Passive cooling meets mineral oil: Dual CPUs and Titan X

[Stefan1024]

Hallo silence aficionados!

My third passive build is even more powerfull than the previous once. This time with mieral oil. While it uese 3 fans, they are fully submerged and totally inaudible while the oil itself is passive cooled.

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The specs are:
CPU: 2x E5-2680 (8 cores, 2.7 GHz base clock, 3.5 GHz boost clock, 130 watts): used from Ebay
Coprocessor: Xeon Phi 31S1P (57 cores, 1.1 GHz, 8 GByte RAM, 270 watts): new from Ebay
RAM: 8x Hynix HMT31GR7CFR4C (8 GByte, DDR 3, 1600 MHz, ECC): used from Ebay
Motherboard: Asus Z9PE-D8 WS: new from retail (no used once available)
PSU: Corsair RM1000i: new from retail (I don't dare to use a used PSU)
GPU: GTX Titan X: when the GTX 1080 hype peaked, you got them for very low price, I couldnt't resist to buy one
SSD 1: Samsung 850 Evo 1TB: salvaged from my first build
SSD 2: Samsung 850 Evo 2TB: used
SSD 3: Samsung SM951 NVMe, 256 GByte: used
HDD1: WB Red 8 TB: when the helium can't escape, the oil can't come in right?
WLAN: TP-Link Archer T9E: new from retail

As you can see it has capable hardware and the power consumption peaks at about 900 watts. It can handle such heat load for about 2 hours than the thermal capacity is ued up. But when I disable the Xeon Phi or the GPU, the load is reduced to about 600 watts what it can handle 24/7. As my applications will use the GPU or the Xeon Phi but not both at once this is fine.

As usual, by big blog is over on LinusTechTips (https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/53 ... il-cooling), so sorry for not replicating all the 12 pages here.
But if you have some questions feel freee to ask them here....

[quest_for_silence]

Congrats, as usual, impressive job, as usual!

Out of curiosity:

1. I didn't understand, did you eventually fixed the mobo whine? How?
2. Is the mineral oil toxic? In case, what about the leaking?
3. How to clean all the parts if you need to do some manteinance work?

[Stefan1024]

Congrats, as usual, impressive job, as usual!

Out of curiosity:

1. I didn't understand, did you eventually fixed the mobo whine? How?
2. Is the mineral oil toxic? In case, what about the leaking?
3. How to clean all the parts if you need to do some manteinance work?

Thank you very much

1: I returned the MoBo as DOA and got a replacement that was fine.\
2: I use medical grade mineral oil that is cleaned and all aromatic hydrocarbon removed. So it is not dangerous if a bit evaporates. It can't hurt your skinn and it is even used as a base for a lot of cosmetica. However when it get's into your lung is gets dangerous due to the low surface tension.
3: You don't. The parts gets ueded until they die or are so outdated, reusing is pointless anyway. Maintainance work should not be required and if it is I may have a big problem depending on the part.

[CA_Steve]

While it uese 3 fans, they are fully submerged

Whaaat?

[quest_for_silence]

While it uese 3 fans, they are fully submerged

Whaaat?

Haven't you ever seen something like a Noctua iPPC working submerged? IIRC there should be also a video on the Youtube channel of the italian reviewer CoolingTechnique (but I'm pretty sure there are more from other tubers).

[Stefan1024]

While it uese 3 fans, they are fully submerged

Whaaat?

As they move oil and not air I prefer to call them propellers and not fans
Also they turn slower than usual, but they are completly fine and I do not need a lot of oil movement.

[edh]

Well at least the fans will be well lubricated.

Can you perhaps provide some more details on the exact oil being used? It would be interesting to be able to look at it's thermal and electric properties.

I am assuming the large heatsinks act as radiators from the mineral oil. What kind of temperatures do they get to? When you say it takes about 2 hours for the heat capacity to be used up, what kind of temperatures does it reach? You have a big heat capacity there but not an equivalent ability to radiate heat so high temperatures will eventually result although it will be very slow getting there. I see this more useful if you are not running 100% all of the time but more for varying workloads.

Application wise I can see the need if you have some major Matlab calculations to do but I do not believe folding to be a worthwhile exercise for spending that much on electricity. Your electricity bill must be enormous.

[Stefan1024]

Well at least the fans will be well lubricated.

Can you perhaps provide some more details on the exact oil being used? It would be interesting to be able to look at it's thermal and electric properties.

I am assuming the large heatsinks act as radiators from the mineral oil. What kind of temperatures do they get to? When you say it takes about 2 hours for the heat capacity to be used up, what kind of temperatures does it reach? You have a big heat capacity there but not an equivalent ability to radiate heat so high temperatures will eventually result although it will be very slow getting there. I see this more useful if you are not running 100% all of the time but more for varying workloads.

Application wise I can see the need if you have some major Matlab calculations to do but I do not believe folding to be a worthwhile exercise for spending that much on electricity. Your electricity bill must be enormous.

I use "ADDINOL WEISSÖL WX 15" what is a mediacal grade mineral oil.

The maximum temperature I'm conftabe with is about 85 degrees C on the GPU and 90 degrees C on the CPUs. Under full stress this is reached within 2 hours and the oil itself has a temperature of about 60 degrees C at this moment. The steady state dissipiation is between 500 and 600 watts what equals to both CPUs under load and the Phi or the GPU. Usually the Matlab simulations only use the CPUs and the temperature is well within save lavels (70 - 80 degrees C). So I could runn them 24/7, but usually they are done within 3 -4 hours.
Stuff like gaming is also fine as the CPUs have not a lot of work. And I have not more time than 2-3 hours to game anyway.

At the moment I do not fold except a one day run for thermal stress testing. But I moved recently to a new flat and the heating here is said to be not suffisiont enough when it's very cold outside. The previous tenant used electrical heating elements as a boost. Instead of running the electricity just through a resistor I can as well do something useful like folding with it

[Cistron]

At least you won't have to heat that room in winter, hehe.

Fingers crossed that you don't have to change any components, because that would be messy.

How many times did you re-seat the coolers? I would have been paranoid about getting it as optimal as possible.

[Stefan1024]

At least you won't have to heat that room in winter, hehe.

Fingers crossed that you don't have to change any components, because that would be messy.

How many times did you re-seat the coolers? I would have been paranoid about getting it as optimal as possible.

Due to the RMA of the MoBo I had to reseat the coolers a few times, but never because I was worried. But I did excessive testing before I willed it up with oil.