Do you hate noisy computers?

[Fire Walk With Me]

Throw them in EVOO. Kucinichs' multimedia director does.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2007/11/6202_kucinich_campai.html

[rocktivity]

1. If Rachel Ray weren't alive, she'd be spinning in her grave about this!

http://media.graytvinc.com/images/Rachel+Ray.jpg

but seriously, folks, I thought I was stuck with a noisy CPU, too. When I replaced my tube monitor with an LCD monitor, I realized who the real culprit was.

:headbang:
rocknation

[lapfog_1]

2. Not a new idea...

immersion cooling has been around for more than 20 years.

Seymour Cray (the Cray II) used a product called Fluorinert (3M) to cool his second generation Supercomputer. Made for a neat "waterfall" display near the machine as the Fluorinert was circulated to a heat exchanger and a reservoir (which either was the aforementioned "waterfall" or a set of Plexiglas columns).

There have been many gamer hacks to do much the same thing with PCs.

The problems are:

Eddy currents that can create hot spots. Fluid flow around block obstacles (like a add on board or even a memory chip) can create a hot spot behind the blocking object.

PC testing and repair. either removing the PC from the bath or draining the container to service the device can be challenging, not to mention messy. If you frequently change things in your PC, this is a huge issue.

Uneven cooling. If you do not circulate the bath, you can have severe problems in areas like the CPU, all of which now depend on rapid heat dissipation to continue operating. If you do circulate the bath, you may need a heat exchanger or radiator (most likely with a fan) to effectively cool the liquid.

If you do try this with your home PC, do some research online first to see what other solutions are available and what has worked for other people.

[backscatter712]

3. Interesting idea.

Noisy computers can be obnoxious. Mostly, the culprit is cheap fans, which can make the computer quite loud. In server rooms where you have dozens of computers around, all with spinning fans, the noise can be enough to damage your hearing if you spend a lot of time in there.

Usually, the problem can be minimized by building computers with better fans instead of cheap fans, along with power supplies and CPU fan/heatsink assemblies. Control the temperature correctly instead of going on the cheap, and the fans won't have to spin as fast, and make so much noise to keep the system cool.

Overclockers have been working with liquid cooling solutions for a few years now - usually, the idea is to have a heat sink assembly that has liquid running through it, then to hoses from a pump and to a reservoir, maybe even an external heat sink - the whole thing works like the radiator in a car. This is more for performance reasons than noise - the more heat you can draw away from the CPU reliably, the higher you can turn up the clock speeds and the faster your system will run. A few pioneering souls have even taken to dunking the entire motherboard in transformer oil - the oil's non-conductive so nothing shorts out, and the oil is very effective in dissipating heat.

Haven't heard about vegetable oil. As long as it's non-conductive, I have no doubt it would work. It's green, too, since it's biomatter, while transformer oil is petroleum based and should be disposed of correctly.

Personally, as far as noise reduction goes, laptops work pretty well in place of desktops. My old desktop machine had seven fans in it, and sounded like a damned vacuum cleaner when it was running. My new laptop just has one fan in it, which usually only spins at half speed unless I'm doing something CPU-intensive and generating heat, and it is engineered to conserve power to boot (always good for the environment to draw fewer watts!)

[unpossibles]

4. sweet

and you can make corndogs with it too!