Oil-cooled silent PC

by philg

Here is a report on the construction of an oil-cooled silent personal computer: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/09/strip_out_the_fans/index.html


There are a few limitations, e.g., “When exchanging components, all of the oil might have to be drained and the hardware cleaned.”  So perhaps it would be better to order a Dell XPS with the new Dell 30″ LCD monitor to replace my four-year-old desktop Windows machine (I had planned to wait for Longhorn/Vista, but it seems as though that could be a long ways off).


I’m off to London, Ontario today to pick up a new Diamond Star DA40 with G1000 glass cockpit.  The owner, a newly minted private pilot, and I will fly it back to Boston tomorrow.  Friday morning, I leave for Kona, Hawaii to finish my helicopter instructor rating at Mauna Loa Helicopters.

14 thoughts on “Oil-cooled silent PC”

  2. Read an article on water cooling the processor, but diping the whole mutha board in oil, Yikes!

  3. Whoopie. Liquid-cooled electronics is nothing new. Big industry still has use for them now and again. Why aren’t they used more often? Maintenance. Having been responsible for water-cooled frequency converters on a ship, I can tell you the maintenance is a nightmare. Traditional setups rely on plumbing with intimate thermal connections to various bus bars. We had to replace selenium rectifiers in ours about every 500 operating hours. When they’re running non-stop, this is less than a month. Try doing that for a six month cruise. I don’t know why, but I think it’s because design creates huge thermal differentials, thus conductivity differentials, all of which are unpredictable, but based on load (is the fire-control radar up? Air search? Surface search? Missile systems? Did we just pull into port and shut everything down?) and cooling capacity (are we in the Gulf or off the coast of Canada?). I’m sure the design variables are more stable in this setup than on a Navy ship, but I can’t imagine maintenance being worth anything close to the cost. How are you going to ensure it’s clean? Put it in the dishwasher? What about long-term thermal decay of the oil? What bad nasties are being made right next to the processor?

  4. You sure you want a Dell? They seem to do OK for big corporate clients, but for the man in the street they are a pain in the neck, with abysmal service.

    Why not just build (or have someone do it for you) a custom PC based in something like the Zalman TNN 500AF?

    As quiet as they get and dude, you are not getting a Dell.

  5. I have a custom-built PC that was supposed to be silent. It isn’t silent and it is prone to running too hot. So I thought I should maybe do what everyone else does and just buy Dell. At least Dell has enough money to pay engineers to figure out noise, cooling, etc.

  6. I think Dell’s engineers are hired to make the best tradeoff between quality and profit, just like any other in the corporate world.

    That said, yes, Dells do run quieter than most cheap and nasty cases, with a smarter cooling system that has a duct above the CPU straight out the back.

    But in my experience, anything with fans on will only be quiet for so long, before they wear out and become noisy. And that goes for Dell too I am affraid.

    So if you want quiet that stays quiet, you’ll have to skip the moving parts…

    And don’t get me started on quiet “fluid bearing” harddrives. I guess all the fluid in the bearings of mine have evaporated as within 6 months, they have gone from the quitest to the noisiest 7200RPM drives I have ever heard.

    You could do worse than buying a Dell, you could do much better too…

  7. Phil, when you order the Dell, go for the RAID 0 performance drives. You’ll be glad you did. Super-fast performance. I open a dozen 64MB tif files at once, with very little waiting. My 2GB RAM helps too.

  8. RAID-freakin’-0, are you nuts? You do realise you just DOUBLED your chances of losing ALL your data, right? That’s how RAID-0 works, one file system acros 2 drives, lose one drive, drag the other down with it. I hope you have good backups of that data.

    I can’t believe Dell sells these things to cluesless consumers. RAID-0 is meant to be used in combination with RAID-1, mirroring, so you can create massive volumes and still have redundancy. I guess selling people RAID-1, which gives the same speed boost on reading, is a bit too hard for Dell; pay double for the same size. But for me, that is the only way to go.

    If you want faster drives, get 10KRPM SATA disks in RAID-1. I’ll take reliability over speed any day.

  9. No Bas, not nuts, not clueless. I was aware of the doubled risk when I made the purchase. In my home based business, slide scanning, I need the speed of RAID 0. I’ve only a had hard drive loose data once, and it was an IBM brand drive. I beleive these are Western Digital brand. I’ve never lost data on a WD drive and I’ve been using them since my first computer, in 1992.

    BTW, does RAID-1 really have the same read/write boost as RAID-0 ? Dell advertises 0 as “performance” and 1 as “security”

    I doubt a 10,000 RPM drive would give the same boost. Mac was not offering pre-configured RAID at all and their machine was $2000 more and way slower for my read/write intensive application.

  10. Jim: RAID 1 potentially has a read boost if you have two applications trying to read different files at the same time. One app can read from disk 1 and the other app can see that disk 1 is busy and read from disk 2. If you have only a single application that is trying to do sequential reads (e.g., Photoshop reading one big file), there probably wouldn’t be any performance boost, especially with a comparatively simple/stupid file system such as those included with Windows XP and Mac OS X. You take a hit on write performance with RAID 1 because I think a lot of file systems wait until the disk has confirmed the write all the way to the platter before returning to the application (i.e., they don’t just let the disk drive store a write request in its little RAM cache). So you have to wait for two disks to write instead of one.

  11. Thanks for the carifying Phil. Either way, this system is WAY faster for my apps than a single drive system.Dell is now offering 1TB of storage (two 500GB RAID 0)…talk about capacity! I got a 4 yr warranty for about 160 extra. This 9100 case cooling system is much quieter than my 6 year old Gateway.Seems most video cards now have fans, which over time need cleaning or they get noisy from out-of-balance dust build-up conditions.

  12. This is an interesting test: http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q2/chipset-raid/index.x?pg=5.
    It shows RAID-0 giving a 50% increase in read speed over RAID-1 or single drives. It is also faster writing, but RAID-1 certainly isn’t slower than a single drive in that department.

    It is strange, I would assume a good RAID-1 controler would read from both disks. I guess these are just dumb cheapies they stick in consumer PCs.

    I don’t think Photoshop is able to process 80MB of data every second when opening files, so it would be interesting to see if you can add a single drive and compare if the 50% disk speed increase actually makes a big difference to Photoshop. My guess is it just seems like a lot because you got it at the same time as your much faster computer than you had before, but the RAID-0 doesn’t add that much.

    Besides, I could never care about if something opens in 1 or 1.5 seconds when you spend minutes (or much longer) actually working on the file.

  13. Bas, Here is the way my RAID 0 sytems gets used.I open 50 12MB tif files at once, or 30 27MB tif, or 12 64MB tif files. Then perform edits,(a few seconds each) then close each file as I go. The RAID 0 is super fast compared to a single drive system and I’m sure it’s faster than RAID 1. It also increases speed when my 2GB RAM gets used up. I let Photoshop use 75% of physical RAM. RAID 0 also provides twice the storage(1/2 TB) that I’d get with RAID 1. Maybe fast file read/write is not important for you but in my business it means less time spent editing scans which converts to more $/hr and more free time for me. RAID 0 and no regrets.,BTW Photoshop CS2 requires a patch from Adobe to work on RAID systems (activation conflicts).

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