Topic: Resting Your Video Card (Read 11695 times)

I'm getting quite a few good tips through PMs now from many of you good folk sharing your ideas on card longevity. But one tip in particular
caught my eye, that is the use of a hairdryier and a bucket of ice.

If you point the hairdryer at your PC and get it to blow over ice it will indeed produce a cool stream of air. Yes, this cold air can
be used to cool your video card. However, excess water vapour in the air may fry your shit, so it isn't advisable. It would
only work if the ice is kept in a sealed plastic bag.

Keep them tips coming fellow miners. Just ignore all the haters and crazies.

Ah this thread again...

yea been looking for a good laugh and some of the more recent replies to the OP have delivered. 

I feel bad contributing to this thread but I just wanted to comment on a couple things.  Computers in fridges don't work.  First, as has been mentioned, they aren't designed to run constantly.  Second, the compressors in fridges aren't all that powerful, so you it won't be keeping your rig very cool even before the compressor fails.  A/C units or dehumidifiers will work better.

Smalleyeter - nice posting yet again, but I might ruin it.

For most casual GPU users, the cards run happily for a long time.  However, they do fail and there are several things that shorten lives.  I'd agree with the smoke, but I don't have that problem.

1: Keep things clean.  Dust is well know for doing amazing things and gets everywhere.  Clean your case/fans/cards periodically.
2: Heat kills - if you overclock, you will probably shorten the life of the card, and it doesn't take too much to fry video ram or the gpu.  I'm happy running stock speeds and down clocked memory.
3: Have spares.  I have been running cards 24/7 longer than bitcoin has been around, and every now and then I get a bearing failure on a fan.  I have a stash of failed cards so I can swap out a fan and replace it easily.  I also "re-fresh" the thermal paste rather than applying new - saves me quite a bit.

If I wanted to have my computers get cold, I can turn them off, but they are happier when warm.

Awww, man, this is one zombie thread that shoulda stayed in the grave! I keep hoping it will go away, but it...just...won't...die. Someone bust out the holy water, please. 

You just said they do, but not how; what i asked is how.

trololol
the pic matches

sigh.. goes to show ya I guess.. You just cant fix stupid

Ohhhhhh I get it now!  I didn't check me maths!

I'm sorry to all you good folk out that have been PMing me about card health tips, this thread seems to have been hijacked by a bunch of crazies and
conspiracy nuts. There is one other important factor that y'all should take into account when caring for your card and
that is magnetic fields.

I mentioned it earlier, before all the heathens turned up, and I'm saying again: don't put yor speakers near your cards!

The magnetic fields in the speakers cause vortexing in electron flows that are in your PC. So keep them speakers at arms length
as you get down to whatever disco music you listen to while mining.

That's good thinking man, you one of them few openminded individuals that keep the world from going crusty! Ignore all them other
so called experts, they just parroting them nonsense that got jammed into their heads from the Man.

You're right in that a spaceheater is pretty much an inverse freezer. Both take energy from an external source to function. But where as the
freezer transfers entropy out of the room, a heater will transfer entropy into the room. Both convert energy doing this, so all conservation principles
are intact. It is the heating fins on a freezer that achieve this inversion and such fins do warm up, but in general more cool remains
in the room.

That maths behind this is solid. Sorry to all you so called a/c experts, but your knowledge is bunk. Stop poncing around like you know shit,
if you can't prove it from first principles, then keep your cake hole closed!

Oh I think they are... they are dumping on a troll thread... but your post reminded of this:

Many years ago I happened upon a person who was running a render farm in his garage... It was pretty warm in there and his solution was to put 4 window AC units in to keep it cool. The problem is they were literally sitting in the garage... the condenser end was venting into the garage... I kept trying to explain this too him... but he honestly believed it was working... unlike the OP who is a top quality troll

 

Heh :p when it's something your trained to know, it's hard to watch someone try and explain it like that

Damn, you spoiled the fun of watching him try to come up with crazy explanations for his absurd claims DX<

I didn't bother looking, but either Wikipedia has got the tech completely wrong, or it's being misinterpreted.

If your willing to listen for a moment, I'm a licensed a/c tech, and a/c and fridges work on the same basic principals, with the exception that an a/c unit is designed to run nearly 100% duty cycle. Refrigerators and freezers however, are designed with 25-30% duty cycle in mind. If you try to use a refrigerator system to cool a PC (generating heat constantly) you will burn it out eventually. Window a/c units and similar can be converted to cool PC components, but specialized tools and equipment is required to perform the required modifications.

These systems remove the heat from one area, and need to dissipate them in another. A/c units use things like radiators on both ends, evaporator is where it gets cold, condenser is where it gets hot. Then they simply use air to transfer the heat either into the system or out of the system. The only electricity involved is to run the fans and refrigerant compressor. In fridges, the same principal applies, although the evaporator is smaller and inside the fridge, usually does not have a fan on it. The condenser is the black grid of tubing you see on the back of a fridge. That warms up, and the inside gets cold. No thermal energy ever leaves the room via the electrical wire. There's a bit more going on in the refrigerant system all dependent on the system pressure differences, but this is a reasonably easy to understand run down of the basics.

Even the use of a peltier cooler (ceramic, thermo-electric device) the electricity is used to facilitate transfer of heat from one side to the other, and in fact these devices create more heat than they are able to remove from the cool side.

Overclock.net forums have a number of great articles of people using refrigerant or peltier based cooling on PC's if your interested in learning more.
http://www.overclock.net/



I don't think anyone's trying to dump on your thread, it's just best if we try and prevent misinformation whenever possible.

Yet an other person saying the OP's info was off.  Keeping GPU's constantly on isn't as bad as turning it on and off frequently.  What happens is when used solder points and such expand due to heat when shut off and cooled down it contracts due to cooling off.  Enough expanding and contracting can and will eventually break the card.

Please explain how the electrons from the freezer take heat from the room while the electrons on a spaceheater heat up the room.

Entropy transferred out of the room?  WTF does that mean?  The room is a preservative and the rest of the world begins to grow mold?

Maybe you meant energy transferred out of the room.  But my room has fucking walls.  What does your room have?  Doilies?

And where does the heat from the food go?  Does it stay inside the fridge?  Maybe the cool inside the fridge is so dense that the heat just kind of creeps around it like a psycho ex-girlfriend.

Straight up it's true! That tar and shit from the ciggie will build up into deposits and clag up all the internals.
That'll prevent heat extraction and slow down electron flow. Your machine will either overheat or you'll get
timing error crashes.

Pretty much all goes with life philosophy, if you lead a unhealthy life that gonna reflect in the things around you.
So save your lungs and Bitcoins will be your reward!

Look man, this was a beautiful thread before you and your misinformed brutes came along and made ugly. Y'all need
to learn to be more polite and shit.

With regards to the fridge, you got to understand that it ain't a closed system. There's energy being supplied by the
the power station outside right? That energy lost by cooling the fridge down, entropy is transferred out of the room by
the electrons. Seeing as y'all can't provide no robust refutation other than point to wikipedia etc I think we gonna
have to agree to disagree up in here.

Hey but no hard feelings. I'd like to 0ffer another great tip:
8 ) keep your machine clean inside, dust and cobwebs will reduce heat extraction efficency