The Heat Fight
Dealing with heat is one the biggest challenges of folding long term. I live in Texas and when summer or hot days roll in I am cutting out low production CPU clients and turning all my video cards back to default settings to try and control all the heat that gets pumped out and hopefully stop the AC from running 24/7 for 5 months.
I have come up with a few tricks to help deal with this that I would like to share. When I was running a GX2 in my lan rig it was right next to my bed making a lot of heat and a lot of noise because the fan was hitting 90-90% duty cycle. I ended up replacing the factory thermal paste and adding plastic washers under the screws to help increase pressure between the GPU core and heatsink. This helped get the duty cycle down to 85% most of the time but I was still looking for what else I could do because my room was blazing hot at night. What I came up with was the core was hot and getting the sink hot even though there was a fan on it....but everything has at least two sides and only one side was being cooled. A quick dig through a parts draw and I had come up with two 120mm fans that I plugged in and set up on either side of the video card pointed right at where the GPUs are. This brought the temps down and brought the fan down to the 50-60% range but it would still spike up to 75%, the best I could do.
I also have my file server sitting in a closet that folds and I took every single spare fan I had and rigged it up and around the other GX2 I had running in it...this kind of worked but I kept the door almost shut most of the day so it still baked. This is where I realized that I could simply close my room door and leave my closet open to create an isolated room where the heat would not disperse into the house as quickly. I would simply open my room about 30 minutes before I went to sleep to let all the extra heat so I could sleep, plus the furnaces in the house were not running that late so the overall temperature on that floor was lower and the AC could handle it easier. During fall I simply closed my room and opened my windows all the way to use the outside to keep my computers cool without having a horrible effect on the cooling of the house.
Recently I have moved both of my GX2s into my main rig to occasionally run quad-SLi, which crashes games some times(so many headaches), try and not cause such high bills from electricity use and cooling, plus how B**A** is that to say you run dual GX2s. Currently I am only running two out of the possible 4 GPU clients because of heat issues. I have one fan blowing new air form the front onto the cards and one fan sucking air out of the exhaust to keep it form being stuck in the case. Still my main card hits 100% fan duty when clients are running on it and putting an extra cooling fan on top of it seems not to help. My side panel doesn't have the acrylic in it any more so it fits out 6 inches before it hits any obstructions. Its a little warm at my desk at times but the overall temps in the upstairs have dropped since I did this. Still looking for some tips or tricks.
Post up your folding rigs and show what you have done to control temps, make them quiet, or just explain your set-up. Who knows, you might be doing something none of us have though of before. Plus I want to see a shot of all of Leo's set-ups, I think everyone else wants to too.
I have come up with a few tricks to help deal with this that I would like to share. When I was running a GX2 in my lan rig it was right next to my bed making a lot of heat and a lot of noise because the fan was hitting 90-90% duty cycle. I ended up replacing the factory thermal paste and adding plastic washers under the screws to help increase pressure between the GPU core and heatsink. This helped get the duty cycle down to 85% most of the time but I was still looking for what else I could do because my room was blazing hot at night. What I came up with was the core was hot and getting the sink hot even though there was a fan on it....but everything has at least two sides and only one side was being cooled. A quick dig through a parts draw and I had come up with two 120mm fans that I plugged in and set up on either side of the video card pointed right at where the GPUs are. This brought the temps down and brought the fan down to the 50-60% range but it would still spike up to 75%, the best I could do.
I also have my file server sitting in a closet that folds and I took every single spare fan I had and rigged it up and around the other GX2 I had running in it...this kind of worked but I kept the door almost shut most of the day so it still baked. This is where I realized that I could simply close my room door and leave my closet open to create an isolated room where the heat would not disperse into the house as quickly. I would simply open my room about 30 minutes before I went to sleep to let all the extra heat so I could sleep, plus the furnaces in the house were not running that late so the overall temperature on that floor was lower and the AC could handle it easier. During fall I simply closed my room and opened my windows all the way to use the outside to keep my computers cool without having a horrible effect on the cooling of the house.
Recently I have moved both of my GX2s into my main rig to occasionally run quad-SLi, which crashes games some times(so many headaches), try and not cause such high bills from electricity use and cooling, plus how B**A** is that to say you run dual GX2s. Currently I am only running two out of the possible 4 GPU clients because of heat issues. I have one fan blowing new air form the front onto the cards and one fan sucking air out of the exhaust to keep it form being stuck in the case. Still my main card hits 100% fan duty when clients are running on it and putting an extra cooling fan on top of it seems not to help. My side panel doesn't have the acrylic in it any more so it fits out 6 inches before it hits any obstructions. Its a little warm at my desk at times but the overall temps in the upstairs have dropped since I did this. Still looking for some tips or tricks.
Post up your folding rigs and show what you have done to control temps, make them quiet, or just explain your set-up. Who knows, you might be doing something none of us have though of before. Plus I want to see a shot of all of Leo's set-ups, I think everyone else wants to too.
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Leo.....
I took the photos today. I just need now to convert them, sort, resize, crop, and file them on a hosting site. (I don't remember which service I have an account at.)
No promises as to when, but I've at least started the process.
Or dropbox, public folder. Or picasaweb.
or
HERE
has anyone tried anything similar?