I want to build a fluid cooled pc. I’m not thinking water cooling like with water blocks that go on the chips, but full imersion. I need to find a dielectric fluid that doesn’t polymerize when heated.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/09/strip_out_the_fans/
This is kinda what I was thinking. Any ideas? vegetable oil polymerizes (F7?) and deionized water won’t work either.
You mean like this?
What temperatures are you expecting to see? Why wouldn’t water work?
don’t you have anything better to do?
Filter Blockage sigh
Anyways, someone else made an oil PC and said they had temps of 49 (Degrees C i think) after 24 hours of running Pryme 95 to max out the CPU. For comaparison, the air cooled CPU went up to that temp after only 20 mins. Regular water won’t work because of the minerals init that make it electricaly conductive. Deionized water gets poluted by the dust from the air and the board. Someone tried it and it shorted out in 5 minutes. 
white vinegar? don’t know if it would work, but is a suggestion.
+you could get a blue neon over it and it would look sweet!
It would be far more practical to work on making a PC that is both powerful and quiet. Isolate the hard drives, optical drives and power supply to cut down on vibration noise. Isolate any case fans to cut down on vibration noise. Carefully select what fans are used for being quiet yet powerful enough. If you go water cooling make sure the water cooling setup is as quiet as possible.
With careful selection of parts and careful assembly you can have a nice quiet PC and get in some geek-fu. Selecting parts for being both quiet and powerful is geek. Assembling such a PC is geek.
To go further than the On button on your computer tower is geek 
Goodluck man
Sorry, the link shows a guy who immersed his motherboard in cooking oil in an aluminium container, then cooked chips in the boiling oil. It was intended more as an amusing aside than a serious suggestion.
I have heard, and it’s probably an urban myth, that a guy once immersed his 286 in liquid nitrogen, then overclocked it sufficiently that he could play Doom on it, a few computer minded friends have pointed out all the impossibilities of this, but it still makes a nice story.
Freon R-113 (liquid at STP) is the best. It is very difficult to get and fairly expensive. The last 50 pounds I bought for $1000. Legally, it can be used as a coolant but not as a refrigerant. I use it to fully immerse a fast, high voltage switching circuit for an ion beam sweeper. It has been submerged for 15 years without the components being attacked. The freon needs to be sealed and cooled in a heat exchanger loop.
Another good dielectric fluid which is cheap, has a high vapor pressure, is non corrosive, and easy to get is mineral oil. It is viscous so the heat tranfer out becomes somewhat more difficult. Immersing a water cooling coil into the oil bath might be more effective.
this is what you want
http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=3983
anyways good luck, btu the problem with a submerged pc is that there needs to be a way to cool the water off, because or else it will heat up and then of course overheat ur pc.
Doing that with a 286 is probably total bunk. the guys at the first link I posted did that with a P4 and got it going 4.1 GHz!
Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. UV reactive too! I’d get some UV LEDs and everything would glow! I think UV LEDs don’t emmit visible light like fourescent (F7?) bulb.
I had annother idea where there would be a basin at the bottom of the case and the motherboard would sit upright in that. there would be a tube that poured the coolant over the CPU, RAM and the GPU.
What do you do for a living!?!?! Sooo, with Freon, you have to have the whole system sealed? I’ve read things about using mineral oil but I want to know if it will polymerize or grow bacteria like veggie oil.
attach this to the case of your computer straight up, plug a hose in and let her rip. how’s that for fluid-cooling?
That’s a good way to zap an expensive MOBO.
No. It’s a petroleum by-product.
Do you drive the At-At’s, or ride in the back?
First step is, don’t plan on keeping the computer running all the time.
Second step is, it’s not even worth it, air cooling is better than submersion.
Oil is a much better conductor of heat than air. take a woodstove, and put a few drops of oil on a section of the metal. Then, put a kernel of popcorn on the patch of oil and one on the bare metal. the oil will make the popcorn pop in seconds. the kernel that is on the bare metal takes a noticably longer time to pop.
I have heard of people soaking hi-lighters in their water coolant systems to make the fluid glow under UV light. Will putting Hi-Lighter fluid make the mineral oil conductive?
This is exactly why you don’t want to do it.
You can’t remove the heat from the oil quick enough to make it work efficiently.
Don’t do that either. Buy some of those overpriced dyes, that specifically say it’s non-conductive.
you can pull the heat out of the oil with a large enough amount of cooling fins, a pump, and a few fans to pull air across the fins.
My first question might be “Why do you need to do this?” Have you a problem, and is there an easier solution? Are you going to fluid cool the CPU? ( been done, some laptops certainly had fluid CPU cooling). I suspect you can probably get a ready made fluid CPU cooling device.
Surely you don’t intend to immerse the whole damn thing?
Use anything conductive …problems…did someone say vinegar?
Oil? what about your contacts? you want good electrical contact: soaking them in old engine oil is not going to help that at all.
Nao