Originally Posted By: Familyguy
About 3 years ago, I had the need to do a LOT of media encoding. It was winter and where I lived we got a substantial amount of snow and sometimes it would be days before the roads were passable with my torque monster RWD hemi vehicle.
Sooo....I built a spare machine from parts I had around the orefice so I could do a chunk of work at home. The machine had 8 opteron 2.4ghz processors and a dozen 750gig barracudas inside along with whatever was the fastest video board that I could buy at the time ('cuz you gotta be able to play Ghost Recon with all the eye candy turned on when the machine is "idle"). Unfortunately, it wouldn't run for more than about a half hour under load without shutting down due to all the internal heat produced. Similar machines in the orefice were in a climate controlled machine room with big fans in the top of the racks forcing cool(er) air past the machines. So I got obnoxiously loud fans for the case. That extended the run time to about an hour. Something had to be done.
Sooo....I bought 2 sections of clothes dryer exhaust tube. On the end of each one was a fairly high CFM 120mm fan running on 120v AC power. I riveted two metal flanges to the case. On the bottom of the case, I attached one of the tubes and had air blowing IN to the case. On the top, I attached the other tube which sucked air OUT of the case through the fan port in the back of the power supply. The other ends of the tubes were connected to a 2" sheet of polystyrene foam that I'd cut 2 holes in at either end and fashioned into an adapter plate for an open window. The temperature outside hovers around 0-20F during that time of year and with this system, the computer would remain running 24/7 while busily ingesting uncompressed 720p video and excreting multi-pass fondled mpeg4 video. On the really cold days, I plugged the exhaust hole in the window adapter and vented the exhaust inside. Very toasty. On the month that I used this rig at home, my electric bill was almost $2000 (which the company paid).
Unfortunately, I didn't snap any pictures. When the going gets tough, real men (Tm) go to Home Depot.
Hahaha, Awesome! Did you have to find a unused electrical circuit for that [censored]? Im showing you would need about ~900-950 watts for that. Ive thought of doing almost the exact same thing so I could overclock like a mofo.
