Building a desk

Oh, I just need the fridge for the bodies.

 

I used to buy several 4*2 liter packs when I made a shopping run. I've tried to ease it down a bit since.
Sometimes I used to 'decant' my pepsi, leave it open on the table for some time before consumption.

The obvious downside to such levels of consumption, you have to go to toilet constantly. Hence it's actually good that I drink less, though not much time to play nowadays.

 

unless I'm fairly active that day I don't often go through a whole 2 liter in a day, but I don't particularly like flat soda so there will be no decanting , it just tends to get warm sometime between when I take it out of the fridge and when I finally finish it off days (sometimes weeks) later, I'm not always at my desk and I hardly always like to drink the same damn thing... but I usually only let myself float 2 different drinks on my desk at a time, not including cans or glasses of whatever else I choose to drink in the interim. Mostly the bottles are there so I don't have to consider going down for something different if I'm thirsty but not willing to go down. I'm too lazy to install a fridge for my desk, so I suffer the trip when I run out. And I'd just put it off till next week repeatedly anyway.

 

I realized that drinking 4 liters a day of aspartam stuff was probably not a good idea since it was proven that aspartam interferes with certain neuron signals and can lead to psychological disorders. When I actually read that it was only put to 'allowed' list during GWB's period I stopped cold turkey. Nowadays I can have some on a weekend or when I go to a restaurant or so but it stopped being my #1 thirst drink. Replaced it with strawberry juice. Got to look after one's health so I get to see the day of full-body immersion gaming.

Btw. for cooling check out Noctua's industrial grade fans. A bit noisy, but if you're building your own desk you can create special compartments for the fans that are sound proof and you can place these things that allow airflow but block airwaves in the airpaths. Basically it's like having multiple aeroplane wings with narrow gaps next to each other, except they're fully symmetric (not hollow on the bottom cross section). The shape of these reflects most of airwaves back but lets airflow pass through.

Just a thought.

Noctua's most powerful 120mm industrial grade fans, 4x as efficient at moving air as your average high end fan.
http://www.noctua.at/main.php?show=productview&products_id=80&lng=en&set=1

 

Good find, Sheep. Do you have a link to the airwave blockingmajigs?

For a chair, I'm thinking about making my own instead of blowing $150+ to get a comfy chair. MH and I were discussing this last night and I'm leaning towards the Anvil Gladiator's pilot seat.

 

The fans btw. don't appear to come shipped with filters, but you can either request them with the order or buy standard 120mm fan filters since they fit all 120mm fans.

The airwave thing was difficult to actually find but find it I did.

http://michaelschwob.com/

For best results, have that on the intake and outtake and then combine one of the following for the flow channel




Eventually it's always about balance. You can eliminate almost all the sound created by fans but increasing the amount of contraptions that reduce sound will always have some form of impact on the airflow. That can be fixed by simply having sufficient amount of powerful fans, it's not like the airflow resistance is that significant in many of the effective designs that it would be impossible. For example having foam in the inner linings of air tubes is really effective especially with a corner of sorts and I don't think the foam and corner together cause a massive reduction in airflow.

The acceptable sound level is obviously another factor though if you can I'd always recommend minimizing sound. Fan sound levels can lead to increasing the volume in games and that can lead to unnecessary stress to ears. If the ambient noise is low you can hear exactly just as well but at significantly lower sound levels in games. Ears don't really adapt to increase in sound volume and hearing capacity erodes faster in higher sound levels since it's essentially mechanical wear&tear effect. Lesser sound means lesser wear.

So, kill all ambient sound. The game sounds will be more pure and your ears will appreciate it as well.

 

The Noctuas might be a little overkill unless you can only run one fan. I know when I put my media PC in a cabinet that only had a fine grating on the door for airflow it would get pretty warm in there. You could hear the fans spool up after 30 minutes or so of a movie playing. I cut a hole in the back of the cabinet and put ONE el-cheapo 120mm fan pushing air out of the hole (wired into the comp so it runs when the comp is on). It pretty much stays at ambient temp inside the cabinet now no matter what I'm doing with the comp.

 

Yea but you're not running dual cpu phenoms and quad gpu's all at stress test for 'cheap laughs'.

 

Unless I missed something, the bear isn't either...

 

At any rate, proper airflow direction is much more important than raw CFMs. You can have all the fans in the world but if your GPU is sitting in a dead zone it's still gonna run hot. That's one benefit of doing an open system, you can set up the airflow better than in a case. That setup from the first page with a clear top looked more than adequate with the fans he was running. By the time you get a decent sized GPU in there you'll just about have a tall enough box to run 240mm fans too. I'll take a big slow quiet fan over a little warp speed noisy fan any day.

 

Well, that's the thing. If your room temperature rises as it does with my office, it will push the CPU and GPU fans and if it's an open setup then it also means that the noise will be highly irritating and heat levels rise.

The advantage with a custom wind-tunnel like sealed system is that it can be sound proofed and you can for instance hook up air intake to window, for me window is always the best source of cool air. The idea is that it's not a box with dead corners and vortexes but rather like a wind tunnel, with a powerful fan at both air intake and outtake and a funnel shape for the area where the motherboard is. With this kind of setup reducing the actual space inside the component area is beneficial to prevent creation of vortexes or areas of slow flow and to increase the rate at which all of the air inside is changed.

I was joking about the extreme setup with dual CPU slots and all, but really I need to stress my machine a lot over the day and the parts produce a lot of heat, so much that without any other heating the office becomes too hot even during winter. Hence when I get the chance I will have the air intake and outtake both go through the window with some parts separating them so that keep the outtake from going back in.

The alternative would be to simply put liquid system on both the GPU and CPU and have the unit itself be out the window. Eliminates all noise and has high efficiency without heating the office and without complex construction. Would even allow a completely open setup and not worry about dust other than the basic cleaning and keeping the cooling unit clean.

 

It'll end up being a "wind tunnel" style enclosure in the desk instead of being an open thing, but it will be built in a way where it's easy to open it, swap parts, clean, etc. I'll look into the 240mm fans since I'm with you, Guppy. Less whirring makes for a happy bear. I don't have any kind of extreme setup, but I want to make sure my cooling is above simply adequate. No sense in building something custom and leaving it at mediocre.

Okay, back to the desk itself. I'm thinking a U-shaped desk with a chair on rails. I'm looking at roughly 66" x 120" of free space, though it's not going to take up that entire area. 167.6cm x 304.8cm for those of you who use the correct system of measurement.

 

If I could afford it, I'd rip the 400+ mm fan out of my portable air filtration unit. It's extremely good at moving lots and lots of air for very low noise at the low setting or acting as a leaf blower with the high setting. I can keep a laptop at idle temperature while playing stuff that usually heats it up to 90C and triggers cpu-throttling.

In fact it doesn't even need to be taken apart. You could just attach the unit's air outtake to your desk's air intake.

 

alternatively, you could fill the case with cooking oil or similar non-conductive fluid (mineral oil)

 

I prefer Trev's idea. Mineral oil doesn't exactly go well with the easy to clean and swap components bit.

 

+1

I'm really starting to like the water cooling options available nowadays.

 

I got h100i for the CPU for my next comp but I didn't order water cooling for GPU because the whole package started to get a bit pricey as I ventured further overboard. Though I made sure the chassis supports one when I'll get around to it in Rev2.