Man, it's hot!

Yeah I know, I'm pretty much stating the obvious here. However, heat is currently a big deal in computers. The faster and more complex that our machines get, the more heat they put out, or at least attempt to.

Getting the heat out is the most important part of a chassis design, however the major manufacturers have apparently forgotten that golden rule.

I was working with a particular design from the most major manufacturer out there, and was utterly shocked by what I found. This particular machine has a serious airflow issue, and we can thank the new BTX format for that. This revolutionary design that the big guys have taken to recently makes for a very quiet machine, that's true. They can use just one fan to effectively cool the processor, and supposedly all the other components inside.

The problem was that under heavy I/O operation, like installing a large program, this design really doesn't do very well. See, the one big fan blows air over the processor first and foremost. While that's all great for the processor, it's not too great for everything else inside, as the air that's supposed to be cooling components is now very hot. The old design, ATX, had the air move over everything else first, and then get to the CPU and out the case.

So in this particular instance, I was installing Peachtree Accounting 2007 on this brand-new machine and it could never make it through the install. Not only would it spontaneously reboot, it wouldn't run at all for about 3-5 minutes afterwards, because the chipset was just too hot.

The funny thing is that I experienced this exact same problem in a machine I recently built and had to install a side fan just to keep the thing running. However, since I do massive testing on each and every machine in near-85 degree conditions, I located the issue and fixed it before the machine left the bench.

I wonder how the poor call center person I have to call to fix the other one will react...