Personal Project - Slick's Oil Cooled PC Computer Showcase Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,331 words · ~6 min read
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welcome to a crazy you know rig
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sort of feature showcase honestly this was one of the things about slick's
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resume that really popped out at me because he actually put this on his
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resume he was like i have a computer that's like oil cooled and i was like
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okay i guess and uh so i had to talk to this guy of
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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
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apply for a job at like a car dealership and you're like yeah i have an oil
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cooled computer because they'd be like okay oil is like for cars
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and stuff no we're not talking motor oil we're talking mineral oil so this is
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slick's oil cooled machine which is actually
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still running after all this time so this is back when a 70di a qx6700
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eight gigs of Corsair dominator what the heck is this stuff
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uh 8500 memory so this is somehow he
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managed on a 780i board to get four dimms working by some freaking miracle
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is the thing overclocked too a little bit yeah a little bit exactly
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because that's not an easy feat i can tell you guys that much GeForce gtx 260.
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you see you can see the uh the ddc or ddc plus i don't know what it is it's
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some kind of pump going on in there you can also see he's got like seriously
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this thing is old school but legit hardware check this out hx 620 modular
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power supply with all of the casing stripped off so even the fan is gone
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however you can see from the tubing coming in here that he's got the fresh
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coolant coming in near the power supply so i think he recognizes that the power
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supply would be one of the more disastrous things to go wrong in a
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mineral oil cooled computer so one of the questions that a lot of people have
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about oil cooling is
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why does this work and not water because you always hear people say well
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deionized water is non-conductive and it
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is but the difference is that deionized water is also very aggressive in picking
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up ions from metal that is placed in it so whether it's an aluminum heat sink or
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whether it's a copper you know exposed portion of a pcb or
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whatever else the case may be that distilled or deionized water is going to
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pick up ions like that and it will probably short out within about 10 or 15
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minutes whereas mineral oil is much more inert and is much easier to have running
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on a long-term basis so this has been running pretty much non-stop other than
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an incident where there was some kind of a party at the dorm that he was staying
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in and someone broke the bottom of it or something along those lines had to be
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refilled other than that it's been running pretty much non-stop all this
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time now if he had a bigger reservoir he could probably run it without an
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external radiator but due to the fact that he's using a fairly compact case if
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you guys come here and look at it from the top you can see it's only about an
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atx mini tower size case it's actually
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probably even smaller than that this is more like an m atx case because the
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power supply instead of being mounted here or on the bottom is actually just
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like ghetto mounted near the memory most cases are not designed this way so what
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he's done is he's used a quadruple so that's a four by one 20 millimeter
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ghetto sauce radiator although it is a thick radiator so in terms of
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performance it's going to be darn close to something like a thermo chill
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quadruple radiator he's got 3 8 inch tubing which by the way is very stiff
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the mineral oil has some interesting effects on your hardware including
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stiffening up cables that it can it creeps its way up so it'll stiffen
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cables stiffen tubing and it can be a bit of a challenge that way now
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if only solid-state drives had been feasible at
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the time that he built this machine you probably wouldn't have to have a mechanical drive here but you can
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actually see there's a mechanical hard drive right there hiding under yep
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hiding under this lip because mechanical hard drives are one of the few
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components along with optical drives you can see he uses an external optical
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drive do not sell are you kidding me
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are one of the few components they cannot run in mineral oil due to the
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fact that they would just die instantly so uh
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so yeah you know the oil inside the hard drive would be really bad for the 7200
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RPM spinning platters they would slow down a lot um which is bad so anyway so
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he went with a hard drive an SSD however could run inside here just fine now
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speaking of things slowing down in the mineral value you can see that it is
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still sort of fan cooled in spite of the fact that there is there's mineral oil
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going on inside here these fans have slowed down however due to the
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properties of the mineral oil they actually are not damaged by this i mean
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they're running in lubricant so it's not the end of the world to have them to
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have them running submerged like this i'm just trying to see if i've missed
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anything the decorative plant is fantastic of course
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and so is his he actually doesn't own a single cougar thing as far as i can tell
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i mean maybe maybe the girl he's dating you know gave him this
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um what else does he have that's not like ghetto i mean that's a cool machine
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like a few years ago but uh okay yeah he
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he loves this keyboard this is a mechanical keyboard
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um it's a ducky he put like you know custom keycaps on it
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he's kind of a geek you know that's that's sort of par for
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the course when it comes to working in this business i think that's pretty much it as far as
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slicks liquid cooled mission liquid you'll see i kept
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going into habits here oil cooled machines so i hope you guys enjoyed me
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sharing this with you and don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more
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unboxings reviews and other computer videos although i cannot promise that
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i'll be doing ones like this very often and uh for those of you who are
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inevitably gonna post do an oil-cooled machine build guide
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no not going to happen it's way too much work and the hardware is pretty much
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fubar by the end of it because he said to dry something to drip dry one
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of these components out is going to take a matter of weeks
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we're not talking days we're not talking like you know dusted off we're talking like
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by the time you can actually use this in an air-cooled environment and not have
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it just be disgusting and get oil all over everything we're talking weak so
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anyway cool machine flick um
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you know i don't think when he upgrades this to something modern he's probably
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going to stick with the oil config he says no but it was fun while it lasted
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and it was definitely an interesting item on the resume don't forget to subscribe