I am trying to figure something out about the Rig Box. For people not following all the BFL threads, I had initially paid 20 singles and made a down payment for a Rig Box. But I cancelled my order a week or two ago, until I see more single units out there (3 rev ones, without extra fans and holes in the bottom) and at least one or two Rig Boxes in the wild.
I am sitting here in a friends office who is designing a new server room for their business. I've been joking he could house my mining rigs in there once he is done, which started a lengthy discussion about heat and A/C.
He has been reading this article:
Calculate heat dissipation for better server room design
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/get-it-done-calculate-heat-dissipation-for-better-server-room-design/5031678Now here is what I am trying to figure out. BFL says the Rig Box does 50.4 Giga Hash @ 2,500 Watt. They haven't said anything about the "required" or "recommended" temperature, but they said it's 22C with the singles (correct me if I am wrong). Now for the Rig Box I don't expect it to be different, on the contrary, 2500W is a lot of heat for a box with
dimensions of 24.5x17.7x13.5cm. Honestly, I believe the case is just a preliminary picture, and they are probably using something completely different, but that's not of any concern in this post. The point is that the heat dissipation is 2,500 Watt. Probably more than that given their track record of getting it wrong.
Since we don't have heat dissipation specifications from BFL, we are going to use a formula provided by the above server room design article.
(2 500 * 0.80 * 1.73) / 0.293 = 11 809 BTU.
An air conditioner rated at 1 ton is roughly capable of handling 12,000 BTU (or 3517 watts!!) per hour of capacity, as specified by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
So does that mean you need a 1 ton (12,000 BTU) A/C for a Rig Box and pay an additional 3517 watts of electricity?
I can't imagine you'd need an A/C if you run a couple of GPU mining rigs with a total of 2,500 watt (to stay with the same number) and clearly, people run mining rigs in hotter climates (ie. Goat in Thailand). Why would you need one for servers? Or would it only matter if you have multiples of those (as it is usually the case for server rooms)? As you can see, I am clearly confused about his.
For reference, temperature averages here in my city:
Jan-Dec, Degree Centigrade
18.6 18.6 21.5 25.1 28.4 30.4 31.3 31.1 30.2 27.7 24.0 20.3
I'm sure it might work well enough interstate, but internationally it's bloody terrible.
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