Mineral Oil Cooled PC

Over the years, we have seen many custom pc projects on the web that cooled a computer using common vegetable oil, including a very popular video by Tom’s Hardware. After seeing all these projects, we had a lot of ideas of how we could do it better and more easily. Many projects used vegetable oil, which would go rancid after a short time. So we instead used clear mineral oil which is odorless and completely clear. We also wanted to use an appropriate enclosure — many other projects used a clear acrylic case, and they had to painstakingly seal each rear connector to keep the oil from leaking. We wanted to put the ports on top to solve that problem the simple way — with gravity. Other people have built systems in aquariums before, but they were always oversized and square. We wanted to use our tools and experience to custom build a solution in exactly the size we needed. This was only intended as a fun project, to see what we could accomplish, but we have freely share the results of our testing over the years, including thermal performance and long term effects

Standard computer components are submerged in mineral oil. The mineral oil is non-conductive, so the electronics do not short out.

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