Once PC performance enthusiasts came up with the idea of cooling a computer by submerging its components in mineral oil – and it worked! But today, no one does, so what happened to those awesome “aquarium” PCs that went into hiding?
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How does this even work?
In order to make a computer that is cooled with mineral oil, you need to have a few things on your shopping list:
- A leak-proof container, e.g. B. an aquarium tank.
- Special non-conductive mineral oil.
- An (optional) pump that circulates the oil in the system.
- An (optional) cooler, although you’ll need one for an always-on system.
All solid-state components of the computer are immersed in mineral oil and their heat is transferred directly to it. Mineral oil has a high specific heat capacity. That’s how much energy you need to pump into the oil to raise its temperature by (for the sake of argument) one degree.
In practice this means you can keep adding heat to the oil and it will slowly warm up until it reaches temperature equilibrium. From this point on, the system runs temperature-stable under load. Assuming that temperature is below the maximum end of the range, your cooling worries are over.
Passive oil cooling comes in handy for people who use their computer for a few hours a day and then turn it off, put it to sleep, or leave it idle overnight. The oil slowly cools down and is ready to absorb more heat the next day.
For systems that need active cooling, you can use a pump that circulates the oil through a cooler. Fans extract heat from the oil running through the radiator, cooling the whole thing. While this isn’t as quiet as a passive system, the use of large, low-speed fans that only activate at certain temperature thresholds is still fairly inaudible.
Early homebrew experiments
Just as with water cooling, initially the equipment needed to build a petroleum system could not be bought off the shelf. This meant that people who wanted to try to build such a computer had to pay a visit to the local aquarium shop and perhaps repurpose small car oil radiators.
You can find forum posts about these projects all over the internet. Likewise some magazine publications and YouTuber also attempted to build these systems, with varying degrees of success. Interest in oil-cooled PCs began to grow among performance enthusiasts. “Take off” might be an exaggeration, but it was an intriguing option if you wanted high-performance cooling in a system that can run 24/7.
Commercial mineral oil kits

Indeed, given enough interest in the enthusiast market, some commercial petroleum kits have been made available for sale. The most famous of these is the Custom System Builder kit Puget. The company tested and developed several iterations of a mineral oil refrigeration system and ran its first prototype for over a year to see the long-term effects. Satisfied that it was doable, you could (for a while) buy the kit from them.
Unfortunately, another company claimed that Puget’s oil cooling kit infringed on their patents, and instead of paying royalties, Puget decided to stop selling the kits. It’s not clear how many people bought kits like this, or if they built long-term systems with them. Anyway, we couldn’t find many commercial kits on the internet today. One company, Coolbitts, offers one immersion kit for high-end systems for a staggering $2450.
Mineral oil cooling has problems
Cooling a computer with mineral oil has many benefits and is an interesting way to create a unique computer that looks amazing. At least if you do it right. That being said, there is many Problems to deal with when building a petroleum computer system.
First of all, the oil itself must be cared for. Puget systems said in their tests that changing the oil or filtering the oil once a year would probably be sufficient. It’s not that the oil deteriorates as it cools, it just becomes less clear over time, which detracts from the computer’s looks.
If you have optical drives or mechanical hard drives, they cannot be submerged in oil as they are designed to operate in air. This means that you need to create a special shaft and wiring. Today, with SSDs and digital downloads, you no longer need these types of drives in your PC, so this is less of a problem.
All input/output devices, such as USB ports, should preferably be out of the oil. While it won’t harm your ports or plugs in the short term, having non-conductive liquid between the two ports is probably not a good idea. Oil can also suck up connected cables and slowly seep out of the tank!
There are also stories about mineral oil soluble rubber components. When Puget tested his system, there was no sign of it even after a year. However, it depends on the exact oil and the type of material. That’s why it’s important to use specific ones Special mineral oil and not just the things you find in the supermarket.
Ultimately, mineral oil PC cooling has many maintenance issues that make it impractical for mainstream use, which is probably why water cooling has become the preferred method of cooling high-performance components.
Water cooling takes over the crown

Nowadays it is not difficult to cool your CPU with water. You can simply buy a water cooler from a retail store, attach it to the rails that are likely already included in your PC case, and snap it onto your CPU just as easily as you would a regular air cooler. GPUs are trickier, but if you buy the right model, you can either find a water cooler for it, or just buy a card that’s water-cooled out of the box.
Custom water cooling loops remain a niche solution, but it’s not hard to find professional system builders who will build a system for you with a custom cooling loop. Sealed all-in-one coolers require no maintenance because they are not designed to be refilled or opened. Custom loops require an hour or two of work to maintain, depending on the execution. This maintenance only needs to be performed every few months or every few years, depending on the coolant. So it’s not hard to see why water cooling is (relatively) mainstream today, but petroleum aquarium PCs aren’t.
Oil cooling is still here!
That doesn’t mean that oil-cooled PCs are completely gone. You’ll still find that people still make them, also in 2021. Is it something you should consider? Probably not, but it seems like an intriguing project, and in some cases, such as when a completely silent, passively-cooled system is needed, there may even be a practical reason to try it.
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