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Word up fellow miners. We're getting pretty serious down here with our mining operation and are tying a few extreme cooling methods to keep shit from getting too hot. Just fishing for advice from any cats that got experience.

Anyway, we experimenting with full PC immersion in organic fluids to conduct heat. We tried olive oil and lard and are now thinking of ethanol, the first two were nasty as fuck and them PCs would no way get resold afterwards. Smelt like a goddam fast food joint in PC form. Ethanol is much nicer if we can take care of them fire hazards and shit with appropriate care and caution.

Anyone got ideas up in here?

Have you tried using a fan?

It's called 'hot and cold aisles' and it's been 'extreme'ly effective in most datacenters for one reason: it's dead simple.


  HOT ||  rig  ||  COLD || rig || HOT
  HOT ||  rig  ||  COLD || rig || HOT
    < air     <  air      air >   air >

Exhaust the HOT aisles properly and you've solved your problem.

Now just to be a dick, I'll scrutinize some more! :)


Olive oil??

You must've seen the mess coming :P

Most crazy enthusiasts use mineral oil instead - it's a hell of a lot cheaper too.


ETHANOL?!

You must've seen the explision and flames coming :P   Electricity + flammable liquids = inevitable disaster.

Sure, submerged in ethanol is probably fine as, like gasoline (petrol) it's the gasses that are actually combustible rather than the liquid.  Still, there are far better options.

I think you're going to have trouble selling any components that have been submerged in anything other than plain old air.

Have you tried mineral oil?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtufuXLvOok

Without a radiator and fans, even the mineral oil will eventually get wicked hot. 

Fill your hottub with mineral oil and submerse the PC in it. Don't turn the hottub on.

You have failed to utilize the most potent and interesting organic fluid. How's about you come over to my place and I get you started, little lady.

He can still have fans...not sure about a radiator - but i think he can.

How are you cooling the fluids?  All the immersed pc stuff I have seen assumes limited duty cycles with long cooldown times in between.  If you are running 24/7 you will need a way to cool the fluid.  I would think you would be better off with a standard water cooling setup and it would not preclude eventual resale of the equipment. 

Well, obviously a refrigerator would be the best option for cooling the liquid...I mean, it keeps my beers cold, right?

It just came to me in a flash of brilliance, or perhaps my fingerless gloves just caught on fire while I was heating a spoon with a zippo:























Gravy.

maybe they should use beer..


Even better.. but what kind to use? beef? turkey? or perhaps sausage breakfast gravy?

Sausage breakfast gravy is a no-go. Too lumpy. We need to find the thermal coefficient of beef vs. turkey gravy, as well as the ideal thickness for optimal cooling.

Does ordinary car engine oil work for cooling hardware without blowing anything up?

Hey man, I appreciate your input and shit, but gravy? I mean I aint running no soup kitchen for the homeless with my mining operation.

Foodstuffs are generally out when it comes to organic fluid cooling, jam and shit is just nasty and doesn't work. Ethanol and benzine should work better apart from the fire and biohazard.

Don't use high strength ethanol for cooling! I distill alcohol and high strength ethanol is extremely flammable! It is very dangerous as it releases vapours as it evaporates and since it burns with an almost invisible flame it can be very difficult to see that your rig is on fire until the house is on fire. If you're that serious about cooling then hire a slave to keep topping up your pots with dry ice or look into some other form of refrigeration.

"hire a slave"

dude you can't hire slaves, that's the point. Could prolly get a couple of crackheads to keep your rigs maintained cheap though.

Wow this forum is going downhill

I wonder if using one of those fish tank filters which creates a sort of waterfall back into the tank would cool the fluid enough?

http://www.tropicalfishtanks.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/fish-tank-filters.jpg

I think you would want to be sure you were using a fluid with a low vapor pressure to avoid exposing components through evaporation.. plus I wouldn't want to be breathing my cooling medium all the time.

It'd help but it likely wouldn't be enough. 

Remember a single GPU is going to be dumping ~200W into the fluid continuously, that's a lot of heat in a fishtank.

Submersion will work well if you treat it more like traditional water-cooling.  Hermetically seal the whole thing (have fun replacing components!), and pump the fluid through a large radiator with fans.

That'll keep evaporation down and your lungs relatively free of mineral oil, while maintaining a relatively cool temperature.

It's probably not worth the trouble really.

That’s my understanding as well.. plus you are going to be heating components which normally wouldn't be heated above the ambient air temperature.. who knows what effect that will have. Maintenance will become a huge hassle and you lose warrantees and resale value for your components.


Exactly..  If you are going to go to all the trouble of sealed systems with radiators and pumps you might as well just put waterblocks on the few components which actually need extreme cooling and be done with it without all these other headaches.

If you run multiple GPUs on a single watercooling system use an automotive radiator and fan outside of your building (you can plumb the rest inside).  Make sure to run the tubing in parallel from the gpus.

Honestly, simply setting up a GPU loop would probably be cheaper than full submersion because peltier coolers (witch is what I would recommend for cooling the liquid) are prity expensive... Just get cheap GPU blocks and a 480mm rad with cheap fans... For that matter, if u have a massive farm, you could probably gt blocks custome machined for around $60-70 a block if u get them in mass

You are obviously no gravy expert.

The gravy in the closed loop stays hot, so it will not spoil. You could even have a tap plumbed into the loop so you could access warm gravy with the turn of a stopcock. The one issue you may run into is thickening, but you only need to add water, and it'll all be good.

Look man, no disrespect, but you're clearly out of your depth up in this intellectual thread about cooling systems and shit. Choosing the correct coolant fluid is a scientific process and you gots to know the detailed properties of the shit you use.

Scientifically speaking gravy is just water and bits of mashed-up animal junk. So I don't know what you think is so special about it other than being able to feed the homeless warm coolant gravy. Jesus man, this forum used to be high-brow with lots of intellectual-assed motherfuckers posting dope technological ideas, things sure are going downhill!

Also, I like the idea of a aquarium pump some other poster proposed. Gotta watch them fumes though, or get a gas mask.

You can hire a slave from the person who "owns" them.

#WINNING

[/facepalm]
This whole thread is FULL of fail! :D
Oil doesn't convect heat very well! Use water (in blocks/rads) Swiftech MCW80 is only $40! A rad (even a heater core) is cheap, and a pump! Inside; use distilled water only!

You are obviously retarded.

http://adlib.blogs.com/eurothinkbox/gravy-tm.jpg

unless you fancy a douse of legionairs disease you don't want any open evaporationary cascading water type cooling in a closed room.

*gets out pencil* fishtank ... pump ... tubing.... automotive radiator and boxfan.... we're going to cool the hell out of this when i'm done designing it! :P

That is also retarded...so everyone with a fish tank is at risk for legionaire's disease? I have four open top fish tanks in my living room, about 300 gallons. They evaporate about 8-9 gallons on a summer day, being fan cooled. I don't have a nasty chicken infection, nor does anyone else keeping aquariums.

If Legionaire's causes brain damage, it would explain a lot of this thread.  :D

What the **ck is wrong with people up in this once intellectual-assed thread? Man, we using organic fluid coolants up in that cascading system, not water. Some low viscosity fluid like benzine or kerosene with the PC in full immersion.

Yeah, it don't conduct heat too good, buy we exploring means of pumping that fluid and mixing it with the ambient environment to dump that excess heat.

People round hear using every muscle except the one that count.. they brain!

1 part naptha 3 parts alcohol has excellent viscosity for this purpose.