cooling down a hot computer room

my computer is in my bedroom, and it runs 24/7 because i always have it doing something, whether its downloading torrents or encoding video, and it puts out a lot of heat. i live in florida and opening a window is not going to cool off my room. the air conditioner runs about 50% of the time and doesnt cool my room so well, its noticeably warmer than anywhere else in the house. anyone have any good ideas on how to keep it a little bit cooler? pretty much all i have at my disposal is about 10 computer fans and 30 bucks. lets hear some ideas.

 

Save up a few more $'s and look for a used window mount A/C. :-D

 

Had the same problem when my son stayed in the spare room attached by a hallway and the roof of the main part of the house. You can do one of two things go to a hardware store and get a "vent" fan and stick it in the AC vent hole in your room sucking more cool air or get a small fan and attach it some how to the AC vent, facing the fan toward your tower. My son did the second one and had a floor fan blowing directly onto the tower kept the door closed most the time, worked for him.Putting dark shades/curtains at the windows will keep it cool also. Good luck.

 

thanks, sounds like a good idea. my blinds are already impenetrable to light, being the huge geek i am this was a prerequisite a long time ago.

 

I did the "fan pointed at tower"-thing when I lived in my dorm room. It worked surprisingly well.

 

A friend hooked up a flexible dryer hose to the exhaust fan and pushed the heat into the living room as only the bedroom has A/C. Takes a bit of modding to the house and rig that anyone can easily handle.

 

thats a very interesting proposition. my internet and printer cables do come through a hole in the wall because the router and printer are in another room, i could possibly push the heat through that. its only about 2 square inches though, ill look into it, thanks.

 

I live in FL, too, and the key I've found to running a cool case is using a case with side a side air duct and installing an exhaust fan on the side air duct to pull heat away from the CPU, having another exhaust via a dual fan PSU, and then installing two intake fans on the front and back of the case. The front fan usually helps to bring the coldest air in from the floor, the back fan helps bring in more fresh air (though not as cold since it's seated higher), and the two exhaust fans get the heat out not only in the hottest part of the case (the top) but also at two of the major hot points in a case (the CPU and the PSU). I'm not saying you should do all of this but it may give you some ideas on how you can improve your case cooling.

The next step would be to get that hot air being blown out by your case out of your room since you don't have adequate cooling. It sounds like you have a good lead on that with the hole that's in your wall. Another option would be getting the air outside somehow through a window.

 

i have 2 hard drives im my computer, one is just for storage and i rarely use it. most things on it are essentially archives, theyre there just in case. does anyone know of a program or method to spin down the drive until a program tries to read from it? i dont mind waiting for it to spin up, because like i said, i never use it anyway. i tried using the device manager to disable it, thinking i would just re-enable it when i needed it, but it didnt sound like it spun down, and also said i would need to restart, which i dont want to do every time i use the drive. anyway, if you guys can think of anything let me know, i think it would really help cool off my room, these drives get really hot.

 

Have a look in windows power options - there should be a setting for turning off unused drives after a certain period of time.

 

Any extra cooling you put on your computer is only gonna make the room hotter it just removes the heat from the comp and dumps it in the room.

For $30 I would buy the most powerful shower extractor fan you can afford,you will need to make a hole in the wall and plug it into the mains but much easier that tryna rig something up with 12v computer fans.

I don't have any links to US prices.

http://www.plumbworld.co.uk/bathroom-and-shower-17-0000

 

the power management options turn off all hard drives and only after being idle for a certain time, not unused, but thanks anyway.