I deep fried my computer, literally!

This guy by the username of Sc4freak, had recently read a few articles on submersion cooling, where you take your computer and dump it into a tub of non-electrically-conductive oil. It seemed to work really well, and was cheap. So he saw it as a type of poor man’s water-cooling.

He bought a large aluminium oven tray and 9 litres of canola oil.

Since he didn’t really want to screw up my good computer, he tested it out on an old Pentium II 266 with Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra. He placed the motherboard in the tray, and began pouring canola oil all over it, until it was partially submerged.

And it worked. The computer booted into Windows 98 fine, and it even started up good old Quake 3 and started playing.  But the guy soon became hungry for a fried snack – and since he had used all the oil in the house he couldn’t fry myself anything. Then he had a brilliant idea. Why not use the oil that the computer’s in?

Hr placed an electric stove under the aluminum tray, and turned it to full blast. Soon, the oil reached frying temperature and I dumped a few chips into there. Meanwhile, the computer was still happily chugging along running Quake 3.

Eventually, though, the strain of 120 degrees C ambient temperature and the load of Quake 3 caused the computer to overheat and crash. He rebooted it, and it loaded back into windows. Although Quake 3 still crashed when trying to play. At that point, the chips were ready. He turned off the heat and enjoyed my snack while he waited for the oil to cool so he could use the computer again.