Bitcoin Forum

Anyone experiment with the PCI extenders and immersion cooling?  It would require a fraction of the liquid that's normally required.  Might make monetary sense.

you mean cooling in a big fishtank or something, filled with mineral oil?
would work, but i doubt its cost-effective
unless you really need it to be silent, then it's up to you if it's worth the extra money (depending on scale, add 500~1000 bucks per rig)

you mean instead of this:

http://www.pugetsystems.com/aquarium-computer.php

you turn the motherboard upside down and dangle the video cards in a smaller (much) tank?  that's an interesting idea.

if you go to the puget systems site, they have parts that can be sourced back to the primary vendors.  the radiators - as always - would be the key:  but i'd imagine you could use smaller ones.  their systems are designed for extreme gaming - so the CPUs, RAM, PSU, etc., are maxed-out.  with a couple of 5990s (their V. 3 test platform), they're probably putting 70% into cooling the GPUs.  you could probably use half the volume of mineral oil, and a radiator that was considerably smaller and cheaper.

stopping the oil from creeping up would be an issue.

hmmm...

No matter what you use as a medium to transport the heat, you have to cool this medium as well. With an unlimited supply of air, you simply exchange it. With a regular watercooling-setup, you pump the water through the block, then through a heatexchanger. So far so easy.

With an immersed computer, you can cool all components fairly well, but still heat up your oil. How do you want to cool it? with a pump and heatexchanger? You will run into the same problems as with aircooling once there are parts of the aquarium where the oil isnt exchanged and hot "pockets" form.. Might not be a problem for a regular computer, convection might be sufficient, the large surface of the tank might even be enough to get rid of all the heat by itself..
But we are not talking about a 200w computer here, are we? More like 1kw? I am pretty sure immersion cooling scales horribly..

I still think waterblocks and regular heatexchanger are the most reasonable cooling system (for higher needs in cooling capacity or silence). Maybe even just watercooling the GPU, the rest of the card with small heatsinks and a relatively slow fan..

Ente

Probably fake but you get the idea:

https://i.imgur.com/2ilce.jpg

Immersion cooling is very efficient.  I was hoping to put a heat exchanger in a mini-fridge, as I don't pay electrical : )

-Zach

look at the 4th photo... now why or why would that need to be sitting on a hotplate :)

might as well buy a deep fat fryer as the case

Why void your warranty?  Plus, if bitcoin becomes unprofitable, you can at least resell your video cards that you purchased.  Good luck reselling a card that has been cooled in this manner or much less cleaning it.

does it actually boil the oil? man that would not be safe if you have kids or pets around!

Of course not, that's why I said it's fake. You need temps of 370 degrees F to properly brown fries... good luck getting any electronics to function at that point. :D

Oh for a minute there you had me haha

Hey, seriously, how much can overclocking go for GPU's?