Mineral Oil Cooled PC Part 4 - Q&A
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
3,398 words · ~16 min read
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and we'll be beginning our tour of the finally finished mineral oil submersion
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cool pc with some inside the oil shots
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courtesy of the sony action cam how did we get a waterproof camera inside our pc
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that i can't really tell you but what i can tell you is a bit about the camera
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itself it supports recording at up to 1080p 60fps 720p 120fps with sony's
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steadyshot image stabilization it features a zeiss 170 degree ultra wide
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angle lens and most importantly for us the one we picked up this morning comes
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with a waterproof housing that appears to be oil proof at least over the very
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very short term obviously that's not really what it's
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made for it's more for like crazy extreme action shots like this one
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that we borrowed from sony's channel which you can check out by clicking the annotation right there but that isn't to
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say that pc stuff isn't extreme
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and this my friends is about as extreme as it gets here
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she is looking so shiny thanks to the constantly cleaning properties of the
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mineral oil and weighing in at a massive 75 pounds mine and luke's love child
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slick junior the hardware specs for our mineral oil cooled machine are as
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follows making it one of the fastest fully submerged gaming machines ever
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built we've got a core i7 5960x8 core
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processor overclocked to 4.5 gigahertz
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and cooled by a thermal right silver arrow we've got 16 gigs of hyperx beast
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3000 megahertz ddr4 memory an evga x99
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micro motherboard at the time of selecting our parts for this project the
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only matx x99 motherboard on the market an evga gtx 780 classified graphics card
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an evga supernova 1200 watt 80 plus platinum power supply a 480 gig hyperx
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3k SSD and finally the case a puget systems micro atx v2
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aquarium case kitted out with all the fun accessories we could put in it like
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blue rocks for the bottom a castle and our awesome little plant oh yeah and a
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sunken ship building this machine was an absolute
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blast luke and i did it together over the course of several afternoons and
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there were some hilarious moments some intense moments and some downright scary
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moments so if you guys haven't checked out parts one two and three of the build
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blog you should do that if you're interested in how this beast was created
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but if you just want to know how the whole mineral oil cooling concept works
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and how this one performs then you're in luck because today's video is all about
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that at stock speeds i was really impressed
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with the four fans on the rear radiators running at their lowest speed the
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temperature of the coolant was only about eight degrees above ambient at
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idle and 17 degrees above ambient with both the CPU and GPU running at full
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tilt yielding low temperatures under 60 degrees for both of them overclocked
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things got a little bit hairier my CPU was running at 4.5 gigahertz on 8 cores
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with the GPU running at 1.267 gigahertz and in this scenario the oil heated up a
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lot more thanks to the dramatically higher heat output from both of these
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components because the heatsink for the CPU doesn't have a fan next to it to
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circulate oil our chip reached 88
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degrees 30 degrees higher than stock speed under load but the GPU thanks to
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its fans peaked at only 59 degrees
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much much lower than air cooling and overall much quieter with only low speed
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fans and the pump whose noise is dampened significantly by the oil
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producing any audible noise but i'm sure you guys still have lots of questions so
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i'm going to go grab luke to help me answer them we're going to do a little q a thing here
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all right so luke's joining me for the q a section of this video i mean you guys
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watched us build the whole thing but we had a lot of people posting questions in
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the comments and we wanted to address some of the most common ones so first
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the way this system works in spite of being under liquid is that mineral oil
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is not a conductive fluid so as long as the fluid isn't
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conductive you're not going to run into the usual issue where an electrical
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short will cause the system to shut down or even be damaged so people would then
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ask why not distilled or deionized water the problem with that is that water will
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pick up minerals and little metals and stuff and then make themselves
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conductive over time so you might get like five ten minutes half an hour tops out
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of it but then it'll short out your system over time we chose this tank
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instead of some random fish tank for a couple of reasons number one is that
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getting all the parts from one source is actually a lot more convenient and b can
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actually be cheaper because you're saving on shipping cost of getting it shipped to you from a dozen different
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places and number two is that it's specifically designed for mineral oil
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submersion and the walls are thicker which makes the plexi less prone to
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cracking from the constant heating up and cooling down
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now when you're choosing parts to go under the oil honestly it almost doesn't
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even really matter you just have to be careful what you put under it in terms
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of type of component not necessarily like can a graphics card go under or can
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this specific graphics card go under so you can't put your optical drive under there you can't put your hard drive
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under there because they have mechanically moving components and that's that will actually screw that up
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your hard drive might work for a little bit but then the needle is going to get off it's going to be going really slowly
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for one and then it will probably eventually stop working the funnel
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question is a funny one
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because the only reason we didn't use a funnel is because in spite of the number
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of times we've run into situations where we could use one we actually don't own
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one and diying one didn't occur to us at
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the time we didn't put the oil in first and then
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the components because of like fairly obviously
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displacement problems if you put oil in and then put all the stuff in you
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probably won't have the exact amount of oil you'll have too much or too little
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and that's not great filling the system all the way to the
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top might seem like a good idea on the surface and it might help with this
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trickling noise that we're getting right now because we couldn't put that little
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piece of tubing in thanks to a clearance issue with the graphics card by the way
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it doesn't trickle when the oil is cooler and more viscous i'm running a
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stress test right now but the reason that you wouldn't fill it all the way to
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the top is that mineral oil already creeps up surfaces and the higher you
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are the closer you are to the top the more it's going to creep up and start destroying your cables and anything
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that's plugged into the system below the problems with rubber in a system
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like this especially that softer kind of rubber that you might find not on this
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bubble machine but on some bubble machines feet so you can stick it to the
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bottom of the tank is that the mineral oil will actually eat it away and slowly
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make it decompose almost sending little tiny gooey fragments of
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the rubber all throughout your oil making it look completely gross and
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actually disrupting the system overall fish would be a terrible terrible idea
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you should be ashamed of yourself for even asking this is not water this is
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mineral oil fish would die instantly in it they cannot breathe
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mineral oil now i've seen proposals on the internet for
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crazy ideas where you actually have like a partition dividing the fish keeping
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them separate from the mineral oil but even then there are challenges fish are
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extremely sensitive to changes in water temperature just like we're sensitive to
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changes in air temperature and i don't think anyone has ever pulled that off
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why don't we have a fan on the heatsink we don't have a fan on the heatsink
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because we already have a lot of flow and a lot of movement in the oil from
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other sources and it it actually
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wouldn't serve a huge purpose it might not even help that much because of the
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where it would be pushing the oil so there's no actual point in having a fan
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there with the video card it's a little bit different it's not next to the pump
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it's actually right up against the edge of the aquarium so having the fan
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circulating oil through the heatsink will cool the heat sink in much the same
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way that circulating air through a heatsink will in fact quite a bit better
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we have radiators on this system because oil is going to be able to hold that
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temperature really well but it's not very good at getting rid of it so if you
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had a high performance system and no radiators your temperature is just going
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to keep on going up until it's at unsafe levels if you have radiators on the back
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it can pull that oil out cool it down put it back in and it'll kind of more
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regulate the actual temperature the pump we're using is actually a
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standard pc water cooling pump it's a swiftech mcp355
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um nothing special about it other than that it's a nice reliable land made pump
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uh is there actually any actual benefit of this compared to air or water
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not really other than the fact that it looks really freaking cool
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as long as you don't let any gunk get into your oil like if you had rubber
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components inside that start to deteriorate or if you had the cover not
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closed and some things fell into it there's no reason to clean out the oil
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it doesn't need to be changed like your car would
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now some people when they see the fans spinning really slowly start to freak
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out and think that all the fans are gonna die because there's way too much resistance from the oil actually the
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mineral oil acts as a lubricant so yeah it's a little bit harder for the fan to
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spin but with the lubricant there and a steady amount of voltage going to the
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fan not a steady amount of speed being attempted to be applied to the fan it's
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actually totally fine graphics card upgrade would not exactly be a fun
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experience not that many upgrades in here are going to be a fun experience
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but that's part of the experience of owning a mineral computer it's
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everything you do with it is really interesting i built mine because i
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wanted a really interesting computer and i knew what was going to come with that
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so if you had to swap the graphics card you'd probably be layering an area with
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garbage bags so you didn't have mineral oil going all over the place taking
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everything out putting part of the system inside of a garbage bag for a
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little while taking that card out putting a new one in uh submerging all
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that back in probably getting more oil because you lost some onto the garbage
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bags filling it up and running the system again and then you're gonna have
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to deal with that other oil colored oil covered graphics card
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most parts of any pc component are not going to be damaged by mineral oil
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things like metals things like the components of printed circuit boards if
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anything having mineral oil over top of them especially with some nice flow
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through it is going to keep them running cooler and even make them more reliable
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over time the only time you're going to run into trouble is anything like cables
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for example which can be damaged by mineral oil and in fact made so stiff
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that you could break the sheathing around the outsides of say for example
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power supply cables once they've been sitting in mineral oil for quite some
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time now with thermal compound the mineral oil can kind of get down in
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there and eat away at the outsides of it and it might take a lot of it away over
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five years of running my own i didn't see all of the thermal compound
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removed but especially on my graphics card when i tried to run it outside of
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the of the mineral computer after drying it there was enough thermal compound
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removed that i ended up frying my card so yes it does take the thermal compound
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away but it should be fine while you're inside the mineral oil because the
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components haven't been damaged by the oil there's no reason that you can't
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reuse them the only issue is that you're probably going to have to let them drip
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dry in a nice warm place for a good few weeks before
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you're even going to want to consider touching them and even once they've
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dripped dry for a few weeks they're always going to have a little bit of
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that oily feel to them it won't hurt the functionality though so if you get it on
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your clothes you're just going to need a lot of hot water and a lot of soap it's
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not easy to get out but it's not really a problem i don't actually know what
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happens if you happen to leave your shirt with mineral oil on it for a very
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extended period of time because i've always cleaned it fairly quickly but i've never actually had any downsides if
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you'd on your skin it's no real problem it's just a fairly simple oil
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worth the mess wow it's amazing how many of you quoted what i said when we first
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showcased luke's old mineral oil machine and i i said something along the lines
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of no never ever absolutely never we are never going to do this on our channel
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and having done it once i still don't
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think that it's worth the effort to the point where i really wanted to create a
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guide that you guys definitely need to follow because it's not something that i
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think people should really do unless they're hyper-enthused about it and
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they're willing to go out and do the research on their own to do it because
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if you're not willing to put that amount of work into it you're probably not a
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suitable mineral oil cooled machine owner although i'll let luke answer this
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question in his own words as well no that was actually a really good
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explanation it's it's going to take some work it is going to be tedious you're
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going to have to haul this super heavy thing around sometimes
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it's going to take some dedication you're not going to be able to do these really rapid upgrades that you might
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wanna do uh replacing a single RAM stick is gonna be
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a hell of a problem diagnosing things becomes a little bit different instead
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of what i commonly do is just swapping out parts until i figure out what's dead
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you're gonna have to spend a lot more time doing software-based diagnosis uh
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just it becomes a mess but honestly it's a
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really cool experience you just have to make sure that you're like dedicated enough and
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you actually really want this because it it's tedious
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so this is where i have some good news and some bad news halfway through
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completing our build log series on puget's
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micro atx rev2 mineral oil submersion
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cooling kit we heard from puget that due to a patent dispute from a company that
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is just hardcore trolling it like if you guys are upset about this show some support
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to puget because this is a really crappy thing that's going on these guys tried
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to do mineral oil cooled gaming machines a while back their business venture
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ultimately didn't succeed and now they're just patent trolling puget to
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the point where this isn't a huge part of puget's business they just do it
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because they're enthusiasts about it so they're kind of going well shoot we
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can't we can't justify the cost and time associated with defending ourselves from
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this bs so we're gonna have to discontinue these systems unfortunately
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um you can't buy them anymore uh although the cost was about a thousand
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dollars for a kit and all the mineral oil you needed to fill it a little less
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eight hundred to a thousand dollars um
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so yeah guys show some show some support because it's a super crappy thing that's
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going on but uh in response to the uh
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right so the good news though is that we're actually getting the rest of
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puget's inventory now don't freak out it's only about four units of the mini
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itx and micro atx we're getting the rest of their inventory to give away to
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anyone in the continental us and canada who wants to own their very own mineral
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oil submersion cooling one of the last ones that puget ever produced they can't
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sell them anymore so they're giving them to us to give to you guys you guys are
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going to want to go to the link in the video description to get the full details but i will say this much guys we
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are going to require the winners to send us a copy of their invoice for
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purchasing the mineral oil to put into it we're not looking to just ship these
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to guys who aren't going to use them we want people to really get use out of them this is a really cool project but
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if you're not that into it just don't enter the giveaway because we want
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people who are really excited about building a mineral oil cooled machine to
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uh to get their hands on these so i think that's pretty much it guys thanks
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for watching like this video if you liked it just like it if you just liked it leave a comment if your feelings are
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more complicated than this as always there's links in the video description to our sponsors as well as the other
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thing that we do what else do we do amazon link right the amazon link uh
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t-shirts and uh new office campaign new office campaign
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uh why isn't it working
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and uh also our other channel where we uh
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what have you done i didn't i swear to god i'm not even pressing yours just
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because it's not working yet this is gonna suck we're also gonna have
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a link to our Channel Super Fun where you can find out why luke and i are
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wearing shock collars that were you're pressing the vibrate one and also it's
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not working
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well whatever there's gonna be a video where we're trolling each other with shot callers once we get them