Feasibility question: passively cooled sealed submerged system

[AdmiralFishHead]

I am trying to plan ahead and reuse my old Lenovo Y500 laptop for something fun in a year when it becomes 10 years old and I replace it. I am leaning towards using it as a portable and silent rig, for playing older games (pre-DirectX 11) and maybe some research calculations. Naturally I stopped with submerged cooling setup, because it is quiet and effective at cooling (good heat transfer). It will also simplify installation, since you don't need parts made precisely for laptops and you can just plot your stuff into the tank and forget about it. I however want to be safe to move and headache free. I don't want to worry about it flipping over. So I figured a sealed solution would be the only choice.At first I thought about using a fish tank, or building one myself, but it won't be easy to move around as those types of projects aren't usually sealed.

 

I am currently researching the feasibility of utilizing an aluminum case with built-in heatsink grills, in particular there is a large number of options offered for amplifier-building hobbyists. This is a great option size-wise, since my laptop motherboard is perhaps 30 cm by 30 cm and a sub $100 DIY amplifier case can fit it. I attached an example of such case to this post. In order to make it easy to move, I plan to seal off the openings with high melt hot glue (with melting point of over 150 C) after the motherboard and wiring is installed, before filling the case with mineral oil and sealing it off for good.

 

The hardware includes a 90W laptop power supply stripped down, and a motherboard with the following configuration:

i7-3630QM

GT 650M

16Gb RAM

mSata SSD

 

My first concern is how effective a case like this would be in cooling laptop hardware sealed inside without any active cooling on the outside. Can a large aluminum mass with grills provide enough cooling?

 

My second concern is how the air sealed inside (provided I will not fill the box with cooling liquid to the rim) is going to affect the case by expanding during high load. Is expanding air an issue in projects like this? What about expanding cooling liquid?

 

Thoughts?

[zeusthemoose]

You might want to look into mineral oil computers. Linus did a few videos about it. I forget what the consensus was (most likely that its not practical) but that is silent and passively cooled.

[AdmiralFishHead]

1 hour ago, zeusthemoose said:

You might want to look into mineral oil computers. Linus did a few videos about it. I forget what the consensus was (most likely that its not practical) but that is silent and passively cooled.

I think the closest video would be the one with Macbook being submerged into a tray with water. It is a closed system, but it's being cooled by water from the outside. This isn't quiet the same as my project involves having liquid inside the closed system.

 

Other videos are just submerged system, unsealed and with active cooling cycling the liquid.

[zeusthemoose]

5 minutes ago, AdmiralFishHead said:

This isn't quiet the same as my project involves having liquid inside the closed system.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that what a mineral oil cooled pc is? They Modify a tank to use it as a case and fill with mineral oil to cool the components.

[Wh0_Am_1]

4 hours ago, zeusthemoose said:

You might want to look into mineral oil computers. Linus did a few videos about it. I forget what the consensus was (most likely that its not practical) but that is silent and passively cooled.

Well they work, and that is what got Luke in the door, but the issue is that the OG case manufacturer went under and sued everyone else on patent infringement grounds and brought the rest of the industry down with it. The primary issues include: degradation of adhesives and rubber cables the fact that you will NEVER get all of the oil off the system and etc. otherwise they work just fine. 

P.S. HDDs and mineral oil DO NOT go together.

[AdmiralFishHead]

7 hours ago, zeusthemoose said:

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that what a mineral oil cooled pc is? They Modify a tank to use it as a case and fill with mineral oil to cool the components.

Nope, the tank isn't completely sealed. The tank can be opened from above, and it has actively cooling components cycling the oil through a radiator to cool it down.

 

Quote

 

Well they work, and that is what got Luke in the door, but the issue is that the OG case manufacturer went under and sued everyone else on patent infringement grounds and brought the rest of the industry down with it. The primary issues include: degradation of adhesives and rubber cables the fact that you will NEVER get all of the oil off the system and etc. otherwise they work just fine. 

P.S. HDDs and mineral oil DO NOT go together.

 

 

The degradation of rubber parts is a valid point, however, it may be possible to replace the mineral oil with NOVEC liquid.

 

The questions about pressurization issue inside the case still stand.

 

[butre]

that case will be enough heatsink to run that hardware passively without having to resort to weird stuff like mineral oil.  just run a heat pipe or two across it

[AdmiralFishHead]

4 hours ago, butre said:

that case will be enough heatsink to run that hardware passively without having to resort to weird stuff like mineral oil.  just run a heat pipe or two across it

Would running several copper wires from the CPU's heat spreader to the case work? I mean multi-core copper wires are really thin and they should conduct the temperature really well (theoretically) as they have high thermal conductivity and no thermal mass. I am not sure how easy it would be to solder a copper wire (or pipe) to the flat copper heat spreader and flat aluminum walls on the case.

[butre]

nah, it needs to be heat pipes.  the thermal conductivity of copper is too low for that sort of application.  you wouldn't need to solder them (or want to for that matter), just thermal epoxy and a good fit up should do the trick.  

 

you'll want something like this:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32295488005.html

 

you'll have to find one for your mounting pattern or make/modify one to fit