Questions and Concerns about Mineral Oil PC: Advice Wanted!

[dao2]

Hello,

I am seriously looking into getting a mineral oil PC in the next month and before I do I have some questions and concerns, I would really appreciate answers from people who own/operate a mineral oil PC and of course Puget.

Note: I’ve done a few pc builds before but only air cooled, never water-cooled and while I know it’s barely in the same vein it’s got some similarities to water-cooling and a bit of a leap for me.

The build: What I want to chuck in there is all new parts.
DIY v4 Kit
I-7 2600k CPU
EVGA GTX 580 (I know it’s murderously expensive but I decided to go single card over sli)
CORSAIR Professional Series HX750 (750w PSU, a bit over)
G.SKILL Ripjaws 2x4gb DDR3 1600
Probably some 1tb WD HDD
Katan CPU fans from puget
Power Brick for Radiator

And the mobo, not too sure about… seems like a decent value board and not too many complaints, anyone have a better recommendation?
BIOSTAR TZ68A+RCH Mobo (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813138320)

So on to the questions.

Mineral oil and non-solid caps. I know in the FAQ Puget said this wasn’t an issue before, is it still a non-issue? Has anyone else experienced the rubber on the caps stiffening and them coming loose? The MB and PSU have solid caps but I saw no mention of on the video card (and the one I saw that mentioned I did not like).

Silicon gel around CPU. I’ve seen this once and have seen other people talking about it but never got around to the “why”. What’s the point of this? To stop the oil from getting inbetween the CPU and board? Is it a good idea and does Puget do this?

Temperatures: With the setup I listed what sort of temperatures should I be expecting with stock clocks? Ballpark idle/load figures would be appreciated. Should I be looking at 20 idle CPU 30 GPU? Less? More?

Leaks: I know Puget hasn’t gotten any leaks (minus wicking/bubbling) from their FAQ but has anyone else had leaks from these as I somewhat afraid of this happening.

HDD Passthrough: Is it still a molex power connector?

Wireless: Is this still needed? I could have swore before I read that the wicking problem had been solved but I seem to only see it for the PSU now, maybe I’m blind. But is it possible to use a wired mouse/keyboard without wicking now or is it still an issue?

Quick Disconnect Tubing: I read someone on the forums said that this decreased the rate in which the oil would pass through the radiator, is this normal? Is it significant?

I can’t really think of anything else, is there anything I should know? I’ve heard keep it on a flat surface and all that good stuff and have a perfect flat and stable surface to keep it on but any other advice would be very much appreciated, and if you’ve gotten this far thanks for reading it!

[whiskey67]

My first rec would be get a solid board for your system. The Biostar with non solid state caps is gonna ut your entire build as a reliabilty risk. I recommend a ASUS or Gigabyte board with all solid state caps.

If you are gonna run a GTX580 you will want a larger powersupply. If you are doing the DIY kit 4 then you are likely going to be mounting 9 fans on the external rad and drawing this combined with a pump, HDD and a monster vid card I am seeing a 1000 watt for your setup. It is also important to no overload your rails I am running al of the fans on their own rail to avoid messing up my PSU. I ran the pump and lighting on a seperate rail as well.

The system i built I did not put silicon around my heatsink and proc. This is not a required step and you get no benefit by doing this.

I havent recorded temps yet but my setup is different from your so I thier will be a variance especially on the GPU I have built a few systems with 580's and upgraded cooling is a must so oil will help you out alot.

no leaking or seeping on my system. with the way this setup is built you will not have any seeping down cables with the way the tray and IO are made. The biggest issue with previous cable seeping was because the power supply was not able to mounted on to the io tray in previous versions since they used a smaller tank. This made them have to submerge the power supply on the bottom of the case so oil would seep along the psu cable. With V4 the psu mounts on the IO tray so this issue has been resolved this is possible because of the larger tank.

The hardrive pass thru is sill molex but if you are good with wiring you can take a sata pig tail from your modular powersupply and cho it to make it connect with a molex end to that plug works great and with a little heatshrink it looks factory.

The fittings that come with this system are compression fittings not true quick disconnect fittings. They are designed to make the construction and desconstruction of the system easier. A real quick disconnect will stop and hold the fluids in the lines once disconnected these will not do that and are wide open allowing for great flow. I couldnt believe how well that swiftech pump pushed the oil so easily. THis oil systems has roughly the same flow as my liquid rig.

[whiskey67]

My system specs
AMD 1090T Black six core
8GB DDR 3 Mushkin Blackline Radioactive
Gigabyte 6970
Antec 850 watt modular true power
Crucial solid state
Western digital Green 1TB
ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 AM3 AMD 880G HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD
Zalman cooler.

A few recommendations when you shop for video cards look for one that has open cooling i have a link below for a gigabyte 580 with open cooling.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814125399

Get an aftermarket cooler like the one listed below. This cooler will work with your processor and is the best style for a submersion cooling.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835118036

[dao2]

Thank you both for your reply, I appreciate it. I've updated the original post a little bit based on what you guys said.

My first rec would be get a solid board for your system. The Biostar with non solid state caps is gonna ut your entire build as a reliabilty risk. I recommend a ASUS or Gigabyte board with all solid state caps. Also I'm hard pressed on a gigabyte mobo atm as I had one in my current PC and it eventually got hit with the power-cycling problem, and despite GB's crappy CS after I got it back from repairs (they said corrupted bios) it did not fair any better. And looking at the current ones out now people still complain of this happening to them down the line.

I was thinking about a ASRock with solid gold caps: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157263
Looking at ASUS boards this one got good reviews (both on newegg and off) has solid caps even though it's not mentioned on newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131790
Seems neater then the ASRock and as cool as the dual nics is I'm not going to have any use for it.

If you are gonna run a GTX580 you will want a larger powersupply. If you are doing the DIY kit 4 then you are likely going to be mounting 9 fans on the external rad and drawing this combined with a pump, HDD and a monster vid card I am seeing a 1000 watt for your setup. It is also important to no overload your rails I am running al of the fans on their own rail to avoid messing up my PSU. I ran the pump and lighting on a seperate rail as well.

The system i built I did not put silicon around my heatsink and proc. This is not a required step and you get no benefit by doing this.

I havent recorded temps yet but my setup is different from your so I thier will be a variance especially on the GPU I have built a few systems with 580's and upgraded cooling is a must so oil will help you out alot.

no leaking or seeping on my system. with the way this setup is built you will not have any seeping down cables with the way the tray and IO are made. The biggest issue with previous cable seeping was because the power supply was not able to mounted on to the io tray in previous versions since they used a smaller tank. This made them have to submerge the power supply on the bottom of the case so oil would seep along the psu cable. With V4 the psu mounts on the IO tray so this issue has been resolved this is possible because of the larger tank.

The hardrive pass thru is sill molex but if you are good with wiring you can take a sata pig tail from your modular powersupply and cho it to make it connect with a molex end to that plug works great and with a little heatshrink it looks factory.

The fittings that come with this system are compression fittings not true quick disconnect fittings. They are designed to make the construction and desconstruction of the system easier. A real quick disconnect will stop and hold the fluids in the lines once disconnected these will not do that and are wide open allowing for great flow. I couldnt believe how well that swiftech pump pushed the oil so easily. THis oil systems has roughly the same flow as my liquid rig.

Hmm I thought the BIOSTAR board linked had solid caps, that's what it says in the details on the page on newegg.

As for PSU, I totally forget about that, but instead I think I'll get the seperate power for the radiator, so that leaves the pumps, should 750w be sufficient? It recommends 600 for the system (about 250 draw on the gpu itself) so that leaves about 100-150 (depending on leeway) for just the pumps. Do they take more than that?

Hmm still molex that sucks :/ Maybe instead I'll get a molex to sata connector, seems less messy as long as going through so many adapters doesn't step it down too much.

Sounds good on the quick disconnect tubing, they look nice too , thanks!

My system specs
AMD 1090T Black six core
8GB DDR 3 Mushkin Blackline Radioactive
Gigabyte 6970
Antec 850 watt modular true power
Crucial solid state
Western digital Green 1TB
ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 AM3 AMD 880G HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD
Zalman cooler.

A few recommendations when you shop for video cards look for one that has open cooling i have a link below for a gigabyte 580 with open cooling.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814125399

Get an aftermarket cooler like the one listed below. This cooler will work with your processor and is the best style for a submersion cooling.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835118036

I've looked at the gigabyte card before as it was the only one I found with solid caps but I'm afraid of a few things. One, it being non-evga having a capacitor whine and also a lot of people complained a fair bit about the other gtx580s and their quality so I don't really know :/ Also I've been extremely unimpressed with Gigabyte and the customer service over a U3DR board.

You have got me thinking though, the MSI GTX 580's look favorable, and also have solid caps as well as an open design.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814127579
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814127589

The "extreme" is kind of overpriced but not so badly I wouldn't go for it, what do you think?

For the cpu fan, I like the katana's that Puget use/used, they look pretty sexy and I didn't think the fan would really make much of a difference, do you think the zalman would make a big difference?

[whiskey67]

The cooler I choose distributes in all directions rather than creating a tunnel like other coolers I am not familiar with the one puget used.

I have used a few different 580's I like asus revisions best if you want to get gutsy you should get their new mars 2 card that thing is epic but maximum Pc did a review of it and at load it was over 500 watt draw. In the case of a PSU it is better to over shoot and have more rails and wattage than have to little.

I had my machine benchmarking with 6 seperate programs for 48 hours straight the temps never exceeded 111F with cpu usage at 100% on all cores. I will get some pics over to you if you want.

as for the molex back plate all i did was cut a molex adapter an then splic with a sata modular tail that has to conections on it and this worked great. Powering the fans externally is a great idea. from the research i have done the fans running usualy creates alot more heat from the power supply and therefore makes the oil temps higher but my system with 9 fans has never exceeded 111f.

[dao2]

The cooler I choose distributes in all directions rather than creating a tunnel like other coolers I am not familiar with the one puget used.

I have used a few different 580's I like asus revisions best if you want to get gutsy you should get their new mars 2 card that thing is epic but maximum Pc did a review of it and at load it was over 500 watt draw. In the case of a PSU it is better to over shoot and have more rails and wattage than have to little.

I had my machine benchmarking with 6 seperate programs for 48 hours straight the temps never exceeded 111F with cpu usage at 100% on all cores. I will get some pics over to you if you want.

as for the molex back plate all i did was cut a molex adapter an then splic with a sata modular tail that has to conections on it and this worked great. Powering the fans externally is a great idea. from the research i have done the fans running usualy creates alot more heat from the power supply and therefore makes the oil temps higher but my system with 9 fans has never exceeded 111f.

I'd love to see pics

500 draw just for the video card sounds insane o_0 and there's no way I'm gonna pay that much for it.... That's a hell of a beefy card though.

Alright I'll upgrade the PSU then, 850w should do it with the external power on the radiator. How much draw does a pump normally take? More than 100?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817139011

[Mezinov]

The Swiftech MCP35X pump included with the DiY v4.0 is listed on it's official specifications as pulling 18 watts at 12v @ 1.5 A, with a peak pull of 14v and 2 A- so it is likely best to plan 30 - 40 watts for it to have a decent overhead.

[dao2]

The Swiftech MCP35X pump included with the DiY v4.0 is listed on it's official specifications as pulling 18 watts at 12v @ 1.5 A, with a peak pull of 14v and 2 A- so it is likely best to plan 30 - 40 watts for it to have a decent overhead.

Wow that's not much, a 850w would be plenty overhead then, thanks.

[Mezinov]

I had a quick question for the Puget lads. As I wait for the DiY v4 kit to arrive, I am hoping to whip up some Puget-esque charts to record my temperatures... particularly with these fans - I did a test run on them, and combined they aren't even half as loud as my current case fans, and they throw enough air to push themselves across the desk!

What I am curious about is what Puget uses to record the temperatures? Making a line graph ain't no big thing, but I am curious how you guys get such a large sample size. I can't picture somebody sitting there taking manual temperatures every five minutes for 3 hours! I remember seeing it somewhere on the site, but can't track it down again.