ok - finally at a truckstop with wifi and not out in BFE nowhere lol - so as promised - here we go...
The first attempt we made was using a sump pump, 88 ford ranger radiator, glycol, and copper blocks. Not one of us ever considered galvanic issues lol it was a long time ago, we were usually very drunk, and well... young.... EPIC failure of block in 3 months - by epic, I mean pin hole leak caused by corrosion fried the system - yup even with glycol. we knew using ethanol would trash any seals we had so we never bothered.
One of the first mineral oil attempts was a submerged setup in a Styrofoam cooler. IIRC, it was a 900 or 1G setup ( shows you how long ago lol. We submerged EVERYTHING - HD included! Obviously not the optical though. The initial setup was based on watercooling of the time by pumping mineral oil thru the rad hanging out in a window nearby. not a bad setup, but after a few hours of starcraft/total anhilation/empire earth LAN gaming, equilibrium was surpassed and began to see stuttering. Of course we immediately looked to cooling power, which lead to next attempt
We graduated from the Styrofoam cooler ( ok so we trashed it while toying with the build and leaked 4 gals of mineral oil over my carpet in my apartment - never did pay off the damages on that one....) to a REAL big boy Coleman Cooler - Ya know, the green metal beast with the latch that racoons just laughed at when you went camping? A buddy had a dorm fridge he was getting rid of (ok so we swiped a curb drop) and we tore it apart. We re-plumbed (one of the guys went to school for HVAC) the coils so we could drop them into the oil off the side of the cooler. We discovered two issues - 1)oil does thicken when cold 2) warm oil and cold oil make really neat lava lamp like effects, but do not play nice. So of course we realized we needed to force movement. Out came my old Ehiem submersible pumps. First we attempted placing the pump right by the coils to force the cold oil. Yup, you guessed it - too thick, poor flow. Ok fine - so we decided put by the heatsink to force warm oil to the cold - ooo pretty lava effect but terrible cooling. We then discovered a supplier than could get us ISO50 mineral oil. This stuff is like water at room temp. Voila! we had a possible fix! Realised our mid cooler temps were reaching equilibrium to quick, and added a pipe to the Ehiem, intake by the coil, piped across to eject right by the heatsink! Much more promising results. Stability and 3 hours before equilibrium. We wanted to OC ... hehehe cranked it up to 1.27 iirc and added a second Ehiem. Quite impressive! it held very well with only a loss of 30min for equilibrium. Oil temp never reached above 105F.
The the compressor died after about 2 months of use The humanity!!!! We said screw it and started curb shopping for full size fridges. In the meantime, we took another old dorm fridge and sealed it, used it as our case laid on it's back. Worked, but abysmal temps when under heavy load. A fridge finally surfaced and we re installed into the coleman cooler with a full size fridge compressor and coils out of an old Kelvinator - yup THAT beast from the 50's) Noisy but by dear gods was it cold!!! we ran full gaming stints and never surpassed 90F in the oil. Of course, I also had a $300 electric bill that month instead of the normal 40-50.
So back to the drawing board. We had the principles down, but needed a more efficient means. One of the guys worked at a industrial heat exchange heatsink manufacturer in their testing lab - he got to do destructive testing, quite cool. A supplier had given them a newer tech of the time we hadn't used before - they were called TEC.... yup lol those back in the day when they were VERY expensive and hard to come by quality ones. we now had access to 3 60w pads. a quick trip to Radioshack (again back in the day when you could build a nuke with everything they had right in store, now you have to order everything) and we built a few potentiometers. He also was able to grab 6 stainless steel heatsinks with copper plates just about the size of the TECs, from work... not RS lol we formed a setup where the cold attached sinks were submerged in oil, and the hot sticking up in open air. Took about 2 days and many bottles of captain morgan to fine tune the POT settings. Again we achieved sub 90F equilibrium. But the heat sinks were searing to the touch. Now, time to integrate the original 88 ford ranger rad and sump!. Using acrylic and silicone caulk, we created 2 compartments with a small dead space inbetween. Cold TEC sinks on mobo side with small 360g/h pumps circulating, hot TEC sinks on the other, with sump and rad, fitted with electric 12v car rad fan and placed in window. Looked ghetto as hell but we achieved sub ambient temps now! the cooler side and acrylic edges did form condensation, but the oil managed to of course float it - very mesmerizing when watching on certain.... substances...
The reason we never further experimentation, was 1) limits of mobo tech at the time didn't warrant it 2) anything more than 60w pads was impractical and too difficult to control with any fine tuned results, 3)OIL EVERYWHERE, made a mess of sooooo many things.
We did discover a few things that might be of use to you (heck you might already know but we verified lol):
1) subambient on oil is possible and preferred!
2) no glycol mix level is ever safe from corrosion, and just as messy and impractical as oil
3) multiple small TEC is far easier to deal with than large
4) mineral oil can be purchased in varying viscosity levels, and works identically regardless of viscosity for our purposes - except for in pumps of course
5)insane over radding could possibly yield sub zero temps safely when combining with TEC
6)Drunk ideas are not always good ones but by god they are fun!
Quick synopsis/overview as I am on limited time atm, but if there is anything in particular you want to inquire on feel free and I can give you more detail - now... I require sleep - long drive ahead...
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