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Ask Slashdot: What Would Happen If You Were To Put a Computer Inside a Fridge?
dryriver writes: This is not asking what would happen if you were to place your iMac inside your kitchen fridge. Rather, what if a computer casing for a high-powered graphics workstation with multiple CPUs and GPUs, lets say, worked just like a small fridge or freezer, cooling your hardware down without using any CPU fans or liquid cooling and similar. How much would such a fridge-casing cost to make and buy, how much electricity would it consume, how much bigger would it be than a normal PC casing, and would it be a practical solution to the problem of keeping high-powered computer hardware cool for extended periods of time? Bonus question: Is such a thing as a fridge-casing or "Fridgeputer" sold anywhere on the world market right now? Linus Tech Tips tackled this question in a video a couple of years ago, titled "PC Build in a Fridge - Does it Work?"
I'm sure you can find the formulas online. Not sure how they scale though.
Refrigerators for food can ice-up and otherwise have problems with condensation. Any refrigerator sufficiently advanced to have features to avoid this will cost far more than the equipment needed to deal with waste heat specifically for computer applications.
Additionally, most inexpensive consumer-grade refrigerators are not really oriented toward dealing with constant heat. Most food cools and remains cool once it's in-place, and when hot food is put into a consumer-grade refrigerator it takes some time to really come down to the internal ambient temp. Expensive consumer-grade refrigerators may be equipped to better cool hot food quickly, but they probably are not geared toward continuous heat.
If the original purpose of this was to get a dorm or cubicle fridge and build a computer into it, I would not recommend doing that. The difference in air temperature between the inside of the fridge and the ambient is not great enough relative to the waste heat produced by the computer to justify the build.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Except this is liquid cooling (~the refrigerant), it's just coupled very ineffectively to the CPU via air instead of direct contact. This refrigerator also makes use of a phase transition, unlike conventional water cooling (unless you're getting really toasty!), but it's not unheard of to build this into your rig.
But again, just blowing cold air is going to be rather inefficient for a single computer (data center is another issue I guess). Not to mention, you will need a *larger* radiator than you would otherwise, as refrigerators of course "make more heat than they make cold," and they just pipe the heat off to the air. So...the TDP of your case has now gone up by adding this unit.