welcome to a crazy you know rig
sort of feature showcase honestly this was one of the things about slick's
resume that really popped out at me because he actually put this on his
resume he was like i have a computer that's like oil cooled and i was like
okay i guess and uh so i had to talk to this guy of
course right because who puts that on a resume i was like i really hope this is a custom resume i hope you don't like
apply for a job at like a car dealership and you're like yeah i have an oil
cooled computer because they'd be like okay oil is like for cars
and stuff no we're not talking motor oil we're talking mineral oil so this is
slick's oil cooled machine which is actually
still running after all this time so this is back when a 70di a qx6700
eight gigs of Corsair dominator what the heck is this stuff
uh 8500 memory so this is somehow he
managed on a 780i board to get four dimms working by some freaking miracle
is the thing overclocked too a little bit yeah a little bit exactly
because that's not an easy feat i can tell you guys that much GeForce gtx 260.
you see you can see the uh the ddc or ddc plus i don't know what it is it's
some kind of pump going on in there you can also see he's got like seriously
this thing is old school but legit hardware check this out hx 620 modular
power supply with all of the casing stripped off so even the fan is gone
however you can see from the tubing coming in here that he's got the fresh
coolant coming in near the power supply so i think he recognizes that the power
supply would be one of the more disastrous things to go wrong in a
mineral oil cooled computer so one of the questions that a lot of people have
about oil cooling is
why does this work and not water because you always hear people say well
deionized water is non-conductive and it
is but the difference is that deionized water is also very aggressive in picking
up ions from metal that is placed in it so whether it's an aluminum heat sink or
whether it's a copper you know exposed portion of a pcb or
whatever else the case may be that distilled or deionized water is going to
pick up ions like that and it will probably short out within about 10 or 15
minutes whereas mineral oil is much more inert and is much easier to have running
on a long-term basis so this has been running pretty much non-stop other than
an incident where there was some kind of a party at the dorm that he was staying
in and someone broke the bottom of it or something along those lines had to be
refilled other than that it's been running pretty much non-stop all this
time now if he had a bigger reservoir he could probably run it without an
external radiator but due to the fact that he's using a fairly compact case if
you guys come here and look at it from the top you can see it's only about an
atx mini tower size case it's actually
probably even smaller than that this is more like an m atx case because the
power supply instead of being mounted here or on the bottom is actually just
like ghetto mounted near the memory most cases are not designed this way so what
he's done is he's used a quadruple so that's a four by one 20 millimeter
ghetto sauce radiator although it is a thick radiator so in terms of
performance it's going to be darn close to something like a thermo chill
quadruple radiator he's got 3 8 inch tubing which by the way is very stiff
the mineral oil has some interesting effects on your hardware including
stiffening up cables that it can it creeps its way up so it'll stiffen
cables stiffen tubing and it can be a bit of a challenge that way now
if only solid-state drives had been feasible at
the time that he built this machine you probably wouldn't have to have a mechanical drive here but you can
actually see there's a mechanical hard drive right there hiding under yep
hiding under this lip because mechanical hard drives are one of the few
components along with optical drives you can see he uses an external optical
drive do not sell are you kidding me
are one of the few components they cannot run in mineral oil due to the
fact that they would just die instantly so uh
so yeah you know the oil inside the hard drive would be really bad for the 7200
RPM spinning platters they would slow down a lot um which is bad so anyway so
he went with a hard drive an SSD however could run inside here just fine now
speaking of things slowing down in the mineral value you can see that it is
still sort of fan cooled in spite of the fact that there is there's mineral oil
going on inside here these fans have slowed down however due to the
properties of the mineral oil they actually are not damaged by this i mean
they're running in lubricant so it's not the end of the world to have them to
have them running submerged like this i'm just trying to see if i've missed
anything the decorative plant is fantastic of course
and so is his he actually doesn't own a single cougar thing as far as i can tell
i mean maybe maybe the girl he's dating you know gave him this
um what else does he have that's not like ghetto i mean that's a cool machine
like a few years ago but uh okay yeah he
he loves this keyboard this is a mechanical keyboard
um it's a ducky he put like you know custom keycaps on it
he's kind of a geek you know that's that's sort of par for
the course when it comes to working in this business i think that's pretty much it as far as
slicks liquid cooled mission liquid you'll see i kept
going into habits here oil cooled machines so i hope you guys enjoyed me
sharing this with you and don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more
unboxings reviews and other computer videos although i cannot promise that
i'll be doing ones like this very often and uh for those of you who are
inevitably gonna post do an oil-cooled machine build guide
no not going to happen it's way too much work and the hardware is pretty much
fubar by the end of it because he said to dry something to drip dry one
of these components out is going to take a matter of weeks
we're not talking days we're not talking like you know dusted off we're talking like
by the time you can actually use this in an air-cooled environment and not have
it just be disgusting and get oil all over everything we're talking weak so
anyway cool machine flick um
you know i don't think when he upgrades this to something modern he's probably
going to stick with the oil config he says no but it was fun while it lasted
and it was definitely an interesting item on the resume don't forget to subscribe