[ale] Enclosed Desks

[Jeff Hubbs]

On Sat, 2002-06-22 at 10:20, Christopher Fowler wrote:
> I just moved my Linux box into a compartment in a desk I have.  This
> compartment has too doors and a square hole in the side for the cables. 
> My question is are these desk designed for the heat that new computers
> generate?  I opened the doors this morning and it was a little warm in
> there.  I would like to put 2 PC's in there.  Any suggestions?  Any
> dangers?
> 
> thanks,
> chris
> 
Chris -

What you've already said strongly suggests that it's NOT designed to
keep an anywhere-near-recent computer in.  I have a 1GHz T-bird in a
desk's bottom compartment that's open to the front, the rear, and the
top - you can stick your hand over the back of the desk and feel the
toasty warmth (24/7 SETI at Home, natch!).  If you shut one or, God forbid,
TWO machines in a fully enclosed compartment, hee hee, I can just
imagine...

The worst of it is that both machines' intake air will largely consist
of their exhaust air, so the air temp inside will rise and rise until
some equilibrium is reached or until a box fries, which would probably
happen at some point regardless.

I can understand the draw of using that enclosed space for neatness' and
noise's sake, but unless you forced-air-ventilate it somehow, it's going
to be a "killing cage" for your machines.

You could always try water-cooling but you'd have to run hoses out to a
heat exchanger somehow.

- Jeff


---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.