Found via BoingBoing: Working deep-fried PC shares a pan with french-fries.

Deep fried PC[NOTE: SInce I found this little wonder, the site has been Dugg, so the poor guy’s photo bandwidth is getting stretched. Give the pictures a little while to load.]

Believe it or not, the guy responsible for this photo didn’t start out intending to deep-fry a working PC while using it to play a game of Quake. He also didn’t initially intend to simultaneously cook a batch of french fries in the same pan he was using to fry the PC. This all began as a homebrew experiment in liquid submersion cooling, which is an unusual method of cooling overclocked PCs by submerging them in liquids that have low or no electrical conductivity but effective thermal conductivity. 3M makes a product specifically for this purpose called Flourinert. This guy, however, used home cooking oil.

PC with friesNow, be honest, if you were running an old Win98 PC immersed in a pan of cooking oil, why wouldn’t you try and fry the dang thing? And if you were already frying your PC, why wouldn’t you go ahead and drop a batch of fries while you’re at it?

Sounds insane? Hardly. The old PC took the strain of 120-degree Celsius cooking temps and still managed to run Quake. Eventually, the heat did force a system crash, but it could still reboot into Win98. The only thing it couldn’t do at full temp was run Quake. Serendipitously, by the time the PC crashed, the fries were done. You can grab more and larger photos of this “experiment” here.

Second serendipity–Intel is at TR this week discussing cutting edge PC cooling and energy-efficiency tech. Who knows, maybe the new quad-cores come with a side of fries.