Topic: Submerge your rigs in liquid - page 4. (Read 14833 times)

It still gets hot... Think of it like a deep fryer,

Yes, someone on here is running their rig in mineral oil and mining.  They made their own setup and it is working with I think five cards.  There are pics of it under the pic of my rig thread.  The only issue I can think of that would be a real pain is that the oil can get contaminated once things like dust and other forign items enter the mix.  The would then cause you to have to shutdown and drain, clean and reload as needed which could be a real pain.  I have thought about this and I would say that if your going to attempt it that you basically plan that the gear you put in will be tossed after two or three years if you get that far.  Otherwise it is really interesting idea for us heat and noise producers.

You did not mention that in your first post, it looks like you assume the heat just goes away.
A big heat sink would work well but wouldn't it just be easier, cleaner and probably cheaper to water cool the GPUs?

That's why you cool the oil, there are many different ways you can do it, and off the top of my head..

Hook a heatsink to frigerator coils.
Hook a heatsink that's buried into the ground.
Hook a heatsink thats connected to a pool.


Where I live, you dig 2 feet down and you're at water. A free source of heat dispersion.

It still gets hot... Think of it like a deep fryer, the heat you put in the oil doesn't magically vanish, you need to cool the oil. It may not be true with a low power computer but with a mining rig, cooling the oil would be needed.

Also consider that because of the oil everything in it will heat up to whatever temp it is at. Even things that are normally cool, like USB controllers, capacitors, etc which could cause problems if heated up too high.

There was a guy who did this however, I think it was in the "pics of your mining rigs" thread.

It's probably fine except when you want to work with the hardware i.e. adding/replacing boards etc.
Everything will be slick with mineral oil which sounds yucky.

A handful of Intel servers just emerged from a yearlong bath in an oil-based coolant, and the results were remarkable. The servers ran at a PUE just above 1.0, and showed no ill effects from the oil. Is oil immersion coming to a rack near you?

The idea of immersing servers in oil to keep them cool isn't entirely new--passionate gamers have been housing their systems in vegetable oil for years. But it's time to take notice of this trend when Intel starts singing its praises as a potentially revolutionary method for slashing the price of running a data center.

The microprocessor giant just finished a yearlong test of Green Revolution Cooling's mineral-oil server-immersion technology and is very happy with the results. According to Mike Patterson, senior power and thermal architect at Intel, not only does the technology appear perfectly safe for server components, but it might also become the norm for anyone needing maximum computer power or building out data center capacity. [...]

And the technology is incredibly effective. Patterson said that whereas traditional air-cooled server racks often operate at a Power Usage Effectiveness rating of about 1.6 (meaning cooling tacks on a 60 percent increase over the power needed power the servers' computing workloads), Intel's oil-immersed servers were operating at a PUE between 1.02 and 1.03. It's possible to achieve similarly low PUE ratings with traditional air- and liquid-cooling methods, Patterson said, but getting there can require some serious engineering effort and cost a lot of money.

As for concerns over the effect of all that oil on the servers' processors, hard drives and other components, Patterson says companies probably shouldn't sweat it. When its test period ended, Intel sent its servers to its failure-analysis lab, which, he said, "came back with a thumbs up that a year in the oil bath had no ill effects on anything they can see."