oil cooled PC advice..

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i would make a plexiglass box, fill it w/ oil, take off all the fans, get big ol heat sinks on all your chips and let it rip. if you have enough oil (and a big enough box) it may not need any circulation considering oil holds so much heat. you could just keep a thermometer in the oil and when it gets to hot, shut it down and figure out how to circulate it... if it never getts too hot, forget about it!
 
cor, quite a lot of stuff to answer here...

First off, it's not a valuable computer - I picked it out of someone's rubbish! I asked and they said it didn't work, but all it needed was a fresh install of windows and a bit of work finding the drivers. I can also get another for nothing from a friend who works for a hospital which is gradually replacing all its computers and binning what's left!

It is, I think only just fast enough for this project, but all it has to do is playback video files and run iTunes (not at the same time tho). It's going to have to have windoze on it, by the way, as nothing quite touches iTunes, as far as I'm concerned.

The oil is for cooling - esp of the cpu. I only found out when I took the case off, but the cpu fan was already dead, and it's not fried yet! I was planning on sticking a bigger heat sink on it, and then relying on the oil to dissipate the heat. BTW, the video card doesn't have a fan anyway. As cwiz said, I'll just check up on the temp during normal running, and if it still needs cooling I'll figure something out then...

I don't mind the HDD and DVD drives making a bit of noise - they'll only spin up when they're in use, so they'll be drowned out by the music/video. I just want to be able to leave the thing switched on without having a constant whirring.

I also didn't want a vanilla PC case skanking up my sitting room, so I'm converting a nice looking wooden drawer from a broken sideboard into a case. I have some perspex spare, and some sealant for the edges, so I'll make a perspex box that sits inside the drawer and put the mobo in that.

It's all costing very, very little. Which is good, because I'm skint! I can't afford to buy any clever silencing components at the moment, so I just thought I'd see what I can make with the resources I've already got!
 
it is an interesting idea but i think you will probably be somewhat dissapointed by the results and after a while the novelty will wear off.......by then it will start to get annoying. what exact hardware are you planning to use out of interest?

700-800 mhz P3 and K7 hardware seems to be a reasonably good choice for general media like DivX. right now i'm posting from the "HTPC" in my room which i use mostly for videos. hasn't failed to play anything less than perfectly skip free (aside from after i first play but that's due to only having 128mb of memory and having to use the swapfile). this machine is an 800mhz Duron i got of the side of the road :D (with personalised nitestick touches of course).

you don't really need anything particularly fancy to go passive anyway. i would sugges just using perhaps 2 large fans (120mm?) for air circulation. any half decent 120mm fan should be very quiet due to the fact they are low RPM. then all you need is a heatsink with a reasonable surface area, does not necessarily have to be a passive heatsink as if it is large enough you can remove the fan and use the circulated air to cool it.
 
this project has been on hold for a short while, but now O-day approaches. I've realised that I'm going to need to glue all the cards etc into place, as I'm not using a 'proper' PC case so the cards can't be screwed down, and any cards getting dislodged while under the oil would then be unusable....

so.... any suggestions about which glue would be OK to use on a motherboard?


also, everthing's quiet except the hdd - which is fine, as I imagined that the drve would spin up only when the PC was being used, but it just spins up every 5 minutes or so for no discernible reason.

Anyone know how I can prevent this?
 
As nightstick mentioned earlier.... you would really be better off with passive cooling... and also large, silent fans. The oil PC would be more of an investment than would passive cooling, as it takes MUCH more time, and also, you will have to cycle the oil to keep it good.
 
OK,

what is passive cooling? I've put a massive heatsink on the cpu. Everywhere I've looked, big silent fans are rather expensive.

I'm also hoping that the oil will deaden the interference generated by the mobo for the TV card (and for the TV next to it)
 
mistafeesh said:
OK,

what is passive cooling? I've put a massive heatsink on the cpu. Everywhere I've looked, big silent fans are rather expensive.

I'm also hoping that the oil will deaden the interference generated by the mobo for the TV card (and for the TV next to it)

passive cooling or natural convection cooling relies on the natural boyancy of hot fluids causing it to rise and be replaced by cool fluid. it relies greatly on the geometry and orientation of the object(s)

anyways... i've seen PSU's that are cooled using heatpipes w/o fans... totally silent. also you can get PCI memory instead of a traditional HDD. i think they only hold like 1-2GB, but they dont have moving parts and can be put in oil. you can put several in for like 4gb of hd space. i cant remember where i saw it... i think maybe MajorGeeks.com... it was a totally silent pc project... they used ionic breezes to get air flow through the case, the heat pipe cooled psu and the pci memeory... basicly the only thing that made noise was the ROM
 
d'oh. i knew i should have been more specific.

passive cooling or natural convection cooling relies on the natural boyancy of hot fluids causing it to rise and be replaced by cool fluid. it relies greatly on the geometry and orientation of the object(s)

this definition is text book :). it should be noted by the original post that in this context fluid also includes gasses i.e. air. yes your method is actually passive cooling but i meant passive air cooling. all that is required is a decent sized heatsink with a lots of surface area. if you use 92mm or 120mm fans they are relatively quiet even if you don't get a good one. you may not even need fans but i think it's generally better to have one. unless i missed you still haven't told us what processor you are using. a P3 should run ok off a make shift passive heatsink. post a picture of the heatsink you are using.
 
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