oh wow you idiot you bought a
one of these for one of these and
i bet you're enjoying your pc doubling as your room
heater that's been a running joke for over 15 years now
so we figured then why not purpose build a system that is
specifically designed from the get-go to
warm your room could this actually be practical and how would it compare to a
purpose-built space heater stay tuned to find out
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let's start with some college dropout level physics according to the first law
of thermodynamics energy can either be created nor destroyed it can only be
changed from one form into another which means that other than the small amount
of kinetic energy to turn like your fans and the light energy to run
your dope ass RGB all of the power being consumed by your gaming rig right now is
being dumped into the room as waste heat making
every pc basically a sophisticated space
heater all right so this is our space heater pc it's got an AMD
Threadripper processor it's got a gtx 1080 it's got a fanless power supply so
you know we're not generating any more kinetic energy than
we absolutely have to and the whole thing has been tuned to match the power
consumption of this guy right here one of the key aspects of the
design of the system was using ek's phoenix mlc water cooling kit so it's a
modular liquid cooler that allows us to quickly connect or disconnect any
components we want so we can either use an internal radiator for testing
purposes or unplug the whole thing here
to connect it to our external cooler this
is bertha she's a little rough around the
edges but with this plan
we think we can use an old radiant heater which would traditionally be
hooked up to a gas firing something to cool our pc
and heat our room
so first order of business whenever you find a radiator behind like a jamaican
guy's house is cleaning
now cleaning something like this is not as straightforward as you know
throwing some water in it shaking it around
calling it a day we filled the radiator up with water and vinegar let it sit for
24 hours and drained it the contents
were
the worst after the initial flush we filled the radiator up with tap water and let it
run upside down for a while messing up ivan's LTT adidas in the
process oh no my shoes uh-oh
after half an hour of running water at tap pressure through it it started to
look clean now in order to mate the radiator's
original piping to our water cooling hoses we needed to thread the stock pipe
unfortunately the die bit so hard on reverse that the tube disconnected from
the adjacent elbow and when we tried to vise the tube without the elbow it
ovalized luckily we had compatible sections from
another project sitting around so we teflon tape the threads and here's the
result after rigging the radiator up with an industrial pump in a reservoir we were
ready to fill it up ivan was so upset that i got his adidas wet that you can
clearly see him trying to electrocute me here completely okay we have to turn off
the water ivan there's so much water we're going to kill the pump
the good news is that he failed better luck next time chump the bad news is
that with the liquid pumping at an industrial pump pressure oh it's so
dirty not only did it become brownish again but we also detected a minor leak
it is a pretty substantial leak that like that will affect no that won't
work you need teflon tape just tightening it more will not work after
going gordon freeman on the joint with a crowbar we were able to disconnect it
and teflon tape it adding a t-line drain in the process you know just in case
good thing too it ended up taking four fills and flushes before the water
stayed clear now as those of you who watched our full room water cooling
project know mixing metals in a loop essentially creates a battery causing
corrosion this can be mitigated by adding sacrificial anodes to the loop
but due to our testing being very short term we omitted this step while we were
doing all that we had our space heater running inside the room that we call the
sanity closet so in here and we didn't want anybody opening this door because
that would let the stank out so to speak so in here this is a five cubic meter
room approximately accounting for the the
boxes kind of taking up some of it we've got a wirelessly monitorable temperature
sensor here and then we had our 350 watt
heater running here so the sanity closet started at 23.7 degrees celsius which is
our office temperature and then what we've done is we have configured our
test to stop at 36.7 degrees which is
the temperature of the human body you wouldn't really want your room any
warmer than that would start to feel like a sauna so if our pc heats up this
room from the same temperature to the same temperature in the same amount of
time then we consider our experiment a success one last thing we needed some
kind of opening at the back of the case to pipe the quick disconnect through
finally we just needed to drag our beast into the closet hook her up to the
radiator via the quick disconnects so all we've got to do is hook these babies
up to these babies
and uh let it bake for a bit
finally time to check on this and see how we did with our pc
so this is interesting our FPS
are is lower and even though it's water cooled our
GPU is over it's over 85 degrees
oh
our power consumption is only about 275
280 watts
our graphics card is thermal throttling
okay
let's have a look at what's going on in here whoa wow
that is a heat wave and
i think it's pretty clear what happened
it looks like oh that's hot oh
oh i think
once our system heated up it made it easier
for it to gather gunk that was still stuck on the inside of the radiator
oh that's a real shame
all right come on over here dennis come have a look oh
so
here's our gp yeah okay
our GPU is totally gummed up
what a shame so that affects the amount of heat
that we were kicking out into the room actually we found a silver lining here
so we didn't factor in that this high-powered pump
consumes a lot of power it turns out that it's actually about 75
watts so
our numbers should still be okay
okay so after importing all the data it
wasn't immediately obvious
how it all came together and made sense because upon initial inspection they
actually look like really different results between
the space heater and the pc but
what we didn't factor in initially looking at it
is the immense thermal mass of the water
inside the radiator so what's actually happening here
is that water is taking a long time to
begin to heat up enough that the radiator itself is able to start
dissipating heat to the surrounding air
so in effect all we need to do is time
shift our graph a little bit and what you can see is that even though the pc
it lags about two degrees behind the space heater they both heat the room at
the same rate so
conclusion time can you use your pc
as a heater for your room the answer is yes but we don't recommend
the way we did it because if you do it the way we did it
you're gonna lag behind by two degrees
and all gamers know that any amount of lag is unacceptable
which obviously is totally not the problem like this this this gunk in the
in the water that's that's the problem speaking of problems
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