tends to stain and bloat, if you truly want a mad scientist closed loop I'd recommend glass tubing. The main thing I'd wanted to clear up was those god-awful "facts" about the properties of mineral oil, But do feel free to post crazy cooling solutions like vodka, or orange juice cooling.

You have all seen the video by now. great stuff. My question is, could they submerge their pc in mineral oil to prevent condensation build up? anyone know how mineral oil behaves at low temperatures? I had just heard on the gamers nexus live stream that linus was invited by a brewery to use their industrial chillers. I was thinking this is a possibly a good way to prevent condensation build up. ALTERNATIVELY. There is novec 7000 which can operate in temps as low as -120 Celsius. Only problem is i have no idea how it interacts with water. http://www.me.umn.edu/courses/me4331/FILES/NOVEC7000.pdf

Looking to make another gaming PC. Here's the thing, I've always wanted a desk PC (i.e. all components mounted within a desk) and I've heard good things about the cooling efficiency of mineral oil builds. So, has anyone ever built or have any ideas on how to combine both and make a mineral oil desk pc?

Hi all, New to the forum (not to LTT) thought I would share with you my mineral oil PC build Hardware: ASUS Z170 Deluxe Kingston 8GB 2133Mhz x2 Skylake I7 6700K (O.C 4.6Ghz) Cooler Master Hyper 212X with Corsair SP120 fans x2 Samsung 860 evo 500GB Samsung 960 NVMe 250GB Corsair CX850M x2 ASUS Strix GTX980Ti x2 (stock fans & shroud removed and replaced with Corsair SP120) x4 I/O from a cheap Bitfenix case All thermal paste replaced with thermal grizzly conductonaut All fans are set at their max rpm (1500) Case: The fishtank measures 40cm x 40cm x 60cm and is all glass The mobo is attached by 40mm suction cups that have m4 screws set in them The bottom of the GPU's I/O plate had to be cut The mobo header / I/O panel is attached to the unit next to the tank One PSU powers the mobo, CPU and peripherals and the other PSU is just for the SLI 980Ti's I have 2 x LCD temperature stickers in the tank to monitor oil temp. Air pump and several air stones are underneath the pebbles 70 Litres of white mineral oil used Aquarium overhead LED light Temperatures: Before the mineral oil (with the corsair fans etc all set up inside the tank) the GPU stock temps would hit 80C+ after only about 20mins on 3DMark timespy / firestrike with similar performance in games too after 30mins or so. Random FPS drops occurred and GTAV 4K Ultra settings managed 30-50fps with similar results in BF1 CPU temps idled at 30C and plateaued at 80C after an Hr of stress testing and hit 70C when gaming With the mineral oil, GPU temps sat around 30C and 40C and the CPU around 40C after 30 mins with FPS hitting the 60 limiter throughout (see picture) The oil temp went from 28C to 34C during testing so next step will be to add an external radiator and pump setup (however anything under 3 hours of continuous gaming should be achievable as oil temps will theoretically be less than 60C) I have not had a chance to overclock the GPU's yet (I have had them at 1500Mhz when the original fans were working) but will keep posted with O.C results at some point. (CPU is at stable 4.6Ghz @1.34V) The reason for butchering the GPU's was due to eventually ALL of the fans failing on BOTH of the cards (known problem on the ASUS Strix 980Ti's) (Will upload some videos to youtube at some point, the short video here does not do it justice as it had to be cut for 20Mb file size) Let me know what u guys think! IMG_4267_Trim_Trim - Copy.mp4

Hello friends. I'm trying to submerge my Raspberry Pi 3 in mineral oil to make it kinda look cool on my desk. At the moment my raspberry is serving me as a NAS and also a PLEX server. I've seen some builds on youtube but there are made in few different ways that don't fulfil my thoughts. As you know, an raspberry pi has its operating system on an SD card. People building oil cooled raspberry's on youtube are submerging the SD cards as well. Going back on Linus's oil cooled PC video, he placed the SSD outside the tank for some reason. I know for sure that mineral oil will make an normal hard drive not to work because it has some moving parts but my question is, will the mineral oil attack the SD card in time? People also submerging all the USB cables and power cables as well. Checking Linus's video again, he mention that the mineral oil attacks rubber parts too making decomposing these parts into the oil and making it look awful. Is there any type of cable that's not going to be destroyed in time by the mineral oil? Thanks!

I stumbled upon pictures of Intel's Hades NUC motherboard, and thought to myself, how cool would it be to shove it in a round fishtank, and mineral oil cool it. Now, here's the thing, Ideally, I'd like to run it with no heatsinks, but I could fit in a high flow, high torque fan to blow oil directly onto the dies. I have an idea to fit a pump behind the NUC's motherboard, linked to a radiator, as well as routing ports at the back. I'd love to have an embedded fishtank computer in a stone like wall. Thoughts on feasibility ?

Where would be the best place to get mineral oil for cheep for a build I'm doing? I'm building a mineral oil PC.

So I had a few questions about mineral oil cooling. 1) Can anyone recommend a tank for me? If you know a tank please send Amazon link. For reference ill be using an ATX motherboard. 2) I have no idea what pump to use.

This build is going to be expanding on the ideas user Aaron1001 and his mineral oil PC a the planning link is here > and his build log can be found here > As you can probably tell by scrolling through is that yes there is a 3D model which can be found here > it isn't very user friendly so i downloaded the .step file from Aaron1001's design and imported it into Fusion 360 (link for that here >) Then i took off the Aquarium as well has the radiator and other electrical components so only the acrylic parts that needed to be laser cut remained the file for that is here > More Coming Soon

Am I able to buy mineral oil cases today? Is that still a thing somewhere?

I am wondering weather to go with mineral oil for my editing and timing pc or a custom water loop

This year, I am working with some peers to build a case for our new editing rig, we wanted to make an original case, and after watching Linus's mineral oil PC build log(for the 4th time in 4 years), I looked at other mineral oil projects, and saw that nearly every single on was a fish tank with a radiator hanging out the side. So, the concept I came up with will have 2 tempered glass panels(front+Lside), and 2 aluminum panels on the opposing sides. I didn't like the way the radiator was used in the PCs and a radiator is not within the budget we have to build the machine, so I was wondering if, with circulation of mineral oil, I could use heat fins extending from the aluminum panels to dissipate enough heat to keep our i7-6700k and GTX 980 ti cool. (if it was up to me we would have gotten a 1070/1080). I hope that the aluminum will dissipate enough heat, as it has nearly 3x the thermal conductivity of acrylic. Thanks

Hey guys, This build log is gonna be a bit different from others that you have seen. This is a project that has been in the works for nearly a month now. My custom designed/built mineral oil PC. I’ve documented a bit of the design process here. SPECS: Case: Plenn-Plex 7.5 gallon radius aquarium Motherboard: ASrock X99 Extreme4 motherboard CPU: Intel i7 6800k Memory: 2x8GB Kingston HyperX savage GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1070 Storage: 250gb samsung SSD and Seagate 1TB HDD PSU: TBD (Thinking about 850g2) Radiators: 280mm Alphacool radiator Fans: TBD Pump: swiftech mcp35x Fittings: Mostly Alphacool with a few koolance parts in there Coolant: mineral oil Here are all the custom acrylic pieces laid out. Assembling something that you’ve designed yourself is always extremely satisfying and rewarding. But, like I said on my first update, If you do not have someone check your work, there are bound of be mistakes. And sadly, my mistake came very quickly “Kerf” is the amount of material that is lost when cut by a laser cutter. In my case, I have some test pieces cut out and found that the kerf was .015. A substantial amount. I compensated by making the outside edges .00625 larger, and the inside edges .00625 smaller, for a compensation of .0125. I had hoped that this would create a easier slip fit instead of a friction fit. However, the cut tolerances were not good enough. And when I tried to force the pieces together, not only did they warp out of shape, but they also cracked. A expensive mistake. Every difficult project passes a point where you want to just give up and never look at it again. And for me, this was the point. After nearly a month of design work, it failed. Immediately. However, I was already way too invested in the project to give up, so I chugged forward, just with a lighter wallet. So I remade the parts, and started assembling everything. I decided to use acrylic glue instead of nuts and bolts for aesthetic reasons. But, because the parts don't line up perfectly, there are gaps between the pieces, making it look ugly. However, where they do line up, the joints look very clean and professional. A lot of the mess can also be attributed to my lack of experience gluing acrylic. besides that, here is the frame finished. with the "front" IO as well. Lining up the radiators reveals that they do not fit quite right. Which means I need to re cut the mounting systems. At least this is a Inexpensive fix. "front" io plate also cracked when i forced the power button in. But it is so small that I can't bring myself to recut it for such a small mistake. Now, it is time for the build. I choose the ASrock x99 extreme 4 for three reasons. EVGA’s matx board has a oddly lower than normal cpu socket. Which means most large CPU coolers will block the first PCI slot. (WHY would you do this?) It was pretty cheap on ebay at only $208 The black and blue will fit in with my color scheme. I choose a 6800k because I found a pretty good deal on ebay at only $385. And since this is not a system that you upgrade often, I believe that a powerful six core processor is the best way to go. It has strong single threaded performance, and as games start to leverage more threads, the CPU will stay competitive. I also work on a lot of CAD, so the extra cores help. Normally, with most builds, I would default to a hyper 212 for cost. A noctua nh-u15s for performance, or a noctua nhu-u9s for low profile. But, as much as I love noctua, their coolers just don't look very good. So I went with the thermalright silver arrow ib-e. While it does not look good with fans, it is definitely one of the most beautiful coolers on the market if you want to passively cool your CPU.. For RAM, I originally wanted to go with g.skill tridentZ. But there were no colors that matched my build. So I went with the hyperX savage as I love it’s aggressive look, and there was a sweet deal on a used set on Amazon. It is at this point, after I have assembled everything, that I find out that on the ASrock X99 extreme 4, the ram slots on either side are flipped. WHY would you do this ASrock?! It obviously isn't for cost reasons since they now need 2 different types of ram slots. It won't affect performance or anything, but just doesn't look good unless you have symmetrical ram. Which the savage is not. Now with the motherboard mounted in, I can finally see the build coming together. @19_blackie_73 asked me to tag him. So there ya go.