Cooling like a pro, can we do it too?

[3DMike]

At my place of work we use lots of video disk servers to broadcast a couple of hundred TV channels via satellite. Theese things have very little in terms of processor power, most are 486 or acorn risc CPUs. But what they do have is a whole stack of SCSI drives in them spinning at 15000 rpm+. This gives off a lot of heat. Being a novice overclocker I was wondering how these babies are kept cool. Here is what I found...

Despite the server rooms being air conditioned down to around 12 C the servers the crates have some serious fan work going on. Take for example this Quantel Cachebox. (pic below I hope!) The crate is a 19" rackmounted unit 8U in height. The front face of the box houses a couple of switches a CD drive but apart from this is just a big air filter, behind this are 4 12cm fans sucking in. Inside the crate everything is mounted on its edge (the pic is a top view). The whole shebang is connected by a board which is just basically a bus sitting flat in the bottom. At the back are more fans sucking out and of course a few SDI connectors.

Pros? Straight through airflow, I make it about 550 cf/min. No cables obstructing flow. Temp monitors read 15 C at peak.

Cons? Need a mobo which will slot mount to all other boards and drives.

Believe me this stuff works, we had the air con fail once and despite this setup several of the servers failed. My point is this would seem a great setup for overclocking, does anyone make such a setup of case and MOBO for the "home" pc? Would anyone like to? (sorry the pic is a bit crap!)

Mike

 

[Snuffleuppigus]

I was just tasked with coming up with a cooling solution for our server room... about 300 servers in this location.... (the other 200 are in another state for the unlikely event this site get's hit by an asteroid or something...). these servers have their drawbacks in design.... if memory serves right we have to keep the temp from getting too cold.... or we get all kinds of warnings from the server.... also, notice the raid array blows all it's hot air on everything else.... those raid arrays get a bit warm... it works ok if you have somewhere to dump the heat away from the case.... our server racks are a crummy design here, the server racks were picked by my bosses boss... sooooooo it is unlikely we will be able to replace them.... i just have to make them work..... jumping back, as the server racks cool front to back... prob not a good idea for overclocking.... and the mob's designed for these cases are a but spendy.... also lacking in all of those beautiful oc options (fsb, vcore, i/o volts)