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Message boards : Graphics cards (GPUs) : [Off topic] When water cooling is not cool enough

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Message 30684 - Posted: 6 Jun 2013 | 13:12:17 UTC

A nice article on oil cooling.

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Message 30778 - Posted: 11 Jun 2013 | 17:53:42 UTC - in response to Message 30684.

In terms of temperature, I wonder how this stacks up against a custom water cooling loop.

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Message 30783 - Posted: 11 Jun 2013 | 22:59:43 UTC
Last modified: 11 Jun 2013 | 23:01:36 UTC

I would guess anywhere from slightly worse to much worse. I don't think oil is a very good heat sink compared to water, otherwise we would be using oil instead of water in our PCs. And believe me, any liquid you can think of has already been tried at least once by somebody in a liquid cooling loop.

Plus you still need a way to get the heat out of the oil into the air (ie. a radiator) otherwise the temperature of the oil will just continue to rise until your pc overheated and shut off.

I guess it could be much cheaper than dedicated water cooling equipment and that may attract people. Another attractor would be potential for near-silent operation if you had a big enough radiator and quiet pump.
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Message 30793 - Posted: 12 Jun 2013 | 14:24:31 UTC

The mass of oil is considerable in such a setup so could absorb a lot of heat and there are pumps to keep the oil moving, most likely to a radiator system. I would think the worst part would be changing back to normal cooling. Have fun getting the mineral oil out of everything, maybe some type of solvent...

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Message 30799 - Posted: 12 Jun 2013 | 18:52:30 UTC

Temperatures for these HD6990 are said to be 50 - 80°C while cracking passwords. Water cooling with dedicated water cooling blocks can do much better than this. I suppose the problem are the stock heatsinks & fans, which were made for air cooling. You can see the oil flowing rather slowly in the video, i.e. the heat is not removed from the GPUs quickly enough.

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Message 30803 - Posted: 12 Jun 2013 | 20:28:29 UTC - in response to Message 30799.

It looks like the hotter oil is just radiating from the rear of the GPU's.
They should have taken the GPU casing off completely, and there is no point in having a chassis - just dunk the boards!
They could even have kept everything but the GPU's out of the liquid, by using raiser cables and keeping the motherboard upside down out of the oil, but I think they were just playing around with ideas and trying to lower power costs. A propeller to move the oil around might have helped.

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Message boards : Graphics cards (GPUs) : [Off topic] When water cooling is not cool enough

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