Cool your PC by filling your case with cooking oil

As posted by GEEK.COM for Toms Hardware



Here's one for the books. Frank Völkel of Tom's Hardware Guide has done the unthinkable. He stripped all the fans out of his Athlon FX-55 machine and GeForce 6800 Ultra, prepped them a little, and submerged the entire box in 8 gallons of cooking oil! The result: a totally silent PC that works without a single fan. You can download a video showing the lunacy. For the geek mind, here's the skinny on what he did. First he built a transparent case so he could see everything. Next he tried some other stuff before vegetable oil, including distilled and deionized water. That worked, but only for about 5 minutes--none of the equipment was damaged, but it did crash after being on for a while. So, Frank deemed distilled water unviable and moved on to cooking oil. The video shows the building of the case, the PC running with only heatsinks installed, and then filling the case with oil as the machine is running 3DMark05. There's also some eerie, Star Trek music like in the Borg scenes from "Star Trek: First Contact."

THG goes step-by-step through the creation of the case and everything else. If you're interested in building one, see the article. I would like to hear if any Geek.com readers do this; pictures would also be nice.