I have a desktop that puts a lot of heat out into my room, Its a celeron 3.0 socket 478 (i.e. not dual core or that fancy) I do have 4 hard drives and a 500 watt power supply and good cooling (large heatsinks with fans and several others)

Other than simply turning it off or hibernating it, are there any other ways of lowering my ambiant room temps w/o adjusting the a/c? I used to have a system that was water cooled, but the tubes would always get in the way and I didn't notice that much of a temp drop or performance boost (regardless of overclocking, current system is not overclocked)

3/28/2007 6:03:47 PM

Short of getting different hardware that puts out less thermal energy, there's not much you can do. Even with water cooling the heat will eventually be released into the room. Adjusting the cooling in the room is the only way you can change the room temperature. All that heat has to go somewhere. There isn't a magic method to bottle it all up and store or transport it away (short of a custom cooling rig with a radiator outside of the room).

3/28/2007 8:35:18 PM

That's true, I'm not looking for an elaborate solution, but heres what I was thinking....

I have a couple of external enclosures laying around. If I put some hard drives in there and only turned em on when needed, that may help. I guess there isn't a 'Wake-On-USB' setting. Anybody have any ideas about this?

Thanks for the post.

3/28/2007 8:43:11 PM

Harddrives don't generate a terriable amount of heat. I think you would just be creating more work for yourself.

Since I didn't ask the first time, what problems are you having with heat?

3/28/2007 8:45:13 PM

Are you trying to violate conservation of energy?

Get a new computer or sleep/hibernate.

3/28/2007 8:51:31 PM

hook the water cooling back up. insulate the tubes and place the radiator outside.

3/28/2007 10:12:30 PM

Quote :

"Harddrives don't generate a terriable amount of heat. I think you would just be creating more work for yourself. Since I didn't ask the first time, what problems are you having with heat?"

Nothing computer-related, it's just that when I come back from class the room feels very warm, even though the a/c has been on all day.

Quote :

"Are you trying to violate conservation of energy? Get a new computer or sleep/hibernate."

I think I will start hibernating it.

3/29/2007 5:51:08 AM

You'd be amazed how much a more efficient power supply can help. What brand/model is in there now? If it's a bargain/noname power supply then I wouldn't be surprised if you found that 1/4 to 1/2 of the heat generated by your system was coming from the power supply itself.

3/29/2007 6:43:51 AM

Quote :

"Harddrives don't generate a terriable amount of heat. "

actually they cab generate a ton of heat if they're constantly used.

Obviously the simplest solution is to turn it off or have it auto hibernate after a while of no usage. Other options are to go into your power settings and make sure its shutting down the disks after a certain period of no usage. Of course the disks will never power off if you leave something running that constantly accesses disk (like bit torrent).

3/29/2007 7:56:39 AM

Quote :

"You'd be amazed how much a more efficient power supply can help. What brand/model is in there now? If it's a bargain/noname power supply then I wouldn't be surprised if you found that 1/4 to 1/2 of the heat generated by your system was coming from the power supply itself."

I believe its a powmax 500 watt modular (it may be an ultra, it's been a while since I ordered/installed it, but it was pretty cheap at the time)

Quote :

"Obviously the simplest solution is to turn it off or have it auto hibernate after a while of no usage. Other options are to go into your power settings and make sure its shutting down the disks after a certain period of no usage. Of course the disks will never power off if you leave something running that constantly accesses disk (like bit torrent)."

I have set it up to hibernate, however I was thinking that there was a way that I could lower the processing speed as well as turn the disks off. I assume this is what makes 'mobile' processors unique, however I haven't found how to scale down the power.

Would setting the power to laptop/mobile allow me to do this? or would that require a mobile processor?

3/29/2007 3:08:13 PM

No, I don't think changing that setting will help you.

However you can download RMClock http://cpu.rightmark.org/products/rmclock.shtml. This should allow you to underclock your processor when you do not need the extra power.

NHC is another popular underclocking utility, but it's designed for notebooks and I'm not sure if there would be any issues running it on a desktop.

3/29/2007 6:08:08 PM

A few weeks back I installed NHC on my desktop out of curiousity. It just bluescreened Windows upon startup so I had to safe-mode uninstall it.

So I would not suggest trying NHC on a desktop, they did not code it to handle massive failure exceptions.

3/29/2007 7:13:57 PM

3/29/2007 8:15:06 PM