Speaking of which, luck you, you have triggered one of my rants.... I know there's so many to pick from.
Cooling, such a simple idea... done so poorly. Move air over something and it cools. If you care about noise the bigger the better. Basically a 120mm fan will be quieter than a 25mm fan for the same volume of air. Reliability seems to scale with size as well. My favorite fan for PCs is 120mm mostly because that seems to be the largest fan where you can find a large variety of fans to insure you can find one that meets your needs. Fans are pretty simple, the higher the pressure they have to push against the less airflow there will be. Now the PC failures: * tiny fans suck, GPUs and motherboards should never have tiny fans * any system should have a nice designed airflow, none of this any component might blow air in any direction * the hottest components should have the best airflow. * Heat given the chance would prefer to rise. And the biggest serving of FAIL... graphics cards, in fact it's hard to imagine them getting it more wrong. High end GPUs take dramatically more power than high end CPUs. The CPU typically enjoys a nice healthy airflow from the bottom front of the case, and exhaust through the top rear exhaust and the top rear power supply. GPUs on the other hand form a cube with only one side open trapping air that it tries to dump lots twice the CPU) of heat into. To top it off they often have tiny fans. Since there's no engineered airflow over the GPU it often depends on the various fans/speeds. Sometimes the front fans are stronger... overwhelm the rear fans and sneak out past the GPU.... of course sometimes the rear fan+power supply are stronger, and suck air in past the GPU... which unfortunately can cause a loop, hot air out the top rear of the case then gets sucked in past the GPU again... especially bad if it's under a table. So what would a better case look like: * 120mm or larger fans on the front * adjustable exhausts, making it easy to balance GPU and CPU cooling * no fans on any component (mostly CPU heat sink, video card, and motherboards) * either an adjustable vent below the GPU or a gpu with the heat sink on top. Of course folks might thing servers are better... and they are inside the node, but really suck for a rack full of them. Sure it's front to back, but often with 6-12 small fans per 1U, 240-480 per rack... all achieving a rather unspectacular airflow and often an impressive amount of noise. Not to mention a significant fraction of the entire power load (often over 10Kw) is used for airflow. If they ditched the 240-480 fans they would have a more open node, and could use a few 20" fans at the rear of the case, like 2-3. At one point I had a rack that ran really hot, I just put a single box fan behind the rack and blew upward (again the heat likes to rise thing) and it had a radical effect node temps, where the entire nodes were hot the the touch after the fan only they very rear edge was warm. *deep breath* So, the best I've found out there is the antec P180/182 for a desktop. Good airflow, easy to get even aggressive systems pretty quiet, separate airflow for the power supply and drives. It's an ideal case for a passive cpu cooler, within 1" or so of the CPU heat sink there's not 1 but 2 120mm fans, each settable to 3 speeds. As for servers... well you can buy blades, at a large price premium... but that's really the only alternative I've seen. Nobody sell's 1Us without a ton of tiny noise fans in them. _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
