Handling Systems Exposed to Extreme Temperatures?

NeoMagick asks: "I live in a rural town in the Pacific Northwest, and I'll soon be picking up a Shuttle system which will get mounted in the trunk of my car, and patched into probably an Alpine or Pyle in-dash LCD panel. This last week temperatures have gotten up to 105degF, and have been known to get to -10degF in the winters. I'm wondering if any /.ers have had issues with computers in cars in such extreme temperatures (overheating? freezing?), and if so what they did to solve such problems."

Comments

Re:My experience

[schnurble]

3) Add as many fans as you can...and point them all blowing out of the case to try and reduce the pressure inside.

Actually, what you want is to point some of them out, and some of them -in-, and create a constant flow of air through the system.

Make sure there are -lots- of air vents so you can move monster amounts of air through the system, and make sure you have equal capacity of fans sucking air in as you do blowing air out. "Depressurizing" the system (to the minor extent that your average case fan will do, anyway) is bad. Heat exchange requires something to dissipate heat into. If you thin the air, you dissipate less heat.

If all you do is try to "depressurize" the system, you may not only damage the CPU by not cooling it sufficiently, but you might also put an unnecessary strain on your cooling fans, that are constantly laboring to suck air out.