[conspire] Parts is Parts

[Don Marti]

begin Rick Moen quotation of Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 01:17:53PM -0700:

> On occasions where one yields to the temptation to play thermodynamics
> engineer anyway, one _general_ principle that governs is that hot air
> rises.  Therefore, you want to help cool air enter the case near the
> bottom, flow smoothly through the middle of the case and around
> obstacles, and flow out of the case near the top.

Another good principle is to balance air in against
air out.  If you stick a powerful exhaust fan near
the CPU, and run the rear exhaust fan that most
cases have, you could end up fighting the power
supply fan and leaving yourself with slow-moving,
stagnant hot air in the power supply.  Better to
set up the extra fan low, blowing in, to "stuff"
the case with cool air.  

And _always_ figure out how to measure the temperature
of critical parts before you start tweaking.
If you're enough of a tweaker to come up with your
own fan design, you're enough of a tweaker to get
lm-sensors and smartmontools working.

(My personal favorite quiet computer hack is to move
the case far away from the work area and just run
PS/2, USB, and VGA cables to the system unit.)

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org