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Extreme carputer cooling

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wizardPC

New Member
Joined
Mar 31, 2004
I have an epia m10000 in a morex 3677 case mounted in my trunk. I have had some serious problems with heat, which are detailed (along with some measures I have taken) here:
http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=23139

I have gone to some drastic measures to cool this thing, including cutting 2 three-inch holes in my spare tire well. This keeps the carputer cool enough when the car is stationary, but as soon as the car starts rolling it heats up dramatically. If the 95+ posts above scared you, the last couple pages have pictures and a better description of my latest problem.

I am in some serious need of guidance, and so here is the cliffs-notes version:
I have an Epia M10000, which cannot be water-cooled. The computer needs to stay on all the time because it also acts as my alarm, complete with keyless entry and remote start. I need it to stay below 85F, even with the car off--above 90F and I start seeing RAM problems. I live in deepest daskest Mississippi, so my trunk temperature can reach over 160F in July. I have a second battery to power all this stuff, but I really need total power consumption to be less than 10-15A.

Any help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
 
what you're asking is basically impossible. With that little power consumption, no heat removal technology can possibly remove that much heat. If you were able to up that to 25a, then I'd say go pelt, run a pump, and mount a few rads under your car. But then it'd be water cooled in a way.

The only possible solution is getting the biggest heatsink you can find, putting a constant blower fan taking outside air onto your processor, and most importantly down clocking to about 1.2ghz with as little voltage as possible.
 
That's kind of weird that you start to get RAM problems at only 90 farienheit....

Without using a phase change system or a peltier, there is no way to cool anything below ambient temperatures. If the air outside your car goes up to 100 farienheit, which I'm sure it does sometimes, there is no way fans can get it below that temperature.

The only thing I can think of that might allow you to cool things off without using a lot of power would be something like a large CO2 canister, like for paintball or even bigger, that is set to slowly realease pressure which will make it get cold. You would have to replace this pretty offen though. There are propane powered fridges which might also be usefull.... but I don't even want to think about modifying one of those to work in a trunk of a moving car.

I think your best bet would be to figure out why the computer can't take a little higher temperatures, and see if you can help this out at all.
 
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