Tech - Shuttle computer heat problem

Hello,

So I use a bunch of shuttle pc's inside electrical cabinets controlling stuff. Well I seem to going thru alot of them. And all I can think is it is due to heat problems. The cabinets have no air moving. So I would think it gets hotter and hotter in there all the time.

The cabinets have a 14" LCD in it. Have a flush mount keyboard in it. And the shuttle PC.

The shuttle's keep either blowing psu or bulging caps on the mobo. Right now I am looking at putting a pc in there that has more cooling fans but without having fans on the cabinet its self I believe it wont fix anything at all. So I am looking at putting 120mmx120mm filtered fan pulling air into it. And at the other side of the cabinet putting a filtered vent.

So what do you guys think? Is the heat the problem? Or are the shuttle pc's just not built that great?

Smackre,

 

Thermometers are cheap. It's all wild ass speculation until you put a number on it.

 

Not really the response I was looking for. I was looking for opinion on weather temp could make the computers failure premature.

 

Temps are highly destructive to normal electronics (non military grade) especially as they climb over about 125F. Once you confirm it's high temps causing the problems, how much are you willing to spend to eliminate the problem? I've never had one yet, but I love the idea and look of those liquid cooled PC's. For most apps, though, good airflow from a fan or two (per PC) is all you need.

 

I've had pcs with excess dust or poor air circulation to die before their usual EOL. PCs need to breathe, otherwise they are breathing in the same dust filled hot air, over and over again.

I think I remember a pc that was made to be fanless and for situations like yours. Let me see if I can get a link.

 

Sounds like the cabinets need ventilation. Blow caps usually come from one of two sources, heat and poor production quality. A couple fans added to the cabinets (one sucking in and one blowing out) would do wonders for the problem.

 

Gosh, there's a PC I haven't herd of in a while!! Well I think everyone has already given the consensus that its the heat. Just to add my lil bit, I built my own shuttle way way back in 2002? It came with a really cute little bag to carry it in. Anyhow I used to take my lil PC to friends LAN do's (yea yea I'm cool I know!) This one time I used it still half in its little bag - yip you've guessed it I cooked the mobo!! After that I upgraded mobo n processor (good old AMD athlon days) and went water cooled and over-clocked it. It ran for years n years after that no probs - I always took it out of its bag!

 

Thanks for the responses guys. Just wanted to make sure I was heading in the right direction.

 

Every 18 degrees above 70 will halve MTBF. If you have no thermal management, you're likely pushing your equipment to its limits. If you can snap a few pictures of the consoles and indicate where current equipment fans and vents are and give me the rated power consumption of your equipment in amps or watts, I can tell you where to put fans or vents and exactly how much airflow you need. If your total is under 500 watts, you likely don't need fans at all.

 

70c or 70f?

 

I will get you some pictures of the enclosure MSD.

 

Where dem astronuts at?!

 

In the meantime, I highly recommend this white paper by Middle Atlantic on thermal management. Since reading it, I have not built an equipment rack without referring to it, even if just for the tables and equations
http://middleatlantic.com/pdf/ThermalManagement.pdf

 

Thanks for that, MSD. I saved it for reference.

 

Sorry it took me awhile to get back on here. Been really business with repairs and other stuff at work.

Well I took some pictures of the setup. Right now there is no computer in the cabinet. As I have not ordered any new ones. I have one sitting outside the cabinet till I get a new one installed inside.

Here are the pictures.

In this picture is the side view of the computer cabinet. The computer sits in the top right side of the picture. It used to house a old CRT monitor but when that went bad I replaced it with a LCD so now I put the computer in there.


Next image is the back of it. Which has the cover not attached on it atm. Mainly because I got cabinets going thru the cover to attach the external computer to it.


And the last image is the front of it. Keyboard and LCD monitor.

 

CNC saw sharpening? Very cool. I did commercial casework for years.

Yeah, heat is definitely an issue, but knowing just how much is worth the small cost of a thermometer.

 

Oh yeah, those poor PC's are cooking themselves in that little space. What type of specs do you need to run the CnC program? I'm wondering if something like a Via based setup, or even an ARM setup could run what you need and do so a much cooler temps and less power draw too.

 

It runs off dos. I would think it does not need much of a computer to run.