Air Conditioning - Keeping It Cool

[Xzin]

Let's face it. 5 computers can give off some heat. Especially if you are in a room with poor air circulation or a small room. I used to suffer through it with my original setup and eventually installed a "whisper quiet" bathroom fan to help vent the air outside. It worked and helped quite a bit but it was always warmer than I would have liked. It also required cutting a hole in my house - something not everybody can do. When I revised my setup, I made the decision to do everything right - this included environmental controls.

You need to do SOMETHING to think about keeping yourself and your equipment cool. If nothing else, your computers will not like the heat and will start to corrupt the memory, reboot randomly or simply wear out faster (hard drives in particular). Be sure to have adequate fans in place at the minimum - you can pick up fans cheaply at monoprice.com - newegg charges too much to ship. Be sure to allow for proper air flow through the back of your machines too - cramming them into a wall might be a bad idea.

So, you want to cool yourself and your computers. How?

Cooling falls into two main strategies:

1. Fans
2. AC Units

Fans / Forced Air Circulation

If you can simply vent the air somewhere, that usually works - provided you are able to capture it all and prevent it from radiating out into the room. Simply turning a fan on will only cool you though as your sweat evaporates. Your computers will not benefit from this, other than the moving the hotter air away from them, which will probably be fairly minimal. The hot air will continue to build up though unless it has somewhere to go.

Your fan solution can be as simple as a standing fan or as complex as an inline duct fan or even a custom built box to direct the air through your computers and outside. None of which work well unless they can capture the heat as it is produced and get rid of it right away.

AC Units

These fall into several categories. The simple ""through the wall" AC unit is the cheapest. They are also VERY LOUD. They contain the compressor and the fan and neither of which are usually designed to be quiet. These tend to be the cheapest though and you get what you pay for. Figure you will pay $200 to $400 for one of these. Most run off of 120V AC power but pull A LOT of power, so don't expect to put one and 5 computers on the same breaker. They require a window to vent the hot air out of.

The next unit up is a portable AC unit. These range in price from $500 to $900 for the sizes you would want for boxing. They are usually on wheels and are designed to cool up to about 1 Ton (12000 BTU) - which is what you will likely need, depending on your climate, personal needs, room size, room insulation, etc. These DO need to be vented somehow - you usually have a few feet of hose though and many come with window adapters. You could also cut a hole in your wall and properly caulk and seal it and install a self closing baffle to keep pests out when it is not in use. Many of these run on 120V AC, so they are easy to use but also take up a lot of power.

The next step up is what I consider the ultimate setup (short of designing a house's duct system with a separate zone for your computer space). It is called a ductless, or mini split AC unit. I just finished installing mine and the results are incredible. The compressor sits outside, just like a normal central air system (only a little smaller). 4 lines run to the indoor unit, up to 40 or so feet away. Which means you will likely need to cut a hole in your wall, but only about 3" in diameter. The 4 lines are an electrical conduit, drain lines and copper gas and liquid lines. These units are hardwired and usually considered permanent installs. They will most likely require a professional install to run electrical and charge the unit with "freon" or its equivalent. But boy are they SILENT. If you put it on maximum blast and stand next to it, you can hear it - but compared to a normal "through the window" unit, it is night and day. Perhaps 40 db vs 70 - 80 - and remember, decibels is a logarithmically scaled measure, not linear. I had a 2 Ton (24000 BTU) unit installed and my average room temperature went from 85+ to 70 degrees. The actual unit is mounted some 30 odd feet away no less! I can't hear it at all from here, which was the point. I moved EVERY computer away from my monitors and inputs to keep the increasingly loud roar and whines to a minimum. Mini splits cost around $1500 to $2000 for a professional install and the unit. Units themselves are generally $800 to $1000 with an extra $250 for fittings and pipe, usually not included.

Other than a duct based system, you are not going to get a quieter solution than a mini split (ductless) system. Real popular in Europe, Asia and the Middle East but not very common in the USA.

I would like to elaborate a bit more on this topic at a later date. No guarantee I will do so here though.

[jmet]

I have to agree, these units are great. At my prior place of employment we had one of these in our server room. And currently I am getting pricing to put one in my server/game room in my house.

[Nitro]

I run 7 PC's in my living room and installing an AC in the living room window during the summer is an absolute must. On the plus side though, during the winter, my PC's heat my entire house, I havnt turned on my house heating in over 3 years.

[Xzin]

Me neither and where I live it gets COLD.

[inire]

Interesting. Never heard of these before today.

here's a link to a FAQ for other silly americans like me who never heard of this.

http://www.air-n-water.com/splitac.htm

Xzin, have you had any experience with using direct contact cooling i.e. water cooling and the like? would that be another way of eliminating the heat?

inire

[Shogun]

Funny, these things are what I immediately think of when AC is mentioned, as growing up in Europe they're really common. We had one installed in the office a few days ago, and I managed to get a free one many years ago in exchange for advertising in my parents newspaper (in Spain, the office was an oven)

[Xzin]

I have dabbled with evaporative cooling. It works VERY WELL but it gets messy and condensation can be a big problem. It is one of the best ways to overclock though, short of liquid nitrogen.

Water cooling is something I profess limited experience with but I do understand the concepts. You will never be able to cool more than ambient as it only moves the heat from one place to another (the room).

You would have to cool 5 computers, 5 video cards and even then the benefits would be pretty minimal at best - you would be moving the heat from one place to another, and the CPU and the GPU are not the only sources of heat.... so I can't see that being viable unless you are water cooling outside or somewhere that was then chilled. Water cooling gets expensive with 5 rigs that need it though.

The heat needs to either go somewhere else, be cooled or not be produced at all. Not many other options really.

[Morganti]

Window unit user here. Loud as all get out with 5 computers and a tv and a celing fan and whatnot....Thank god for good headphones that cover my ears completely

[Shogun]

With the water cooling option you need a "reservoir" and a pump to pass it through the cooling devices on each component, you could however run 1 large pump and 1 big reservoir, with cold water, for all 5 PC's. Still alot of cash for the cooling parts for components etc, and I just don't trust water+PC :P

[JesDyr]

I have dabbled with evaporative cooling. It works VERY WELL but it gets messy and condensation can be a big problem. It is one of the best ways to overclock though, short of liquid nitrogen.

"Bong coolers" (evaporation towers) were a short lived thing in the OC/Modder communities. The problems they caused were just not worth it. They could only drop a little bit below ambient temps at best. They basicly replaced TECs (peltier cooling) which could not scale well with the hotter CPUs.

Rightnow there is MANY active cooling solutions out there that work great for single systems. Using 5-10 and the cost gets high plus with any active cooling solution you are producing more heat than cold. This is why you have A/C units exhaust to the outside. These little units are not a good idea for multibox setups.

Air cooling is the easier method and is tried and true. Using a "room" A/C unit would be the cheapest and lowest cost solution but the noise is an issue. A combination of heatpipes, A/C and well directed air flow might work out the best, but this requires a great deal of work.

.... yah .. I use to be very active in the case modding community