In an era of rapidly rising difficulty for almost every cryptocurrency, YouTube user Tio Dave decided to that he wasn’t getting the right level of performance out of his six Radeon R9 280x GPUs, Instead of investing in a new miner with top-of-the-line ASICs for his scrypt-based system, he decided to make his current system a little more efficient.
How? By employing an idea used by the overclocking community for decades: He submerged his cards in mineral oil. Not only is mineral oil non-conductive, it’s also a proven coolant, being used in high-powered electrical transformers. All it needs to work is a reasonably powerful radiator system to remove the heat.Will we see a rise in mineral oil-cooled mining systems? Not likely.
As “cool” as this DIY solution is, it’s not a solution compared to the next generation of low-powered ASICs. It may extend the effective lifespan of rapidly aging mining technology by a few months, but with all of that electrical power (processing power, really) being lost to heat, it’s simply no competition for more advanced, energy-efficient systems.