By Josh Perry, Editor
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In this video project that was posted by Reddit user Lord_of_Bone, he tested a Raspberry Pi 3B+ running the video game Quake 3 for an hour while immersed in basic vegetable oil to see how it would impact the operating temperature.

This Raspberry Pi unit was submerged in vegetable oil in an experiment to see if it would run cooler. (Lord_of_Bone/YouTube)

The experiment started with he Raspberry Pi connected without the oil cooling to establish a benchmark. After an hour of running the game, the temperature of the desktop increased from 51.5°C to 68.8°C with no heat sinks and to 70.9°C when run with heat sinks. Obviously, the heat sinks, which were admittedly just bought off eBay for the experiment, were not particularly effective.

He submersed the Raspberry Pi in standard vegetable oil, leaving the USB and other connector exposed to air so they would not be ruined. After an hour, the desktop temperature went from 36.5°C to 48.5°C.

Lord_of_Bone wrote, “Also while touching the exposed metal parts on the Pi while in oil they didn’t feel toasty at all compared to on air where the entire board warmed up quite a significant amount. So I would say that yes, you can oil cool a Raspberry Pi. It would be better to use mineral oil though and probably in a sealed case to prevent anything getting in.”

There were a number of comments on Reddit after he posted his experiment there. Read the thread at https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/94zpqj/oilcooled_raspberry_pi.

Watch the full video below: