The Mineral Oil PC by Andrew Mollman

Final steps

The o-rings around the bulkhead fittings were made from PVC. The insulation on the motherboard between the capacitors and the board itself were PVC. My tubing was all PVC. You can see the problem this created.


To fix this, I replaced the o-rings with a flourelastomer polymer named Viton. Viton is chemically inert with respect to mineral oil. My PVC tubing was hardening and shrinking. I was afraid it was going to crack and leak all over, so I replaced all of it. Viton tubing is very expensive ($10 per foot!) so I bought fluorinated ethylene propylene (Teflon, also mineral oil resistant) tubing for the straight sections since it is very stiff and used Viton for the remainder.

Only the capacitors on my motherboard failed, the ones on the video cards, sound card and in the PSU were fine. However, during the downtime in which I repaired the case, I upgraded my system from an Intel Core 2 Q6600 with two Radeon HD4850s to a core i7-860 and two Radeon HD5850s.

There was the off chance that the capacitors on my new GPUs were similar to those that were on my old motherboard. I didn’t want to risk killing my new components, so I took the precaution of sealing around all of the capacitors with Dow Corning 735 - an oil resistant sealant.


After all of these repairs, I was finally able to get my system up and running. It has been working great for almost six months now. All in all, it was a lot of work that took me the better part of six months to complete. It is very satisfying to stare into the oil and see the convection currents.

Final Specification:

• CPU: Intel Core i7 860
  
• Motherboard: MSI Big Bang Fuzion
  
• Video Cards: 2x ATI HD5850
  
• Memory: 3x2gb DDR3 1600mhz
  
• Storage: 2x Western Digital 1Tb in RAID 0, Crucial M225 128Gb SSD
  
• Monitors: 3x 24” Dell 2408WFP
  
• PSU: Silverstone ST75F 750W
  
• Audio: Logitech Z560 4.1 speakers, Audio-Technica ATH-AD700 headphones
  
• Cooling System: 2x XPSC RX360 radiators, 6x Noctua NF-P12, 120VAC Eheim 1250 pump, Thermalright Ultra Extreme 120 on CPU, 2x Prolimatech Mk-13 on GPUs

Thanks go out to my sponsors, Petra’s Tech Shop, Crystalfontz and Crucial for providing me with free stuff and support. Thanks also to my father for putting up with the never ending mess I made of his work shop.

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