I have 4 pc's at my desk. About 2 years ago I got sick of 4 cases and looked into the idea of a rack system that might fit under the one side of my L shaped desk. When I saw the price on ordinary rack system stuff, I figured I was outta luck. Then I remembered seeing that folks were building pc cases out of plastic. So I found a local place that sold sheets of cast acrylic and I set about building my own rack system. The whole thing is built out of plastic... it has a removable front cover and 8 slide-out shelves inside. Each shelf will hold a complete PC... MB, power supply, hd, floppy & cdrom. It also had a couple of case fans mounted in it. I keep my KVM switch, cable modem & router are on the shelves not used by computers.
Well, took a week or so to put it all together, and when it was all done & running, what I had actually built was a little EasyBake Oven©. <G> I had a little room left on one end of the box, so I attached a ventilation/filtration box. It has 3 131cfm (or something like that) fans and a replacable filter. That helped a lot. But, it's obviously quite loud, and even with just 4 computers in it right now, it's still plenty warm. The CPU's all have upper-end copper heatsinks with good fans... but the ambient air temp in the box reduces their effectiveness.
So here's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about a sort of passive liquid cooling approach. Find myself some proper sized alum radiators & mount them inside the top of the box. Then attach tubing which carries the liquid down into the basement where it will be attached to another radiator. The idea being, that the heat rises to the top inside the box and warms the water. Using a low flow speed pump, I'd circulate the water down to the much cooler basement, where the radiator dissipates the absorbed heat. I'm not looking to so much actively cool the box, as I am to just carry the heat away. I also thought of maybe running the water through something like an apartment sized fridge in the basement. But I don't have central air, and only run the window units when it gets really hot. So I'm concerned that the heat & humidity could cause some condensation issues inside the box if I used refrigeration. I can envision problems from condensation dripping off the radiators onto the computers & equipment below.
So the questions are... given the setup I've described, do you think a passive system like I've described would take enough heat away to justify the effort? If not, would something as simple as adding fans to the radiator in the basement make enough difference. Am I off the mark in thinking that radiators inside the box would be enough to collect the heat & transfer it to the liquid in the system... presumably that enviro safe anti-freeze stuff? And finally, any other options you might suggest?
Thanks for you time & advice.
Well, took a week or so to put it all together, and when it was all done & running, what I had actually built was a little EasyBake Oven©. <G> I had a little room left on one end of the box, so I attached a ventilation/filtration box. It has 3 131cfm (or something like that) fans and a replacable filter. That helped a lot. But, it's obviously quite loud, and even with just 4 computers in it right now, it's still plenty warm. The CPU's all have upper-end copper heatsinks with good fans... but the ambient air temp in the box reduces their effectiveness.
So here's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about a sort of passive liquid cooling approach. Find myself some proper sized alum radiators & mount them inside the top of the box. Then attach tubing which carries the liquid down into the basement where it will be attached to another radiator. The idea being, that the heat rises to the top inside the box and warms the water. Using a low flow speed pump, I'd circulate the water down to the much cooler basement, where the radiator dissipates the absorbed heat. I'm not looking to so much actively cool the box, as I am to just carry the heat away. I also thought of maybe running the water through something like an apartment sized fridge in the basement. But I don't have central air, and only run the window units when it gets really hot. So I'm concerned that the heat & humidity could cause some condensation issues inside the box if I used refrigeration. I can envision problems from condensation dripping off the radiators onto the computers & equipment below.
So the questions are... given the setup I've described, do you think a passive system like I've described would take enough heat away to justify the effort? If not, would something as simple as adding fans to the radiator in the basement make enough difference. Am I off the mark in thinking that radiators inside the box would be enough to collect the heat & transfer it to the liquid in the system... presumably that enviro safe anti-freeze stuff? And finally, any other options you might suggest?
Thanks for you time & advice.