News/Updates/Journal
This page was last modified on Tuesday, May 09, 2006 |
This project news page is no longer being updated: [it was a class project for our senior project]
*This site will remain up because it is getting several monthly visit from people wishing to know more about this project and this method of cooling a computer. Hope you guys find the information on our site helpful.
May 16, 2006- day of the presentation [the plan is to be at the house around 8:30, and arrive at the college shortly after that, set up the comp, sell a few of our books, and do more testing before 1pm [when the presentation is] afterwords we will most likely start showin it to the rest of the school(assuming they didnt come see it before the presentation), check back soon to see how it all goes down! [hopefully without a big splash between the locations]
May 13, 2006 - Today we're going to be tidying up the wires, and doing more testing, also we're going to get it ready for moving back to the college so we can do the presentation
May 11, 2006 - today we threw the mobo into the tank! we took it and slid it into the tank while sliding the tank into the main comp case, ran a few of our other wires around, and kicked it on. its leds went bright and everythign seems to be working fine, windows booted upa nd we loaded up the benchmarker, it shows it running just a lil' bit above its norm. we'll be making a lid for the mobo tank tommorrow i think, and saturday we're getting it ready for the presentation thats on tuesday[may 26th]. now that its all contained in its case it shouldnt be to hard to move it around, just have to watch the oil and be sure not to splash :s [PHOTOS HAVE BEEN UPLOADED] just saw this...we're listed in wikipedia now [apparently someone likes our site and posted about it] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_cooling#Liquid_submersion_cooling
May 9, 2006 - 1 week left today the new mobo came in and we threw it in as fast as we could get the box open, ooooh look its pretty....but all thsoe looks and....same ****in error! omg we're screwed, the omp doesnt work and weve gotta have it for next tuesday!!! we ordered pizza while we brainstormed and tried to get it working without any luck at all, everyone went home bout 3pm, cept me, cause im already home....want some good news guys? i called the guy i know, he talked me through, we canceled the possibility of it being the memory, hard drive, cd drive, or anything else attached....oh you know what that leaves? it means the AMD 64bit cpu we bought is bad!.....need not worry anymore! i was po'ed with this bad news so i went in checked our connections [which were right] and pulled my ace of spades [literally], i sat down thinking bout how to fix it while throwing this card around the house [threw one 56' in the back yard! woot!] so anyway...i threw in teh mobo cd, had it create a disk, [didnt use it though], then got relaly annoyed and rubbed at my windows cd, and threw it in for kicks, told it to boot off it and GOT IT TO INSTALL! you read that right...WINDOWS WORKS ON IT NOW WE CAN DO THE FINAL BUILD ON THURSDAY!!!!! AND RUNS SO FAST/SMOOTHLY ITS CRAZY!!!
May 4, 2006 - ok so this minifridge we've got isnt gonna work obviously, so I ran and got permission to use my parents permission to use the unused minifridge in their garage last night =) came a bit early so we could get started on mounting everything [again], drilled two holes on the back to mount the pump, then we made a narrow slit down the side [after careful measuring], then made that slit into an I shaped slit so we could peel it open like a window, we then took those pieces out and curved int he edges, we then cut out the holes for the tubing [using a template we drew out], ran our tubes and now we've got a oil coolin machine!! yay something works for the most part [doesnt get it as cool as we wanted] but anyway, the mobo doesnt work and we've only got a week and a half, so james bought a new mobo and payed extra to have it shipped by tuesday *THIS NEXT ONE BETTER WORK*
May 2, 2006 - we've got 2 weeks to go before the project is due, so we knew we really had to get some work done sooo... we bent the new copper into a coil, attached our hoses and kciked on the pump, BAM! works perfectly, it moves the oil like water [see the pictures page once i get the pics loaded], now that is a nice flow :) oook so now we just have to throw it into a freezer...thats where jame's new mini fridge comes in! we mounted the pump facing up in the fridge so that the IN line would be comming straight from the side wall , an dthe out would go towards the cooling coil where our heat-exchanger is. theres a big black garden hose going fromt eh tank above down through the side to the pump, then a clear tube goin from there to the exchanger then out the case back up to the tank...oooh you know what? it helps if you get a minifridge that works!!!! ARRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGG, oook so the mobo isnt working, the minifridge doesnt even wanna kick on, our stuff is mounted and ready yeh time for us to go home and rethink our lives.
April 27, 2006 - day started off with us running ALL OVER TOWN just to find a pump that would actaully move oil, we tried farm & home, they have hand pumps that will work with oil! lol ok thats not gonna work, but we went ahead and got bigger tubing and copper there :p so we tried a few auto places which dont have squat. then off to the other farm store....they have pumps galore! WOOT, ok so long story short we got an inline super pump, 8'x1" tubing & 8' of 1" copper tubing, a few clamps[which didnt work well later] and a few snacks hehe, ok sooooo we went to the project site and took a few pics, fudged with the mobo and got fed up so we left again lol
apr 25, 2006 - getting close to the end of the semester so we went into super gear and tested our pump with the oil, this was supposed to be a nic elil, drop the pump in the oil and watch it move it day but instead we did that and got our supplies for the heat sink part, we sat there and watched james bend at the pipe with the nifty pipe bender kit and make the heatexchanger, we then attached hoses to it and the pump, annnnnd it kinda moved the oil through it. new pump might help? so we ran to wal-mart and got a pump twice as powerful *toolman grunt* ok so here goes nothing! ...no literally....nothing, it trickled the oil through at least but compared to what we need/want it was nothing...the mobo is still messing up so we were fed up doubly today.
April 20, 2006 - fought and fought at the mobo trying to get it to work, but not much luck, did a stress test and water test on our tank...works fine
Apr 18, 2006 - mmm mobo virus......the mobo wouldnt boot anything!!!! we're fed up so everyones goin home [im already home so i just came in here and typed this up instead]
Apr 13, 2006 - we plan to complete the mobo tank on this day. we will probably put the mobo into the tank and route a few wires and seal up the wire port holes. we will also (probably) seal the edges around the cpu/heatsink gap, so the oil doesnt actually get in under the cpu[just in case the oil messes stuff up in the small gap between the pins on the cpu slot, it didnt mess anything up on the test mobo...but ya never know, and when your messing with an expensive mobo/cpu you dont want to risk it]
Apr 12, 2006 - ordered the plexiglass [not a group meeting day]
apr 11, 2006 - We worked out how the wires would be run from the mobo to the components and measued exactly how big we want the mobo tank to be. We went to Wal-Mart and bought glue & popsicles [so we could have some sticks to spread the silicon glue with(it was actually cheaper to buy the icecream than the sticks alone!)] We worked on sanding down our plastic but found it wasnt as perfectly straight as we wanted. so we called up the local glass shop and got a price quote for some precision cut pleiglass instead.
Mar 29, 2006 - Got this website
Feb 15, 2006 - We took the test mobo, removed all moving parts[mobo fan] and connected everything to it, it worked, so we then filled a small tub with our silicon oil, and prayer for the best. we then dunked the motherboard into the oil and....it continued working. its temperature decreased from about 40'c down to a lowmark of 22'c, after it had sat there running for a while its temps were on average around 24-30'c, which in our minds....isn't cool enough.
Feb 10, 2006 - We decided on using Silicon Oil due to its price and properties, we found it was about as thick as mineral oil, non-toxic, non-corrosive, non-conductive, doesnt evaporate until its really hot, and stays liquid for very cool temperatures, and ontop of it all, it was created specifically for heat transfer, it is the oil used in the big transformers the electric companies have. so we ordered this at a fair price of about $55 a gallon.
Feb 7, 2006 - Gathered up spare computer parts for use as testing parts, this way if the oil we chose didnt work then we wouldnt be out a lot of money
Feb 1, 2006 - started looking up different liquids and found the following:
- Distilled Water - put a link to a site that shows this
- Mineral Oil - another link
- Silicon Oil - yet another link
- Fluorinert - 3M
Jan 24, 2006 - We started looking into how other people had done their immersion Cooled Comps and found these sites:
Jan 20, 2006
- This is about when we came up with the idea of doing this project