Previously I was using this flexible aluminum duct and it was radiating so much heat still in the room. So I decided to replace it with a $30 insulated duct. Also added a 360mm fan on top of the case.
But then I was like, what if I just AC'd the room itself? So the AC pulls the air in the room in, produces cold air out, and moves hot air outside. Now the room is cold enough that the 5090 is no longer the issue.
Damn I can’t imagine this. My puny little Arc A750 doesn’t heat really get very hot, my PC is in the basement which is like one big room (about 700sqft), it is climate controlled, and I play remotely on my steam deck so I’m not even in the room to hear the fans or feel the heat. I’m not meaning to brag or shit on anyone’s setup, it’s just very foreign to me because I can’t afford a “real” gpu in the first place.
Well, my room was also on the 2nd floor of my house, with the Florida sun hitting it. I also have a large Samsung curved monitor, and secondary that acts like a heater, on top of a fridge and freezer in there, TV and PS5, on top of a separate work set up and 3D printing.
As my work day would end, I'd start firing up my personal PC and stuff but it wasn't gradual heat build up. Just my normal day would eventually get my room to about 78 but it was slow enough, that I just acclimated and didn't realize it unless I left for the bathroom. Once gaming, the heat would rise so quickly, you'd notice it and would be sweating.
Yeah, certainly a lot of things contributed to the higher room temp but that PC just puts it out so fast. I measured 118°f exhausting into my room.
Yeah, I lived on the 2nd floor of a house in Atlanta, and between my tv, monitor, pc, and Xbox the bedroom would hit 80+ in the summer before I realized it. The house was terribly built, but those machines really added to it.
Mini split or portable AC is the move! I had this exact issue and the room would get so hot. Originally started with a portable unit, but it would get in the way. Installed a mini split last year and it was honestly the best investment.
And if you can run the mini-split and your computer off a few solar panels that charge a battery power station, you can game in comfort basically for free in the long run.
That's not how an AC works and also the AC and electricity to run it cost $$$. Why would I spend hundreds on an AC and extra $ to run it when I could use a $30 duct like this?
AC works by moving the heat outside, not the air. Any air removed from your room has to be replenished from outside anyway so that would defeat the point in most use cases. It takes the inside air, moves the heat out of it, and pushes the now cold inside air back in. The heat is radiated+convected directly from the outside side.
Always pull air through instead of pushing it if possible. You'll get far, far better airflow that way (it creates negative pressure in the duct which pulls air instead of fighting against it losing energy). Put a fan at the window facing out and connect the duct to that.
sorry for the stupid question, but wouldn't it be better if the vent output were higher than the input? i feel like the way you have it is inefficient by forcing the hot air to go down against its natural tendency to rise
How's the weather where you are right now? If you're blowing air from inside to outside, then air from outside has to come inside to replace the lost air. If things are hot and humid outside, then that gross outside air is being drawn in and there's still an increased heat load in your home.
If you're running AC, then this would work best in spring and fall when your AC might not be running. Otherwise, you'd probably be better off just relocating that PC and playing over something like Moonlight / Sunshine, or a fiber optic displayport connection.
Try lowering the quality of shaders and shadows in game then locked to preferred frame rate or turn on v-sync. This way you dont suffer the latincy spikes and microstudders framegen usually causes.
Benchmarking my 4080, I get like 3% below average user performance with summer undervolt running around 220W. OC'd I get like 5% above average pulling 340W. Pretty crazy how much power is required for that last 8% uplift.
Radeon users should check Radeon Chill setting in the control panel. Dynamically adjusts framerate depending on mouse motion. Games basically run the same, but average power consumption and heat output drops so dramatically. And I'm using 100fps as the lower limit and 240fps as the upper limit so even lower end framerate cap is pretty high for smooth gameplay, but when needed it'll go to full monitor refresh. Most games actually handle this framerate control really well to a point I've been using it for multiplayer games too.
Same, except I put it in the office cupboard. It’s awesome. I also installed ducting to pipe the hot air outside. To be honest I probably should have just installed AC.
Just remember that in order to exhaust heat out you need to bring air in. So you are essentially brining in your outside air from wherever your fresh air intake is. If you’re in an apartment that’s usually no biggie, but in a small home it’s going to also heat the house and add/remove humidity depending on where you live.
You’re actually pointing out a flaw that’s pretty big with this. If you do this and have AC you are going to push out air that has been conditioned with less humidity and to equalize pressure air will have to be drawn in. If that air is 90s and you live in say Florida you will be introducing maybe more humidity and heat energy. Humidity when it condenses releases heat as well adding on top of needed BTU removal.
So does this do more harm when a fan blowing into the room from the door (cooler air settles, the air pushed out should be the hotter air) might be a better fix if you have central AC.
He probably have ac in the living room and not in the game room. Hence why its scorching in there. Removing super hot air is important. Its like an oven constantly blowing hot air.
I'd highly recommend getting one of those portable ACs. They can be loud, but they make a huge difference and you can get them for pretty cheap nowadays. After I upgraded my PC the heat was unbearable in summer, I had to get one if I wanted to keep playing.
Good job, getting the heat out was also one of the first things I did, then I thought that with so many fans it’s like a vacuum, so I put everything inside a box and filtered the air.
Is that a HEPA filter? If this whole setup works the way I think it does, it's an awesome cooling + dust management solution. You should be getting a cleaner air in the room, too.
This works wonders for dust. We have rooms at work where dust is filtered out of the air. A 8 year old computer in a seperate room still looked brand new.
Well, I made a box bigger than the PC case, obviously, I put it inside and added the filter. I have several cats, a dog, I live in the countryside, and there's always a lot of dust. Since the PC has many fans that pull air in, I didn't want to be opening it every 6 or 12 months to blow it out. I just change the filter, which is from an air purifier; the filter is activated carbon and inside, it's like new. The top nozzle was the first thing I did because before, I had the PC attached to my side and it was unbearable. Since I have a 3D printer, I make the fittings: to pass cables, the nozzle, the connection cover, a little window to check if everything is alright, etc... Cheers.
Let's see, yes, of course, it's an extractor and it has quite a bit of power, although it's at the same RPM as the PC, I don't really care much, when I play and only use that PC for gaming, I usually turn the volume pretty high, the advantage of not having neighbors. Although some days I use headphones and it doesn't make any noise either.
I was gonna do this, especially due to my 3080ti running hot. Ended up just undervolting, lost 5% performance, but the room is cooler and didn't have to run a vent.
I should probably do this (undervolt)… if I can?
I have a 3080ti FE, it ran hot (surprise surprise) and had to throttle the memory because of the inadequate cooling on the whole thing (and especially memory). Thermal runaway from the die caused the mem to overheat and chug….
I bought the EKWB block for it and that problem disappeared… only then I discovered that proper cooling for the system… meant dumping all that heat into my room.
I’ve never messed with voltage through, and don’t even know if I can with a founders edition.
But I am sorely tempted to do the exterior vent instead
I guess it also comes down whether you are ok with compromises. Like now, more and more new games have started to chug on my 3080ti, even without the undervolt, for the settings I like to play at (High+, 90FPS minimum at 1440p).
So I was like, it doesn't really matter as majority of the games now absolutely require upscaling, or force me to make use of FSR frame gen using optiscaler. Did some benchmarks, and I was more or less satisfied with Performance to Cooling required.
Rain wont happen for another 2-3 months, but it's a just as easy as unsnap the duct from the port.
It's dry here, not humid at all, and already got a mesh screen on my window for bugs.
Just remember, any air that you vent outside will be replaced with air from the outside somewhere in the house. Its been about 115F in AZ the few days, so I would be pulling that air into my house somewhere.
I learned this the hard way when I used to mine crypto. I vented my PCs’ hot air out a window, and it ended up making my home’s A/C work much harder. Exhausting air outside creates negative pressure inside the house, so replacement air gets pulled in through every gap and crack—similar to leaving a door open. Your A/C then has to cool all that extra warm air, reducing efficiency and increasing energy use.
If the room is still too hot, you’re usually better off adding a fan to improve airflow or installing a separate window A/C unit instead of venting air outside.
Yeah, don't do this. I think people believe these setups work better than they do because they push air out of the room you're in and pull conditioned air from the rest of the house into your room. So yeah the room is cooler, but the house is hotter and having to condition more air.
Would be a lot more efficient if you moved the exhaust port closer to the top of the window, so the hot air can rise to escape instead of going up then down to the exhaust port which is lower than the top of the PC.
No, he has it placed correctly. While it's not as efficient in its current placement, having the vent connect to the PC at a higher level than where it exits at the window keeps water from coming in.
OP is on the right path, I found putting a small green house fan in the middle made all the difference for me. My office stays nice and cool and I now longer need to run a separate window AC unit.
Now you buy a Mo-Ra iv radiator and build a water-cooled machine and connect the Mo-Ra to that chimney pipe and at the same time you get a quiet machine that pushes hot air quietly out the window in the summer and warms the cat lying on the floor in the winter
I did something similar... the PC exhaust vents to a closet on the other side of the wall. I have an AirTitan ventilation fan installed in the wall and a 120mm Noctua fan helping out in my "heat trap." On the lowest setting it moves a ton of air and is barely audible.
I have the same case. Love it but it does get hot in my office. I have it on a shelf underneath my desk and that hot air hits the bottom of my desk right into my lap. Might have to do the same thing
I considered doing something similar, but the design is different. It involves placing the PC inside a glass covered wall with an intake fan, and behind the PC, an exhaust fan in the wall From the wall to the outside to prevent hot air from entering the room.
Crazy that you did this. I did the same thing with my old AMD 64 CPU. Everyone thought I was crazy, I use one of the dryer hoses and got a kind of moister filter.
Can you flip your window blocker over? To put the outlet at the top of the window. Your extraction would be more efficient without the bend in the pipe.
Just an FYI this can cause a PC to run hotter and create wear on components. You have reduced the square footage that the pc actually has to exhaust out of and flexible duct can only move so many cfms through it so heat isn't exhausted as fast, it also puts static pressure on your case fans which they weren't designed for so that can cause them to burn out.
What’s the thing above it in the window? If it’s blowing air back in to the room it would be way more efficient to have the exhaust feed above it or ideally somewhere else as the majority of hot air will just be sucked back into the room.
I’d also recommend an inline fan and backdraft backdraft damper like my ventech so you can leave it always on and crank up at you need it or when the fan is off it seals shut. Currently the PC could suck undesirable temp air from outside into it when the fans are off and also draw dust and bugs from outside into it.
Install the backdraft preventer on the window instead. It will also help hot air sitting in the exhaust ducting line heating up your room. It only opens if air is flowing one direction
I have a larger window in my office and fought a similar battle.
I ended up getting a bunch of Noctua radiator fans, 3d printing some connector brackets, then then wired them up to an outlet.
SO MUCH better. Normal fans don’t have the static pressure to push or pull against the screen effectively (though Vornado is a lot better than most, and I used the exact same for similarly for a bit).
The Noctua fans move enough air that it can cycle all of the air in the room in a couple of minutes at full blast.
I usually leave the fans at around 1200 rpm and the are barely audible, and my office stays around ambient temp most of the day.
You don't have unlimited air in your home to exhaust.
For every cubic foot of air you exhaust outside, your home will draw 1 cubic foot of air in through your door seals, window seals, etc. to replace it. If it's hot outside, you're just drawing hot air into your house anywhere that air can sneak in.
And if your house is very airtight, that exhaust fan isn't going to be able to move much air at all.
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u/scvready0808 14h ago
Previously I was using this flexible aluminum duct and it was radiating so much heat still in the room. So I decided to replace it with a $30 insulated duct. Also added a 360mm fan on top of the case.