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How low is too low?

S

Silent Assasin

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 1, 2004
Messages
1,120
Too low as in tempetures.... I mean like, how low in *C can an A64 socket 754 actually run safely at? This last lan party I was at last night was held in the upstairs of a friends garage, and being in Wisconsin, it's starting to get down to about freezing at night. It got down to about 60*F in the room last night about 3AM. Me and another friend got hungry very late this morning and decided to go out to Taco Bell. Well I guess that I tended to brag about how much cooler my CPU is running then everyone elses.... So when I was gone the rest of the guys that stayed back decided it would be cool to see exactly how cold it could get so they opened the window and stuck my case in it. At about 3 or 4*C ambiant temps outside, when I got back, my x800Pro overclocked a little bit was running at 19*C That's 10*C lower then it has been running at on water. At first I thought it was pretty sweet that I could get the core down below room temp and so I started playing a bit of UT2k4 and then I started to notice it lagging a bit. It really was strange as to the lag I was getting. It started to make me think that it might be the temps, so I took it outa the window and turned my rad fans off to heat it up a bit. Sure enough the video lag was gone.... Would that low of a temp hurt my vid card or any other componenents in any way? And if so, how bad?
 
The only thing you need to watch out for is condensation...which will make the magic smoke appear from your components.
 
If your components are running warmer than the ambient air (ie 15*C component temperature with a 10*C ambient) you're fine. If you, for example, took the computer from that previous example (with it still generating heat) outside where it was 25*C, condensation would likely form quickly which means water on your hardware (you should be able to figure out what can happen from there ;)).

Many people have used peltiers, chilled water, phase change, etc. to achieve sub-ambient temperatures, and most of the people using these setups will insulate the cpu (or whatever component is being chilled/frozen) to prevent condensation.

In your case, as long as you let the computer heat up with the surrounding air, condensation probably wouldn't happen and you'd be fine. I don't know about your lag, if your x800pro had condensation on it I don't get why it would only lag instead of frying itself, then magically working again once it heated up.
 
Well, my worry wasn't about condensation, nor was it compensation, but I know that computers have a minimum working temp. I know that there's one of those little labels that you maybe glance at but then throw away when you get it about lowest working tempeture...
 
That may very well be the problem, to low of overall operating temp.............. :eek: The CPU can work well into the sub zero range as we all know, but there may be other components that don't pplay well at such low temps, like the ones with lubed moving parts (hard drives)............... :cool:
 
HDD and disc drives are the only things I can see that wouldn't like low temperatures. Considering there have been people who have used Liquid Nitrogen cooled submersion cooling (all the components at insanely low temperatures)
 
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