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KingDaveRa · 13-04-2009, 10:52

What about HD temps? It's those I'd be most worried about. Cook your HD and it's bye-bye valuable, treasured photos and mementoes you'll never get back. Ever.

IMHO, PC cases are designed with fairly specific airflows in mind - in at the front, out at the back (mostly!). Indeed, Intel and AMD's airflow guidelines often start in that sort of area. Being a Dell it's possible it's BTX also, which has a definite front-to-back design. If you go whacking it in a cabinet, it'll just sit recycling all its own air, getting progressively hotter until it starts to do 'weird' things, like randomly crashing, corrupting data, or killing the HD.

If you're doing it to tidy up the place, then I'd say just take the back off (or at least have a nice big opening across the back at the top), and make sure there's some air entry points low down - remember, heat rises, so if cold air can get in at the bottom easily, the hot air will find its own way out at the top.

Some hardware is warrantied up to quite silly temperatures these days - I've seen 75 degrees C mentioned in places. Thing is, that's often in environments where you have redundant hardware, i.e. RAID arrays. Throw a disk, no big deal. Besides, it's all backed up on tape/disk elsewhere, so no biggy.

It's a big biggy if it's at home, on a single disk.

13-04-2009, 10:52	#27
KingDaveRa Inactive Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Aylesbury, Bucks Age: 43 Services: Broadband Gamer, Phone M, Tivo V6. Posts: 269	Re: Is this wise???? What about HD temps? It's those I'd be most worried about. Cook your HD and it's bye-bye valuable, treasured photos and mementoes you'll never get back. Ever. IMHO, PC cases are designed with fairly specific airflows in mind - in at the front, out at the back (mostly!). Indeed, Intel and AMD's airflow guidelines often start in that sort of area. Being a Dell it's possible it's BTX also, which has a definite front-to-back design. If you go whacking it in a cabinet, it'll just sit recycling all its own air, getting progressively hotter until it starts to do 'weird' things, like randomly crashing, corrupting data, or killing the HD. If you're doing it to tidy up the place, then I'd say just take the back off (or at least have a nice big opening across the back at the top), and make sure there's some air entry points low down - remember, heat rises, so if cold air can get in at the bottom easily, the hot air will find its own way out at the top. Some hardware is warrantied up to quite silly temperatures these days - I've seen 75 degrees C mentioned in places. Thing is, that's often in environments where you have redundant hardware, i.e. RAID arrays. Throw a disk, no big deal. Besides, it's all backed up on tape/disk elsewhere, so no biggy. It's a big biggy if it's at home, on a single disk.