Summer heat and your computer companion

[Leo Nguyen]

During summer time, your computer can get baked royally. The internal fans may provide some reliefs to the heating components, but just like the car's engine, how long can components handle the constant rising heat until the components cease?

Before I mentioned I purchased the full tower system from Tiger Direct, which was on sale:

Thermaltake Full Tower, Overseer RX-I

Even though the tower may not be the most solid thing among the full towers (loosely snapped upper and front facia), more enclosed, with faster spinning fans that sound like the computer is about to take off into space, the primary focus is to vent the heated components.

The Thermaltake Side View shows you how tall and wide it is.

The Thermaltake Side View Opened Plenty of room to accommodate even a massive dual Xeon processors workstation, with amble amount of room to manage required cables and hide most of them. There's plenty of head room, and width to support all size of components. 5 trays for 5 hard drives, 4 upper trays for your CD/DVD/Bluray drives, and a 3.5" tray for your ancient floppy/zip drive, OR an expansion slot for your extra USB/Firewire/audio/media connection, just in case all the connection on the top front of the tower is not enough for you.

• Look closely at the bottom: screened vent allowing dust filtered air to be sucked up from the bottom. You can add two 120mm fans to force air up from the bottom, only if your system is sitting on the table or hard surface. The great thing is, the power supply is also at the bottom, where the intake fan is also being filtered as the air get jetted out. Great option.
• Look closely at the top rear and center: a massive 200mm fan, with an option with another 200mm fan, to expel air out from the top. Mind you. These 200mm fan are ultra quiet, hovering just slightly above 16db of noise level. Your breathing may be louder than the fan's noise. There's a 120mm fan just near the top back side of the tower as well. This is a more powerful force fan to push additional air out of the top side. These two fans are more than sufficient to expel accumulative hot air out of the tower.
• Look at the front view photo: the same 200mm fan pulls air from the front, filtered by a dust screen, to divert heat accumulating on and around the surfaces of the hard drives. Me, this 200m fan is a bit weak in provide active cooling. I'll be getting a different 200mm fan, kicking the active cooling up a few notches. A cooled hard drive will last longer than a cooked hard drive.

For you cooling freaks, this tower is ready to be cooled with passive water cooling system. I won't go there. Too many things that can go wrong, will go wrong, with liquid cooling.

Jonnathan, and the computer geeks, may be wondering, what the heck is that hard drive hanging in the chassis body? well, that's my spare old hard drive on the side, used for backing up my operating system, just in case Murphy's Law kicks in.

Why so many hard drives? Storage..storage..storage..one 4TBs are not enough to house the constant bombardment of digital recording/photos. Three of the 4TBs will be sufficient..for now. I also have a backup tower with just pure hard drives to back up valuable data.

But Leo, what's that weird looking dual fans set-up you got there for your computer? Simple really. The aluminum cooling tower designed for Xeon processors are not sufficient. I have to purchase a copper based cooling radiator, with fans that spin at a much higher rate than the common fans. During summer time, as the heat approaches 110°F outside, and roughly 92°F inside, human body can take it as we hydrate with cold drinks. The computer components, not so much. So, the fans kick up at full gear, forcing air onto the copper radiator at 450+ cubic feet per minute of air, keep the computer's brains cooled below 110°F, rather than at 145°F with cheaper-weaker fans. Now, the computer sounds like it's about to take off into orbit. But Leo, why don't you turn on the AC? Well, power hungry society in our neck of the urbanized jungle will cause rolling blackout. During hot days, when we can, we try to minimize the usage of the AC. For those who don't care, any one of us are willing to sacrifice a bit of comfort will compensate for those who can't.

Jonnathan may then chuckle a bit, seeing that I only use a 650W (true wattage) power supply, hovering, and I do mean hovering, just a hair over the total system's requirement for power needs. Don't worry, I have a 1050W power supply standing by just in case that 80W power buffer is reduced..hehehehehe.

Accumulative heat on your computer's components are your worst nightmare. Dust bunnies on your component, along with accumulative heat, will be your system's terrors. The lifespan of your system and its components will drastically reduced if you don't keep it clear of dust bunnies, and heat.

[dick tabbert]

This computer kinda looks like mine basically the same tower except mine has about 6 fans on it a couple being good sized. Got rid of all my dust bunny's today but it actually looked pretty good till I blew out the power supply. So much dust in the garage I couldn't hardly get my breath, so a reminder don't forget your power supply. My last computer done a lot of sparking and popping because I didn't clean it out and the power supply died. Hopefully I have learned from some of my mistakes. Thanks Leo for the reminder.

[Leo Nguyen]

A helping advice is always welcome from those who experienced the nightmares before. I've lost so many power supplies, hard drives, and passive cooling video cards (in high school and college years from ancient past) that I made a motto to always be active with preventative maintenance rather than waiting until my components fail. Those who own laptops, and use them on long hours, you should play much more closet attention to maintenance since there is practically no headroom for heat dispersement and definitely not enough active cooling to cool down the components. You wonder why you laps are like an inferno within an hours? Because your components create enough heat to cook a steak at that time period.