ZzzombieBunny

I noticed my temps on my computer being extremely cold lately, I have my chassi out in the hallway and its pretty freezing there due to no heat on.

My core is around 20C and ive seen my motherboard chipset drop below 10C, the Power Supply is currently around 3C or below. The chassi is pretty freezing cold on touch, im kinda worried it might actually start collecting frost during the night. That cant be any good if moisture starts developing inside the chassi? Should I place filters on the input fan locations? Ive turned off pretty much all fans and the cpu fan is at lowest speed, its usually running around 40C, but it wont even come anywhere near that at full load. Would be overclocking paradise if I didnt have my vcore stuck at 1.45 in bios...

Geminiwave

what have you done to make it so cold? did you put a compressor in there???

or is this just the normal temp around there. If so, thats pretty cold. I wouldn't worry TOO much about condensation until you start hitting sub zero temps but you might consider warming your room up alittle.

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Lowfat

electronics besides ones with moving parts (i.e. hard drives) work better the colder they are. your hard drive sshould provide enough heat for themselfs to remain in good temperature. Condensation will not form as your ambient temperature is low. Even if your room temperature is below zero, you wouldn't have to worry about it. Condensation is only a problem is part of the computer has a lower temperature than ambient temperature.

ZzzombieBunny

I got the chassi outside my room, just near the frontdoor to the house. Got the mouse, keyboard etc hooked up with extensioncables. Its pretty effective cause when I need performance I can overclock without having to worry about the sound and temperatures, except during summer. Its pretty cold here during the winter and especially in the hallway cause I got the heat turned off there.

The HDD's seem to have the biggest heat production, with temperatures around 30-36C. As long as its under 45C I should be ok right?

Been having random reboots and lockups lately and couldnt figure out what was causing it.

H3X4D3C1M4L

... that's cold.... you'd have to start worrying about condensation even during a duty cycle, what with the temperature changes.

You think thats cold? That's room temperature right now for me If I stuck my PC outside in the middle of January it'd die from cold pretty fast.

ZzzombieBunny

Jesus where do you live, Siberia?

Think I managed to figure out whats causing my computer to freeze/reboot.WMI Performance Adapter having it turned off seem to cause a lot of instability for some reason. I dont even know what the hell the service does, didnt even have it available on my last clean install of windows.

I also seem to have a lot of "LoadPerf" errors in my logg, events 3011 and 3012. They seem to be logged around the time the freezes and reboots happen.

H3X4D3C1M4L

Canada

Have you tried turning that service back on to see if it stops your crashing? If you're disabling alot of stuff that may be the cause of some instability. I noticed that turning off a load of services at once usually causes at least 1 minor inconvenient issue for me. But if I go 2 or 3 at a time I can usually isolate which ones are the trouble makers.

ZzzombieBunny

Cant quite tell if its a service issue or the PSU failing (or both?). I looked around and my PSU operatinal temperatures are 5-50C, im currently anywhere between 0-10C on the PSU depending on the time of the day/night and weather.

Im overclocking of course, which can effect stability, however my computer ran Prime for over 20 hours without any problems and I cant seem to recreate the lockups/reboots. They just come randomly out of nowhere. I was fine for 3 days now and then suddenly while browsing and doing nothing in particular the computer just rebooted. Perhaps I should upgrade the PSU, probably need to once I get a next gen graphic card anyway. Any recommendations on brands and W? 600+ id guess?

Neshi

OCZ, Antec are good brands.. there are other good brands aswell -> somebody else support?

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H3X4D3C1M4L

At that temp the PSU should easily produce its maximum rated wattage all the same

Lowfat

it sure wouldn't die. Good CPUs will take -150C no problem. Condensation is only going to form if the CPU is colder than the ambient temperature. I benchmark in -20C quite often with no problems. I just wrap my hard drive in a towel.

H3X4D3C1M4L

Yeah but even still it gets cold enough out down by the great lakes AND theres enough humidity still in the air to cause major problems with hard drive platters. I've had it happen to me tooooo many times.

Plus MOSFETs change temperature so fast with load/idle CPU cycles that it may cause some condensation.

The CPU itself is the least of the worries its the parts around it and the air humidity.

ZzzombieBunny

My PSU had its all time lowest temperature last night, a staggering -17C... the fan actually blew out cold air. I put some benchmarks on to keep the computer busy and wrapped some towels around the chassi and managed to get the temp to around -5C. The chassi is right in the path of a cold draft from the outerdoor so the air passes through the chassi, even when all intake fans are off. Its a pretty big chassi and the PSU is pretty much left alone and has no warm air from the other components.

H3X4D3C1M4L

I think if you read your manual for the PSU (if it has one) it gives a reccomended operating temperature range, and operating outside of it isn't guaranteed to be 100% reliable.

Of couse that's never stopped me

ZzzombieBunny

Gonna look into buying a new PSU, think my 350W is kinda pushing my limits, especially when overclocking. Although its been stable for the last year. On a tight budget so think ill go for a 500W or 550W. Seems like the W branding on PSU's is kinda misleading considering most of that woltage is going towards 3.3V and 5V, while its the 12V that most my hardware requires.

H3X4D3C1M4L

Thats 99% of the time the problem with those cheaper or older PSUs. Most hardware these days is all +12V