miniral oil cooled pc (with a twist)

[invalid-user]

i remember a video where linus puts a whol computer under miniral oil to cool it down. it had great thermal and looked awesome.

but i always got bothered with the fact they left the cpu/gpu heatsinks on. like... wouldnt it be better to remove the IHS and gpu heatsink and directly let the oil touch the die?

and just to be safe have a fan near the processor die to keep liquid moving.

 

i would absolutely love to see this concept come to life. and if you like this idea to come to life. like this post and hopefully the team sees it as well

 

 

[da na]

1 minute ago, invalid-user said:

i remember a video where linus puts a whol computer under miniral oil to cool it down. it had great thermal and looked awesome.

but i always got bothered with the fact they left the cpu/gpu heatsinks on. like... wouldnt it be better to remove the IHS and gpu heatsink and directly let the oil touch the die?

and just to be safe have a fan near the processor die to keep liquid moving.

 

i would absolutely love to see this concept come to life. and if you like this idea to come to life. like this post and hopefully the team sees it as well

 

 

Just like with air, the more surface area that the mineral oil can absorb heat from the better. No cooler would not work. And fans don't work well in mineral oil. 

[Lurking]

17 minutes ago, invalid-user said:

 

and just to be safe have a fan near the processor die to keep liquid moving.

A DC fan likely will burn out since the higher viscosity of the oil will slow the fan. I don't know how a PWM fan would react since it is smarter and maybe shuts off of if measured RPM is very low. Not sure, tbh. It also is possible the oil prevents motor from burning up. Depends on the motor... But ultimately an air fan won't be a great liquid propeller.

[BondiBlue]

1 hour ago, invalid-user said:

wouldnt it be better to remove the IHS and gpu heatsink and directly let the oil touch the die?

No, it wouldn't. That would actually be much, much worse. Just like with air coolers, surface area is still important. Without a heatsink there simply will not be enough oil making contact with the IHS (or even worse, the die itself if you removed the IHS), and you'll quickly overheat the chip. Fans running in mineral oil run very, very slowly compared to air, and they aren't designed to push around a bunch of liquid. Sure, having some near the components that generate heat would cause more oil movement, but it would still be nowhere near enough to cool a CPU or GPU, especially with the power hungry components we have these days. 

[Lurking]

17 minutes ago, micha_vulpes said:

oil immersion cooling is still fairly common in high end render farms, compute clusters, and crypto mining.

 

Low boiling point fluorine based fluids are starting to replace oil immersion though as there's a lot less mess, easier to keep clean, and a lot less to maintain - These fluids can in fact do bare die cooling too though it still would work better with a larger heatsink

 

Here is a Cluster of 48 RTX A4000's

They run 30C cooler on the core, all intact using the original fans and shrouds, than running the same settings on air.

 

Often times you will run a heat exchanger to chill the oil to remain near ambient or sub ambient

 

And here are blades cooled in a low boiling point Flourine fluid

 

And an intel Immersion cooling data node

Interesting.

 

What is a low boiling temperature in °C? Is it supposed to boil under normal operation (working like a heatpipe?)? Or is boiling point a safety "not to exceed" temperature?

 

The "low boiling point" emphasis sounds like this is an important part here.

 

Can this be cleaned off easily? In oil, I cant see the mess being practical when you re-seat a GPU and the contacts ate layered in oil. 

 

Hope no one uses an oil that is solid at room temperature

[Lurking]

1 hour ago, micha_vulpes said:

The low boiling point fluids tend to boil at 50-55C. They use the boiling action specifically to carry away heat so yes like a heat pipe.

They use a fluorine compound that is non conductive, and non flammable ( at normal temperatures) some of them are even re purposed fire suppression chemicals.
These are also stupidly expensive and no regular person is going to be able to afford them. It runs off basically like water as well. Just bake it to flash it off if you wanted to.

 

https://www.gigabyte.com/Solutions/immersion-cooling

This actually gets a little weird though - modern thermal protections on things help but you dont want your heatsink to be too large, since the interface from the die to the cooler is going to be more efficient than from the cooler to the fluid. Basically you need to boil the fluid to have the cooling effect and you dont want to make the heatsink so big it cant boil effectively. I think computex in like 2016 or 2017 there was a demo booth set up and they explained this much better than I can but I cant find the video off hand

 

As for the Intel Node, The A4000 nodes above : those are both mineral oil cooled.  Those just use fans to lightly push oil ( or a pump) from one end of the tank to the other, it then gets either recycled trough a heat exchanger, or there is a heat heat exchanger in the immersion tank. PC parts do not care about CLEAN mineral oil, its inert for this function at these low voltages and power levels. Reseating parts is of no consequence. 

 

Oil immersion servers are SOOOO 2010 - though they crop up from time to time every so often in 'pop tech' articles because people just love seeing them and hearing about them

Thanks for the explanation. I assume they need to have a mechanic drain the system before replacing parts. Do they use parts that most likely don't fail for some years and then replace the whole server at once to limit how often they deal with the fluid?

 

It is kind of an inside out of that Microsoft server system that basically is a small submersible in the sea to dissipate heat to the Ocean. For that I also assume they hope to not need service before replacing the whole unit.  

[Sarra]

Just keep in mind that LBP fluid based cooling solutions can be highly toxic, if inhaled, and you're literally heating a liquid up until it boils and turns to a gas. Don't go out and buy a bunch of LBP refrigerant if you aren't trained in it's use.

[Lurking]

1 hour ago, micha_vulpes said:

Usually the blades drop down in (90* from a normal rack) so you just pull out blades as you need to perform repairs or updates or whatever. The new LBP fluids have to sit in covered tanks  so you just open the top to pull out the blade for service. For Mineral oil its much the same unless you are an at home miner. Those tend to secure the cards and systems to a full rigid mount because they are not hot swapping parts.

Does the fluid dry off or has it to be cleaned off? I envision you pull the blade out and the fluid drips iff and may leave a film.  

 

I assume you want to recover as much of the expensive fluid and not evaporate it by heating the blade over boiling temp.

[Phantasmagoria]

8 hours ago, micha_vulpes said:

oil immersion cooling is still fairly common in high end render farms, compute clusters, and crypto mining.

 

Low boiling point fluorine based fluids are starting to replace oil immersion though as there's a lot less mess, easier to keep clean, and a lot less to maintain - These fluids can in fact do bare die cooling too though it still would work better with a larger heatsink

 

Here is a Cluster of 48 RTX A4000's

They run 30C cooler on the core, all intact using the original fans and shrouds, than running the same settings on air.

 

Often times you will run a heat exchanger to chill the oil to remain near ambient or sub ambient

 

And here are blades cooled in a low boiling point Flourine fluid

 

And an intel Immersion cooling data node

 

can you use this liquid in a custom loop

[SimplyChunk]

9 hours ago, micha_vulpes said:

And an intel Immersion cooling data node

this last one looks like it's straight up out the matrix

[starsmine]

On 7/22/2023 at 12:15 AM, micha_vulpes said:

However they are prohibitively expensive, even whole sale a 15KG pail of the cheapest HFE Novec is like 1300 USD, with an average price closer to 2300 dollars for the same pail. No one is going to run out and buy the amount needed for a typical PC other than to demo it at a tradeshow.

I still want an LTT video to do it since its content, rather then just talk about others doing it.