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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.
When you cool a volume of air you squeeze all the water out of it. The water condenses on the computer components, and your computer breaks.
I suppose as long as you dehydrated the inside first and kept several moisture absorption packs in there it would be ok.
Honestly water cooling is going to be better bang for the buck. you're just going to do an inefficient job of what the ambient air does fine to normal functional components.
bend like the reed
https://what-if.xkcd.com/155/
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.
A fridge is an efficient machine for a smaller amount of work. A fridge works via a compressor motor that isn't on all the time which actually generates more external heat than it internally cools when used inside a room. Compressor motors as such are not designed for continuous operation but even if they were compressors are not designed to remove that much generated heat continuously. such a compressor would be huge and likely many times the size of the space it was trying to cool and would require an order of magnitude more power to operate and hence the room it operated in would be like an oven.
The reason a fridge is efficient for cooling food is that that box is insulated and so the compressor does not need to be on most of the time.
look. this isn't a widely used idea because it is stupid. most of the time you could use it only for the cpu if it was cheaper to overclock a cheap chip than to buy a more expensive chip. most people who come up with this idea don't actually know what a fridge does, so they abstract the fridge into a magic box. after you look what a fridge does, this seems less ideal. after you look at the benefits you get from going from ambient 23 celsius to 3 celsius, it seems even more stupid. after you look at what it takes to proof it against condensation and ice, it starts to look even more stupid.
but back to the dorm fridges. lets say your fridge has an efficiency of 50%. lets say your pc consumers 400 watts of power in gaming. your fridge has to be consuming 800 watts while you play and NOT MANY FRIDGES CAN DO THAT - your typical fridge cannot cope with a constant heat load that big - it will be running full time and STILL the temperature inside the insulated box will keep going up.
in addition your electricity bill will go up so much that you would be better off buying a better gpu anyways, even if you had an industrial freezer with enough btu to keep your rig cool.
in addition, you would have to dump the heat outside. so really you would be better off just buying an aircon unit in the first place and using that to cool water and use that to cool your pc components if you want to go extreme - or just pipe the aircon unit into the box - because THAT IS THE CHEAPEST WAY to buy enough capacity that can handle the heat load from the computer.
and really it's not worth it now, there was a time when you would get gains enough to be kind of worth it(dollarwise), but not nowadays.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I service a few accts that are abattoirs, numerous pc's and printers that live at 0C ,( 32F). All work is done situ, if a big job is required, the units get pulled out, left unplugged for 2 days, work is then performed, units go back in, unplugged for a day, then fired back up when acclimated. Humidity and condensation are the killers, the PC's need power supplies every few years, the big printers last 3-4 years before rust finally takes it toll. Cold air is supposed to be dry, but with the amount of people ingressing/egressing makes it a cold, humid environment, I can't say I recommend it :(
The computer heater would win, and the refrigerator/freezer would just stay warm. In fact, it would overheat because the fridge would be insulated and trap all the heat inside.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/155/
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