On Tue, 2015-04-14 at 09:53 -0700, Rick Stevens wrote:
As someone who's been in the industry for over 40 years, cooling
is
rarely ever given anything but short shrift. When you start stuffing
lots of heat-generating components (GPUs, multiple CPUs, lots of
DIMMs) into chassis that are designed with aesthetics more in mind
than reliability or heat dissapation, you're "cruisin' for a
bruisin'."
They're fond of putting heat intolerant components, such as electrolytic
caps, right next to heat generating components. I have a Philips
television camera with electro caps actually strapped onto a heatsink
(not to cool the caps, the heatsink's for something else).
Side of the chassis mounted large fans that blow over whole cards are a
good idea, cooling the *whole* card, rather than just having small fans
on some heatsinks for some devices on the card, can be very useful,
especially in hot environments. That made a big difference to one
graphics card I had, it's fan barely made a difference to the thing it
was mounted on, and it eventually melted and seized up. Meanwhile other
parts on that board were burn-your-fingers roasting hot. But with one
fan doing the whole card, the whole thing stayed cool.
I haven't gone as far as doing smoke trail tests, but I've waggled my
finger tips around inside, to feel where the air does and doesn't go,
and made a cardboard reflector to change the flow of air onto something
that really needed it on one PC.
The average home PC is a bad design, often sucking air in from the
floor, pre-loaded with dust and carpet fluff. Just getting tower PCs
off the floor can make a difference. Heatsinks do not work when clogged
up with fluff, and it gums up the mechanics of fans.
--
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George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not
a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments.