Mat's Message: Beware The Vegetable Oil

g'day Frank,

WARNING
Vegetable oils slowly polymerize (turn into a solid, rubbery mass) upon exposure to oxygen. This process is accelerated by higher temperatures.

Using vegetable oils to cool hotspots like CPUs and GPUs may lead to a slow buildup of a solid polymer layer on the electronic component. This will impede heat dissipation, and lead to overheating. The most likely outcome is component failure rather than a catastrophic failure, such as fire.

I suggest that you append a warning to your highly entertaining article, and advise people to use good quality motor oil instead -which is designed for sustained high-temperature operation.

cheers, Mat Ballard

And Another Thing About Vegetable Oil

Sorry to spoil your meal, but cooking oil will go rancid, i.e. grow BACTERIA by the gazillions and get someone sick. Your trick is sort of a laugh for someone who is bored, but you've just ruined your PC permanently, and even if you try to get the cooking oil out of your printed circuits, (they are porous weaves of fiberglass and epoxy) they too will rot. You'll see soon enough - you'll have to throw out your experiment just because of the stink, never mind your health in the longer term. Not to mention that silicon won't seal oil for long, it will seep out the "seals". The permanent way to do this is to use a higher temperature inorganic oil - like a silicon-based lubricant, but it still will be hell on any elastomer seals, but at least won't rot...At Cray they used to use fluorinert liquids, but these are not permitted anymore due to halocarbon destruction of the atmospheric OZONE layer from the vapors ( plus you need a sealed system ) BTW silicon based oils are Hell to remove from anything they touch - you thought the cooking oils was messy, silicon oils are almost non-removable.

BTW You must have been VERY bored.