As part of a new project, Palmer Luckey said that he plans use liquid propane to cool a small but powerful PC unit. If time permits, Luckey hopes to vent the propane into a small turbine generator connected to the power supply unit.
Luckey had already experimented with liquid nitrogen cooling before and learned the difficulty of using the technology specifically when there's a need to use it daily. He added that apart from being difficult to use, liquid nitrogen usage is also believed to be dangerous.
"My new project is a very small super-powerful PC with no heatsinks and no fans - it is cooled by liquid propane, boiled into gaseous propane in an expansion block," said Luckey. "From there, I can either compress back into a tank under high pressure, or vent out of a burner nozzle for supercooling to subzero temps."
Luckey may just be one of those propane cooling enthusiasts who strongly believe that using a propane phase-change-cooled PC is a must-try. One forum commenter who identified himself as dimmreaper explained how he removed a set of bronze valve guides by using a special method.
"The other day at work I was removing a set of bronze valve guides from a set of 18 degree aluminum bowtie heads (the same cylinder heads used on many Chevy Winston Cup cars)," wrote dimmreaper. "I have a special way of removing valve guides. I have a short piece of hose, with a fitting on one end for attaching it to a tank of propane, and a piece of brake line on the other end. I invert the tank (so liquid propane exits the tank rather than gaseous propane), stick the brake line in the valve guide, and open the valve. When the propane evaporates from a liquid to a gas, it instantly cools the valve guide to some -125F, and it shrinks and falls out of the head. It occurred to me that the propane fridge in my RV works the same way, but it burns the propane off afterward. Someone needs to give this a shot on [their] CPU!"
One Reddit user suggested that instead of using propane, it would be better to use normal refrigerant, which is not explosive nor flammable.
Another user showed curiosity on just what type of gaming Luckey is possibly working on that it made him decide to use liquid nitrogen.
Luckey reiterated that he is sticking with the recommended hardware specs for VR that were described in the Oculus site.
"That way, I get the same experience as most of my customers. I don't want to become disconnected from the reality of how our hardware and software performs."
