I’ll be straight with it. I’m a smoker, I smoke inside, I have a PC that is also inside. I want to clean my PC thoroughly to buy it a few more years. I know about the q tip method, and the compressed air, and general methods of cleaning out gunk and junk from PC parts. But this boy is way too gunked up for a regular cleaning. So, I reckon, the easiest way to clean it is to dunk the dirtiest parts in a bath of isopropyl alcohol. I was considering acetone at first, but it’s way too strong of a solvent, and alcohol should be better at dissolving organic residues. Is this a good idea?
I hereby submit this query to the council, and await judgement.
I would highly advise against this! That would be a health and fire hazard waiting to happen. Isopropyl is good for cleaning your electronics but I wouldn’t bathe them in it.
If you still want to try submerging your PC in some kind of liquid, you can try mineral oil. This was a trend in PC building back in the early-mid 2010s but seems to have lost momentum around 2017/2018. I’ve never done this myself so research thoroughly. Other than that, stick to water-cooling.
Also, at the risk of sounding like an asshole, I would advise quitting smoking.
My dude. How is mineral oil supposed to clean my PC? Is it a solvent? I don’t remember it being a solvent. I have a feeling people think I want to put a turned on PC in a vat of alcohol. Which is crazy.
And I respect risk takers. Doesn’t make you sound like an asshole. Just EXTREMELY annoying.
Their post didn’t sound like they were going to RUN it submerged in alcohol… Just dunking in the alcohol to clean it off. I don’t think mineral oil is going to help clean the parts much.
Finally! someone with at least half a brain. Yes, I don’t plan to RUN a PC when it’s submerged in EXTREMELY flammable alcohol. Why would anyone think that, i have no idea. The post literally states that I want to clean the PC parts. You clean it when it’s turned off and unplugged. Or is that not how people do it?
From what I recall, it stopped being a fad because outside of the cool factor, it was found to be horribly inefficient (cost/performance) at actually cooling the computer compared to air or water cooling.
I did the math on that a while back, and the one factor I don’t hear anyone mention is that you have to cool the liquid/oil as well.
Like, sure, a tank of oil can capture a lot of heat - you could probably max out several GPUs. But once that oil gets hot, it’s not going to take anymore heat away from the GPU, and it’s going to take a long time for a tank full of oil to cool down enough to provide proper cooling.
You’d basically have to have an additional heat pump unit transferring heat from the oil to the air if you wanted to run things long term (like crypto or whatever). So you’re basically just adding in an additional, unnecessary, very messy step.
Maybe datacenters should partner with fast food restaurant and use their waste heat to fry chicken nuggets.