mineral oil vs. water anyone know

[Stedeman]

I was once told that “pure mineral oil” was one of the best was to go liquid on a computer now my big “Q” is: Is their anyone that know how it stacks up against “distilled water” in the same rig (that is if you can use a regular pump with mineral oil)

[Fink]

In a word, no.

The viscosity of even light mineral oil is much higher than water mandating pumps designed for high viscosity liquids.

The thermal capacity of mineral oil sucks compared to water. Plus water evaporates making cleanup easy, mineral oil just seems to creep into every crack, making everything oily for all eternity.

I have seen it used to convection cool things like large transformers. And there was a guy on the net who immersed a comp in mineral oil with no problems.

[JaY_III]

the idea behind cooling with oil is alot different than with water....

As you all know, with water you pump it into a waterblock that cools your CPU....

With Oil, you would be putting your motherboard in the oil cooling everything (except ROMS and HDD's).....
and that is a project i will get around to.... some day

[Lusankya]

Some of the guys at a local comp store are working on a mineral cooled box.. when I talekd to them he said they had it all sealed up and they had 3 gallons of mineral oil ready.. they just had to do some more sealing and leak checks

[JaY_III]

any idea what oil they are using????
if you could get the name/type of it, that would be great
thanks

[Stedeman]

That must have been what they meant (a fully submerged system)
thank you and I would love to here more on this subject lets keep it going

[Lusankya]

Unfortunatly it was more of a 1 time meeting.. I don't really plan to return to that store cause of their policies...

They refuse to sell a CPU w/o the HSF
If you buy a CPU with a fan and fry the CPU... sure you can go back and buy a new one... but they will refuse to sell it to you unless you buy another HSF... even if you had bought the CPU and fan from the same person that same day *Yes this has happened before*

[TheGhengisKhan]

that's just a dumb policy, duhh, money is money!!

[Daemonfly]

Water deffinately beats mineral oil for cooling.


The thing with Mineral oil is you can get a type that is 100% non-conductive, this is used for full submersion cooling. There was a link where someone tried a submerged motherboard in mineral oil, but I can't remember where.