Antec Truepower 380s heats up the room too much - too hot!

PSUs: The source of DC power for all components in the PC & often a big noise source.

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davidstone28
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Antec Truepower 380s heats up the room too much - too hot!

Post by davidstone28 » Wed Jun 16, 2004 1:40 am

The Antec Truepower 380s that I have in the Sonata, heats up my room too much too much - it's left on 24/7 and just pumps out hot air upon hot air.

It's about 25-30degrees in the UK at the moment and my room is just roasting without the Sonata adding more hot air into the mix.

Is there anyway I can lower the temps and stop the PSU from addings 2-3 degrees to the room temp?

bomba
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Post by bomba » Wed Jun 16, 2004 7:12 am

Turn the PC off?':wink:'

Your PSU takes AC power and converts it to DC, the most we can ask is that it do its job efficiently, quietly and reliably. Though the TP380S is not bad, there are better choices for cool quiet PSUs. Read the PSU reviews and especially for the Noisetaker and rev A3 Seasonic "Super" PSU's. These power supplies are some of the most efficient PC PSU's available and thus will put out less heat.

Note that all AC power being pulled by your PC, monitor etc. is being dissipated as heat. If you really wish for a low heat output computing experience, you need to look beyond the PSU to the CPU, graphics card & monitor. These are typically the most power hungry components. LCD monitors draw less than CRTs; there is much discussion about CPU and graphics card power requirements on these boards. The Radeon 9600 series is recommended for good performance and low power requirements. For CPU's, desktop P4's run hot, especially the Prescott. AthlonXP desktop processors are also hot. More energy efficient processors include the Pentium-M, Athlon XP-M and Athlon 64. Note that reasonably priced motherboards for the Pentium-M are not available at this time.

AZBrandon
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Post by AZBrandon » Wed Jun 16, 2004 9:58 am

What bomba said is correct. I have a 21" CRT that consumes 115 watts A/C. Who knows how much of that actually translates into light production verus slost as heat, but most light producing objects other than LED's, LCD's and fluorescent lights produce mainly heat. I figure of that 115 watts drawn, probably at least 80 becomes heat. I know that by placing a small thermocouple in the top of the vents in the monitor I've recorded temps as high as 125F (50C) so it's possible that if you have a CRT, that could be a significant portion of the heat.

Further on what bomba said, since the PSU just converts A/C to DC, you can reduce heat by reducing the amount of power drawn by the PC itself. If you have 2 hard drives each drawing 10 watts, that's 20 watts DC, which may be around 25-30 watts A/C. So you have heat produced by the translation from A/C to D/C, plus of course heat coming off the hard drives themselves. Same for your CPU. The more power it draws, the more power the PSU has to produce, plus the more heat that the CPU will produce and inevitibly be pumped out of the box by the PSU and case fans.

streety
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Post by streety » Wed Jun 16, 2004 3:47 pm

Although the best way to reduce the heat produced is to use less power hungry components you may also like to consider the reverse of this with your hot air vented out of the room. You'll reduce your airflow so would need to monitor the temps in your case but most of the hot air from your computer case should end up outside. This doesn't help with your monitor heat but might make the difference.

Alternatively you could always invest in air conditioning. Of course it's probably not worth it for the couple days of summer we see each year.

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