Today, I received all the parts--sans oil pump-- for the immersion cooling system. So, I cracked open Miner #5 to start test fitting the stripped-down miner for the tanks. The process of breaking this machine down was exciting and illuminating.
There was very little dust in the miner at all--a testament to the previous owner's care, I'm sure--and each piece easily came out. I did take the control board out of its housing, and all the blades for cleaning before the dip (everyone else says fill, so I say dip--it seems more appropriate since the oil will be running through the system in order to pre-filter long before the miners go in).
The printed circuit boards (PCBs) are pretty simple boards, but I must say I love the heatsinks. These will distribute the heat to the oil very well without too much restriction on flow--much the same as they were designed to do with air, but the viscous property of the oil makes these heatsinks even nicer.
From the top, the board looks very 1986, but when you flip it over and have a look at the micro-soldering, you have to appreciate how complex these machines really are. Six rows of twelve Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) per board yield approximately one hundred and twenty-seven million hash calculations per second and eat nearly two-hundred Watts of electricity--most of which is shed as heat thanks to switching losses.
I did a lot of thinking--and calculating--concerning the way I wanted the boards to be held in the oil. Ultimately, the case itself is already the perfect solution--remember, other than the medium changing, the same basic principles apply here as they do with water.
The fans will be suspended above the oil to draw hot air away from the surface of the oil. This will yield only a minor improvement I'm sure, but the due to the miner's firmware, I need to keep the fans going--and why not use them.
In regards to the other miners: They are running at default settings and still keeping my house too warm. My wife was just as excited as I was that the parts had arrived this morning. Hopefully, the next update I write will be about the newly completed immersion cooling system and how much better our lives are for it.
