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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?"
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.
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.
What would happen is: water would condense on the every surface in the computer after every time you opened the case. And you know how well moisture plays with electronics.
After opening and closing the case, you would need to run the fridge case in a dehumidification mode for several hours before turning the computer on in order to reduce the humidity below the cooled computer's dew point.
In addition to this problem, the contraction and expansion from when the computer runs and stops (stopping the fridge with it) would quickly wiggle stuff out of its socket and create cracks on the boards.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Before doing anything, it is a good idea to think about what you are trying to accomplish. If you are interested in overclocking, there are plenty of sites that explain how to focus on that.
If you are trying to make your hardware "more reliable", or "perform better" then cooling is unlikely to accomplish much. Cold machine rooms were useful 30 years ago, but today they mostly exist out of misguided superstition that they provide some benefit. Modern CPUs and memory are built to run fairly hot. HDDs are actually more reliable at the hot end of their operating range. SDDs benefit from being cooler, but you can accomplish that with better airflow rather than colder temps.
There is a reason that most big tech companies run "hot" datacenters today, with ambient temps of 40C / 105F or higher. The AC savings far outweigh the negligible performance/reliability issues.