Don't Laugh - Serious Question

[SlowSpyder]

Depending on the magnitude of the under-clock, you are looking at the possibility of considerably reducing the heat output.

Absolutely! When I really, really pushed my CPU in voltage and clockspeed I was able to get the Kill-o-Watt to jump very near 400 watts under some CPU stress tests. On the other hand, I was able to go the other way with the voltage and had fairly decent results. I didn't lower my stock 4.4GHz, but you can probably imagine how much power I could save if I did drop it down to FX 8350 clocks and kept dropping voltage.

 

[AdamK47]

I had the same problem. My little computer room would heat up pretty badly with all the hardware I run. I decided to put my PC on it's own 20A circuit and put a portable AC unit in the room on the existing circuit in order to vent the heat through the wall to the outside. It works great. I only run it when I need to. It can take the room from 80 degrees to 72 degrees in less than 30 minutes.

 

[cytg111]

haswell stock and gtx 780, in the summer time my 'office' was bearable in terms om temperature when idling about and browsing .. fire up a game (and thus the 780) and the room quickly became a sweatpit of dimensions. Back down the volts on the CPU and GPU, underclock some .. I would not be surprised if you could turn that into measureable results

 

[Flapdrol1337]

If you have the power saving stuff still on an overclock will not increase the power use when your computer is idle.

 

[artvscommerce]

You may want to get one of these:
http://www.amazon.com/P3-P4400-Elect.../dp/B00009MDBU

This will allow you to get a more accurate idea of what impact the differences in tuning are going to make to the heat the system generates.

Each watt is ~3.4 BTU's.

The power draw from your system (and other appliances) will give you far more insight into how much heat is being dumped into the room compared to looking at CPU temps or feeling how warm the air is from the exhaust fan. The temp of the air leaving the case is only one of multiple variables. For example, the air above a candle is much hotter than the air coming out of your PC, yet the candle doesn't necessarily heat the room up more than your computer does.

 

[coffeejunkee]

As mentioned nothing strange about underclocking/undervolting. It won't affect idle draw much since modern cpu's already clock down really well, but it can make a fairly significant difference under load. That said, your gpu is generating much more heat so undervolting that will help more.

One thing, watch out with going to low with the cpu voltage. If you set it to low you might crash on loading the bios and then you will have to reset by either a jumper or button on the mobo or removing the battery. I'd start out with something like -0.050. Don't jump straight to -0.150.