Hack #29. Check the Vents
Add it all up—a screaming 7,200 or 10,000 RPM hard drive, a lightning fast CPU, stunning RAM throughput, blinding video performance, and a modest few watts of sound power—and you realize that puny little fan inside the power supply is not going to be able to suck out the extra BTUs of heat generated by all these hopped-up devices.
The operative words here are "suck out." For some reason, PC chassis and power-supply engineers think that one little 2" fan stuffed into the corner of the power supply box is going to unload hundreds of BTUs of electronically induced heat and pick that heat out of all corners of the chassis. It's just not so. Even a newer PC with a fan and duct work placed above the CPU to remove significant amounts of heat from the PC chassis is not cooling the system as effectively as possible.
Generic PC design recommendations tell us we should evacuate or use a vacuum to pull hot air off the CPU and out of the PC chassis, but they do not tell us that to do so requires construction of air deflectors and ducting to create a maximum vacuum or negative pressure near the CPU heat sink. This is not practical for those of us who are building our own systems. (As well stocked and equipped as my shop is, I know I do not have plastic molding or sheet metal fabrication capabilities!) Those of us hacking prebuilt systems that have fancy ducting can benefit from this hack as well.
The basic physics of vacuum theory are pretty clear in that the pressure, ...
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