ASCII.jp has been immersing computing devices in canola oil, because I guess mineral oil is too safe or something. While the article is not very receptive to automatic translation, from what I gather, they've already toasted a couple devices. This time, they took an ECS LIVA Core to the dunk tank and filled it with about four liters of said canola oil, which is about a US gallon.
Again, if you're looking to do oil cooling yourself, just use mineral oil.
Image Credit: ASCII.jp
The PC was passively cooled, using just the circulation caused by currents of relatively warm oil. I say relatively warm, because the Core M has a single-digit expected wattage. They allowed OCCT to run for eight hours, which yielded a stable temperature of about 44C in a 24C room. Again, this is without pumps or radiators or anything like that. The only difference between this and passive air cooling is how effective oil is at absorbing heat, in speed and capacity, compared to air. That said, air is a fairly good insulator, so that should imply that oil has a better chance.
Vegetable oil also rots over
Vegetable oil also rots over time and smells like death.
Making a small form factor
Making a small form factor computer fanless is actually an application where oil cooling makes some sense.
The wattage is low, so you don’t need fans to cool the oil. You don’t need a lot of oil or a huge container that ends up being extremely heavy when filled. The limited upgradeability means you’re unlikely to ever want to take the device out of the oil.
Fanless heat sinks makes way
Fanless heat sinks makes way more sense. If the idea is for the PC to be small, why put it in a big bin of oil?
Pretty much. Oil cooling
Pretty much. Oil cooling mostly makes sense in server farms, where you can save on air conditioning by only cooling the oil, and not needing to cool it as low.
Why canola oil of all things
Why canola oil of all things though? 0.o
My best guess is that it’s a
My best guess is that it’s a lot cheaper than mineral oil.
Look at this guy’s mineral
Look at this guy’s mineral oil rig from 2012! Also note some of the stupid replies from some the more mindless folks that are into gaming. Gaming has a lot of seriously mindless folks making things funny when discussing high technology!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGcW7Ii_BKo
Oh NO! Somebody’s Xmas is
Oh NO! Somebody’s Xmas is borked!
“Gaming souk Steam spews credit cards, personal info in Xmas Day security meltdown”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/25/steam_snafu/
Once the oil reaches
Once the oil reaches equilibrium temperature (which would be quite a while, that’s a lot of oil for a tiny PC) the main difference between passive air cooling and passive pil cooling is that the surface area of the tank sides and the oil surface is larger than the surface area of the heatsink attached to the CPU. It doesn’t really matter if oil is a better heat-transfer medium than air if the heat has nowhere to go.