direct liquid cooling fesability

[drag]

I was thinking about making a cheapo copper cap and bar stock type water block, but I was wondering about this,

What if instead of using a block simply flushed cool liquid directly onto the cpu core(were the outlet of the pipe would be a couple of centameters from the chip itself)? I wouldn't use water, but a dielectic oil such as pure mineral oil which is electricly inert so I wouldn't have to worry about frying anything out.. I've seen this thing done on older cpu's were the ceramic part was as big as the base of it, and I seen it once done on a early athlon (I think it was) were the guy covered the capaciters on the chip with epoxy and water cooled it. It cooled it to 32 degrees were a high-performance heat sink only cooled it to 40 something.

would cool oil being sprayed directly on the small chip be enough to disipate the heat or a overclocked XP proccessor? Even though oil is a much more efficient transferer of heat then air would this be enough to suck the heat from a tiny surface area?

Another thing, would a water pump be able to handle thin oil without burning out?

 

[WarCon]

Just make an acrylic waterblock that only exposes the core to the water. Someone at another forum made one that used something like 7 small copper tubes in the water inlet to cause a jet effect right onto the core and had the exhaust hole right next to the core. He just siliconed it onto the chip. It seemed to work well. (If I remember right he burned out his first mobo though when it leaked and he didn't notice, so the project is not without risk)

 

[drag]

That's why you use the dielectric oils. one example of their use is to cool the electrical transformers on poles outside your house... The transformers just sit in a pool of oil in that bucket and that's about it. You could submerge your entire mobo in the stuff and it would click along happily like nothing happened.

In fact that was one of my concepts for a super cooled machine, playing off of the liquid nitrogen-cooled machines and the refrigatant cooled machines you can buy nowadays.

See this just take a bucket the shape of a computer case and plunge the entire mainboard with all it's pci cards and a backing plate to hold it together securely, but instead of the outlets for the video and usb and stuff coming out the back you'd have it coming out of the top so you wouldn't have to seal all the outlets and stuff and make them water proof.

But instead of having a external cooler or whatever you just modify a damn FREEZER's cold coils to fit in the computer case/bucket submerged in the oil with the motherboard, and have the hot coils working away out behind the desk like a regular storage freezer. All you'd have to worry about then is having a few pumps powerful enough to push the sub-zero oil around the case so hot oil doesn't stagnate around the cpu's and vid card's heat sinks.

 

[WarCon]

Dr. Ffreeze did it several (maybe 5 or more) years ago with mineral oil (which is dielectric and cheap). You can't submerge your drives obviously so you need some outlet. And his did fry, because he left it exposed to air and ice formed and sunk (oil lighter than water) and eventually found its way to the electrical components and shorted them. If you do this then make sure it is air tight.

I can't find his site anymore, but here is a link to a news article about it though......News Article on Dr. Ffreeze (The links given on this page have been hijacked and lead to a sleazy site, so don't click on them at work.)