Computer Room Hot?

Anonymous Coward writes "Here is a cool PC ventilation product I ran across. Like many faithful on here, I have multiple computers in a small room which really heat up the place. My office is a good eight degrees warmer than the rest of the house This product called R.A.C.H.A.L (Reduce Annoying Computer Heat And Loudness) vents computer exhaust into the wall, not the room. Might cut down on the electricity bills during those hot months.." Another approach: An anonymous reader writes "If your 'puter is getting to loud, you might want to consider some silent cooling. And the gang at OverclockersClub has just that. A three page review of the Zalman VGA Heatpipe Cooler. This thing is pretty nice looking, and with no power, no noise, what else could a guy ask for? Check out the review here. How come more companies don't do the "silent" thing?" Borked link fixed.

So...

[Spazntwich]

How long until Slashdot becomes completely shameless and starts just admitting to their advertisements all over their front page?

Ack...

[shepd]

Just do the right thing to begin with. If you want silence and no heat use a Cyrix C3. I'm sure you'll say it's too slow for you. Hey, you know what the saying is:

Silent/Cold/Low-Power. Fast.

Pick 1.

Moisture problems?

[gorillasoft]

It seems to me that venting the heat into your walls could cause condensation or other moisture problems inside of your walls. It also seems like you could get some very strange noises resulting from the forced air going into an enclosed space. The backpressure from exhausting into the wall could also shorten your fan life or possibly worse. If you have fire blocking in your walls, you could be blowing hot air into a space as little as 16" x 24" or so, and once that heats up you'll be getting the heat back into your room as it radiates through the drywall.

You also couldn't effectively use this on an exterior wall because insulation should be taking up all of the available air space inside the wall cavity anyway. Also, not all of the heat your computer generates is going to be exhausted by the fan, so this may not result in a huge reduction anyway, and it becomes even more problematic if you have more than one exhaust fan. Just a few thoughts I had.

Unbelievably bad idea

[msclark]

As a carpenter/electrician/plumber in my spare time, I think sending computer exhaust to a residential wall is one of the dumbest ideas I've heard of. Venting to another room, crawl space, basement, outside, etc. is OK, but a proper wall cavity with normal studs only has a few square feet of volume. For an outside wall, breaking through a vapor barrier and sending the exhaust to fiberglass insulation is very, very bad.

The only valid application I can think of is for some commercial office space, where usually cheap extruded steel studs hold up sheetrock and the wall tops are open to the space above a drop ceiling. Also, the steel studs have holes in them to allow for cables and some horizontal air movement.

The website does not have any of this information concerning checking the validity of walls. Ugh.

Re:nice!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mom wake me up by turning me on a 4AM.

Re:My apartment

[Strog]

I have 6 pc's running daily with half running 24 hours a day. My whole bill is $60-$70/month for everything (fridge, lights, 32" TV, DVD, etc.). This includes an Athlon and a P4. No SMP at the moment though. :-(

What are you running there to generate that much of an electric bill?

hmmm

[lophophore]

Let's take an 80 mm fan (diameter about 3 inches) and pipe it through a 1.5 inch hose into a closed space. Do the geometry and calculate the area. Not too efficient.

Why not just jam the fan to stop the noise and keep the heat in the case?

This must have been brought to us be the same hucksters who sell those cell phone antenna boosters [antennabooster.net]

OverclockersClub Graphs

[stever00t]

Does anyone else find it horribly bad journalism/science to report with a graph where one bar is a third as long as another bar, yet the large value is less than 1% larger than the other because they start the graph at a random number instead of zero, and then just using a graph break in the scale?

If you make a bar graph and the values are 1% different, the sizes of the bars should be 1% different. Why do they not understand this?

one [overclockersclub.com] two [overclockersclub.com] three [overclockersclub.com] four [overclockersclub.com]

I've seen this at other websites, too. Does it irk anyone else?

Re:I don't get it

[tomhudson]

And then there's this quote:

Since the ventilation system restricts airflow somewhat, we noticed some systems had increased chassis temperatures due to poor design.

In other words, your computer will run hotter. While they blame it on "poor design", anything that restricts air flow out of the box (and trying to blow the air thru 4 ' of pipe, then into a wall, will restrict your power supply's air flow) will shorten your box's life. It will also void any warranty (counts as abuse).

This idea is "so" lame that I can't help but think we've all been trolled.

Re:That's not gonna work.

[idontgno]

And recirculate all that heat in the summer?

How about installing house-wide central evacuation plumbing (like the central vacuum system mentioned up-thread) but vent it outside like another exhaust flue or bathroom vent?

Yeah, no single item I mentioned is novel, but the combination! Demand to have this built into your next custom-built house!

Think of it as an uber casemod.

Re:I don't get it

[jdreed1024]

This idea is "so" lame that I can't help but think we've all been trolled.

Agreed. This hardly smacks of professionalism. Check out these gems from the FAQ page [computerexhaust.com]:

Won't [the wall] fill up with hot air? They have yet to build a wall that is air tight, anyone who has ever worked in construction will tell you that there are probably 50 different places air flows into your walls.

They of course don't talk about 50 places where air flows OUT of your walls. Plus, they fail to address the questionable legality (re: building codes) of this "product".

Won't bugs get into my computer from the wall? Your system fan runs at anywhere from 2500rpm to 4500rpm and is putting out about 35cfm of air. If bugs actually make it to the system fan, the blades will chop them to pieces.. muuuhaaahaaa

Right.... 'Cause there are no bugs that _walk_ instead of fly, and they certainly couldn't crawl up the tube. Oh, and of course, you'll never turn your computer off ever, so there'll never be a time when the fan might be _off_. And what self respecting company would put "muuuhaaahaaa" in a FAQ.

Exhaust temp of a rack.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can tell you until recently I had a rack with 18 servers and poor ventilation (colo in a rack that used to hold telco stuff) that got 118 degrees inside on the exhaust side.

The doors on this cabinet only have slats in the top and bottom sections, similar to what I had on my highschool locker. No fans on the top, and only 3 120mm holes for fans, with no good mounting method aside from drilling holes in the metal and bolting them in place.

So if anyone else is looking for colo space, be wary of airflow, especially if you have a high density of small servers you'll be cramming into them. I'd really prefer mesh doors on the front and back, along with a good number of big fans on the top.

FYI: 16 1U servers, 9 of those diskless, the other 7 with 2 10k RPM disks. 2 2U servers w/ 6 10k RPM disks. In total, 16 P4's and 18 P3's. 3 ethernet switches, 3 remote power management units and a bigass UPS.

Re:Ack...

[evilviper]

The Mobile Celeron (1.2 GHz) generates about as much heat as the 800MHz C3 (which really runs at less than 400MHz).

The question is, why don't PC makers make MOBOs that can use Intel & AMD mobile processors? Even a tiny, nearly silent fan would be plenty of cooling (or a rather large heat-sink).