Written on May 5th, 2007 by Jon Bach

Subsequent updates:

Over the years, we have seen many projects on the web that cooled a computer using common vegetable oil, including a very popular video by Tom's Hardware.

We felt that by building a computer in an aquarium using clear mineral oil, that we would be able to accomplish a much more attractive result, with less work. We were happy with the results!

We are pleased to present this page showing you the system we built, and giving you the information you need to make one of your own!

Note: Puget Custom Computers is a custom computer company, but we have no plans to sell a full computer like this. This is just a fun project we've been wanting to share! We do offer DIY kits, if you would like to build one yourself.

Why Build One?

We built this system because with all the oil cooled projects out there, no one built a system that looked good and functioned well! After seeing all the other projects, we had a lot of ideas of how we could do it better and more easily. Many projects used vegetable oil, which would go rancid after a short time. The mineral oil does not have this problem, and is completely clear. We also wanted to use an appropriate enclosure -- the Toms Hardware system used a clear acrylic case, and they had to painstakingly seal each rear connector to keep the oil from leaking. We wanted to put the ports on top to solve that problem the simple way. Other people have built systems in aquariums before, but they were always oversized and square. When we found the Eclipse System 6 Aquarium, we were excited to see an aquarium that was absolutely perfect in size -- you couldn't go any smaller. In addition, we had questions about performance and long term effects. Our initial tests, which we go over below, answer the questions about cooling performance. At the bottom of the page, we've posted subsequent follow ups after a few months and even a year, to let you know how a system like this performs in the long term.

Primary Materials
Eclipse System 6 Aquarium $60 from Premium Aquatics It took a fair amount of searching to find the right aquarium, but the Eclipse System 6 ended up being nearly perfect in size, we couldn't have asked for better dimensions!	Lian-Li Motherboard Tray $25 from Performance-PCs Designed as a removable tray for Lian-Li cases, this part allows us to cleanly mount all the computer hardware, then simply slide it into the aquarium. Only minimal modifications to the aquarium are needed for a good fit.	5-6 Gallons Mineral Oil $60 from STE Oil You'd be amazed how difficult it is to find quantities of mineral oil locally! We learned that it is given as a laxative to horses, so you can talk to a local vet to get it! Special thanks to McMonigle Veterinary Hospital for humoring our odd request and providing the mineral oil!

Also needed:

Clear acrylic panel: In order to give the motherboard tray a flat surface to mount to, we needed to grab some acrylic panel to cut to the shape of the aquarium on the outside, and to the rectangular shape of the motherboard tray on the inside. You can see this in the video above. At first, we planned to create a more complicated metal framework for the motherboard tray to slide into, but it turned out that simply giving the tray a flat surface to rest on made it more than stable enough for our needs.

Silicon Sealant: We used this clear waterproof sealant to seal the acrylic to the lid of the aquarium, mainly to make the top as airtight as possible to prevent as much evaporation as we could. Sealant is NOT needed around the CPU.

Weather Stripping: Applied around the edges of the motherboard tray, this was just one more measure to try and prevent as much evaporation as possible.

Computer Hardware: We started with the cheapest hardware possible, just in case the whole thing blew up! When the first test went perfectly, we moved up to modern hardware. Note the external SATA hard drive -- we didn't want anything to have to be plugged in or unplugged from down in the oil -- too messy!

Air Pump and Bubble Bar: If you like bubbles! We were also hoping the bubbles would help carry heat out of the oil, see below for our test results.

Assembly Notes

The setup is quite simple -- with a few cuts to the top brackets on the aquarium, and an acrylic panel cut to provide a flat base for the motherboard to rest on, there isn't much else that had to be done in terms of assembly. If we had to do it again, we'd find a better solution for the power supply -- it is a bit clunky down in the bottom of the case. If you're adventurous, you could always remove the housing from the power supply. There is a real risk of shock if you don't handle it properly, but without the housing, the power supply would look much more at home in a system like this. We also didn't intend to run the system with fans, but once we saw them spinning slowly in the oil, we just couldn't resist keeping them! With the oil, they made no noise at all. In our follow up in a few months, we'll let you know if the slow spinning eventually burns out the fans.

Performance Results

With a system like this, one of the best things is that the oil evenly distributes the heat. You don't have nearly as localized hot zones as you do in an air cooled computer. But how well does it dissipate the heat?

Idle Temperatures	The mineral oil has considerable specific heat capacity, which means it can absorb lots of heat without having to vent it out to the surrounding air. Because of this, it takes the system quite a while to work up to its equilibrium temperature. Starting at an ambient 29C on the CPU, we found it took about an hour to hit a stable idle temperature of 37C. Not bad!
Load Temperatures	The system under load was a different story. We started 3DMark06 looping, and watched the temperatures climb. It took a really long time. After an amazing 12 hours, the system topped out with a CPU temperature of 88C. Yes, that is really hot...on the other hand, the system was rock solid and didn't crash when running 3DMark06 for 48 hours at these temperatures. While you could add some radiators and pump the oil through to cool it, you realistically would not be gaming constantly for 12 hours, so these temperatures are as extreme as it gets for this system.
Did Bubbles Help? After we saw the high maximum temperature during load, we started to think about what would happen if we pumped bubbles into the system. Theoretically, since the air for the bubbles was bring drawn from the outside air (we placed the intake a few feet away from the tank), the cooler bubbles should pick up the heat, then rise and release it to the air above. The question was whether the effect would be enough to show a noticeable difference. As you can see in the video, we had quite a bit of bubbles going. After about 2 hours, the temperature settled at a new maximum of 84C on the CPU under load. So, the bubbles did have an effect, but not as much as we were hoping for. Interestingly, the bubbles also hurt the video card temperature, causing it to rise by a few degrees! It seems the bubbles also served to agitate all the contents of the aquarium, bringing everything to a more consistent temperature throughout.
Return to Idle Another question we wanted to answer was how quickly the system cooled once we stopped the 3DMark06 looping. With the aid of the bubbles, it dropped back to an idle baseline in just about 8 hours. While the bubbles seemed to have little effect in dropping the peak temperature under load, they did speed up the cooling process, and we can only imagine that under load the bubbles would cause the system to take even longer than 12 hours to hit peak temperatures.

Final Thoughts

The mineral oil aquarium alone had an incredible ability to absorb heat into the oil, and for that reason, this is a great setup for periods of load less than 12 hours long. As long as you give it some cool down time, it runs some great temperatures. We do want to stress that at no time was the system unstable, ever....which was surprising! It doesn't seem too much a stretch to expect that you wouldn't put a typical computer under load for more than 12 hours...after all, even gamers have to sleep! With that taken into account, this setup as it is could serve as a great, eye catching way to cooling your computer. If you need more cooling, it would be very easy to use a product like the Zalman Reserator to directly cool the oil by feeding it through the radiator. However, we don't want to focus too much on the temperatures, because that's not really why we did this project! We had a lot of fun building a system like this, and now that you know you only really need to spend about $150 on all the materials, we encourage you to give it a try if you've been thinking about it. Of course, we're not responsible if you blow up your computer! In the end, this is a novelty, of course. There is really no other reason to build a system like this...but it will certainly be a great attention getter when we display it prominently at our office! If you're in Seattle, feel free to stop by and check it out.

Gallery

Update posted on July 16th, 2007

Update After Two Months:

Improving Cooling Performance

The biggest issue with this setup is that there is inadequate heat dissipation. The mineral oil has a terrific specific heat capacity, which means that it takes a very long time to reach peak temperature -- about 12 hours. However, that temperature was too high, at 88C. On the other hand, we had absolutely no problems with stability with over a month of usage at those temperatures. Our theory is that while the overall temperature was hot, the oil did a good job of making sure everything was a very consistent temperature. With a normal air cooled computer, you have a handful of hot spots. With the oil eliminating these hot spots, we had no problem running a rock solid system.

Stable or not, 88C is still very high, and there is little doubt that the lifespan of the components would be shortened at that temperature. We wanted to add a radiator to help dissipate the heat, and judging by the feedback we've received, many of you agree! We've received dozens of different recommendations on how to best cool the oil, some extremely complicated. We elected to simply pump the oil directly through the radiator. That way, we can test it and tell you if there are any adverse long term effects!

We do a lot of liquid cooling here at Puget, so we have a lot of materials on hand. We decided to use an Innovatek Konvekt-O-Matic Ultra Radiator, which is a huge radiator that we could run without any fans, and a Aqua-Computer Aquastream water pump, which has good flow and is extremely quiet.

The results were very good! Within 8 hours, the temperature dropped to a new maximum of 45C, and it has held that temperature for about two weeks now. If we wanted to get even better cooling, we could hook up some fans to the radiator, but 45C is an excellent temperature as it is, and we prefer the quiet operation with no fans.

Frequently Raised Issues

Won't the mineral oil put too much load on the fans, causing them to fail?

Answer: Even if they did, it wouldn't matter. We left them running just because they were fun to look at, and to answer just this question! The answer is no -- after two months, the fans are spinning exactly like they did at the beginning. While it remains to be seen if they will burn out more quickly, they definitely have lasted these two months with zero loss of speed.
Won't the mineral oil eat away at the rubber, making capacitors blow or components fall apart?

Answer: We've seen many variations on this question. Some people say the motherboard will fall apart, others that the acrylic tank will dissolve away to nothing! In reality, we have seen absolutely zero effect. All components are perfectly intact, and the system remains rock solid. The only impact we have seen is on adhesives -- the label stickers on the memory came off, and the adhesive backing on the weather stripping became useless. However, it seems somewhat selective. The label stickers on the video card and motherboard are just fine. But to answer the cries of doom and gloom -- we've seen no indications yet. All the rubber seals are intact, and the capacitors are completely unaffected. It seems as if we'll be able to run this system for quite some time, if not indefinitely.
Won't the air bubbles introduce water through air humidity?

Answer: Any water introduced would sink to the bottom because it is more dense than the mineral oil. This is good, because there is a gap of about a half inch before it hits any electronics. So, we should be able to see it pool there and have plenty of time to react. After two months, with the bubbles running 24 hours a day, we do not see even a trace of water. It is possible it will be hard to make out since the mineral oil is clear, but the difference in density should give us a slight "lava lamp" type appearance.
How often do you have to add more oil?

Answer: We only had to add oil once at the very beginning, but it was probably because of sloshing as we moved the setup to its current location. Since then (about a month and a half), we have noticed virtually no drop in oil level.
This is fake, there is no way this would work.

Answer: You're welcome to come by and give it a look in person! Directions to our Seattle facility where it is on display can be found on our Contact Us page.
Where is the hard drive and CDROM?

Answer: We didn't submerge the hard drive, but rather hid it inside the plastic molding on top of the aquarium. There is no CDROM drive -- we plug in a USB drive when needed.
Why didn't you submerge the hard drive?

Answer: There is a good amount of debate as to whether we could have submerged the hard drive. We still think it is right that we did not. While the oil is not conductive, it is viscous. We were not confident that the hard drive was entirely water-tight (in fact, some cite that there is a hole in the hard drive casing, designed to allow pressure differences to equalize). If oil were to get into the hard drive, that would be the end of the drive -- the platters wouldn't be able to spin at full speed, and the read heads would be restricted from free motion. So, we opted to be safe and keep it out of the oil. However, SSD drives would definitely be no problem.
Where did you get that radiator?

Answer: The radiator is imported from Germany, and is no longer available. A great alternative would be the Zalman Reserator 1 V2 or Zalman Reserator 2.
Dood! Put fishez in ur tank!!!1

Answer: No.

Do you have other questions? Email us and we might add it to this page!

Gallery with Radiator

Update posted on December 4th, 2007

Update After Six Months:

The machine is still up and running with no problems! We've made a few more alterations:

We took the power supply out of its housing. This makes it much smaller, and less in the way. This is a great improvement to the look of the machine. This does remove the fan from the power supply, but it was already clear that the fans were not necessary.

We added blue crushed rocks to the bottom. It adds a finished look to the system, and gives it even more of an aquarium theme. We checked carefully to make sure the rocks were not conductive, since they come into direct contact with the power supply.

We have taken the radiator back off the machine, simply because we think it looks cleaner and nicer without it. As long as we put the machine into standby at night, it doesn't get too warm. However, the employee using the machine tends to forget to put it into standby 90% of the time, so it is running at a constant 70C, but again, with complete stability.

The fans are still running strong, just like they did on day one. Two times now, we have seen some oil on the countertop, and paniced thinking we had a leak, but each time ended up being a false alarm. It seems some days the bubbles tend to "foam" the top of the mineral oil, and this foam was spilling out of the aquarium. We just turned down the bubbles a bit, and everything was fine. It is curious that this only happens on certain days. Perhaps humidity plays a part?

Update posted on June 6th, 2008

Update After One Year:

The machine is still running strong! We are having no problems with stability, and it has now been running for over a year, most of the time at 80C! It is very easy to lower the temperature through a radiator, or just putting the system into standby at night, but we wanted to see if stability would be affected by higher temperature.

The fans continue to run strong. We're amazed by the number of people that continue to be concerned that the fans will burn out. It is now very clear that the fans have absolutely no problem running in this environment.

There is no sign of weakening of rubber seals or PCB. We have found that prolonged exposure to mineral oil does not eat away at any components. However, you will notice in the pictures that the voltage module for the LED light has fallen down. That module was stuck in place with nothing more than a sticker -- it took 9 months for it to come down! We're amazed it stayed up that long, but definitely recommend you do not rely on stickers or tape to fasten anything. Zip ties will be more solid and long lasting.

The LED light has turned from blue to purple. We aren't sure whether that is due to the oil, because we've seen it happen with other LED lights in regular computers.

The oil has gotten slightly murky. It isn't a very large change, but it is definitely there. This oil has been sitting, unfiltered, for a year, so it isn't really suprising! A quick pass through an oil filter (maybe even a coffee filter!) or a change of oil once a year is all that would be needed to counter this problem.

Overall, the biggest downside we have found is that the oil wicks down the cabling and makes a mess. Its amusing at first to find oil seeping out of your mouse, but gets annoying very quickly! We recommend making extensive use of wireless (especially bluetooth) for a system like this. There's no reason why you can't run only a power cord and video cables to the box, and take care of everything else wirelessly.

Every day, we're coming up with improvements we'd like to make to the machine. Stay tuned for a "version two" coming soon!


We have also gotten many requests for pictures of the top of the system without the plastic cover. Here they are!

Update posted on October 7th, 2008

Aquarium Computer Version Two:

While our original aquarium computer is still running strong, there are number of updates we've been wanting to make to the design. We decided to build a "Version Two" system, with these improvements. The biggest design improvement is that we have designed an acrylic motherboard tray, which is completely customized for this application, in this aquarium tank. Not only does this take the polish of the project to an entirely new level, but it makes assembly easier and the system much more secure. The other major design improvement came in the cooling system. We wanted to create a radiator system that was more compact, and that placed the pump submerged in the oil, for quieter operation. We built this system for demonstration at PAX 2008, and it was a complete success!

Our first version was to prove that it could be done -- knowing that it could be, we were able to put more finishing touches on version two! The overall look of the aquarium computer is much more polished. The radiator sits on back, and mounts directly to the aquarium.

The view of the top with the cover off shows how much the custom acrylic motherboard tray improves the project. We were able to design mounting holes for CCFL lights, which allows us to permanently zip tie them in place rather than have to rely on adhesives. The tubing to the radiator uses quick disconnect valves, so you can quickly add and remove the radiator depending on your cooling needs. We mounted four Antec Tri-Cool fans to the radiator, and ran them on the low setting, for very quiet operation. The loudest part of this system is the bubble bar!

The custom motherboard tray also allows us to install a power socket, and a control valve for the air hose. These connection points serve a distinct purpose! By not running any cables directly into the oil, we prevent wicking. The connection points break the suction, and has effectively stopped the wicking we saw with version one. A power cord extension is run down to the power supply at the bottom of the tank, and in this system, we directly soldered the cord to the power supply, to eliminate the bulky socket.

In this system, the pump and hard drive (solid state) are both submerged. Using a special bracket, we are able to secure them both in the oil. We also used a larger heatsink, though our testing still showed that the Freezer7 is an ideal pick.

How well does this setup cool? AMAZINGLY well! In this system, we put in the best hardware -- an Intel QX9770 overclocked to 4.6GHz, 8GB of DDR3-1600 memory, and a NVIDIA GTX280 video card. It ran at 50C under full load, and that was with our fans on the low setting! The graph below shows the temperatures we saw as we ran 3DMark Vantage, then let the system idle. You'll notice the temperature barely changes at all -- the radiator handles the heat with ease!

Update posted on June 18th, 2009

Still Running Strong!

We continue to run our V2 system as a workstation for one of our employees, and it is still running strong with no problems. The oil has remained quite clear, there have been no leaks, and the cooling system is running as strong as on day one! Looking to build one for yourself? Try one of our Aquarium DIY Kits.

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