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how cold can a pc get?

silvermert
By silvermert
in Cooling
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I'm fairly new to the whole PC building deal and I recently learned how to monitor temperatures. I live in a latin-American country (really hot), my case is a 780t with 2 frontal intake fans and one exhaust fan (all 140) and I tested at idle and while gaming during 11am to 2pm for a whole week. my average is 29c at idle and 54c while gaming. but theoretically, if I were to use water cooling and add more fans it would be cooler right? so my question is: how cold can it get? 20c? 10c? and is there a point where the computer would start failing because it's too cold?

also, what are your temps? just curious.

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You can not get below the ambient temperature of the air, without external effects such as a water chiller. So if your room is 20C the computer can never below that without some offer effect but water cooling will have lower temps due to it being better at transferring heat it is still limited by the above.

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Depends how cold your freezer is...

 

Kidding aside -

 

There's an operating temperature for each component on a computer. All these vary differently. I don't see how you would want to know how cold can a PC get if achieving such a feat is pointless if it was actually possible.

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4 minutes ago, silvermert said:

I'm fairly new to the whole PC building deal and I recently learned how to monitor temperatures. I live in a latin-American country (really hot), my case is a 780t with 2 frontal intake fans and one exhaust fan (all 140) and I tested at idle and while gaming during 11am to 2pm for a whole week. my average is 29c at idle and 54c while gaming. but theoretically, if I were to use water cooling and add more fans it would be cooler right? so my question is: how cold can it get? 20c? 10c? and is there a point where the computer would start failing because it's too cold?

also, what are your temps? just curious.

Get a bunch of air conditioners and it'll drop your temperatures.

 

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With standard water or air cooling , it is physically impossible to reach lower temperatures than ambient. to do so , you need : chilled water , dry ice , phase change , TEC or ln2 or liquid helium, which isn't practical for an everyday setup and is only used for overclocking records.

 

Theoretically , since a compute has no moving parts , there is no limit on how cold a pc can get ( except for the hdd and optical drive which have defined operating temperatures)

 

My temps are 30 at idle and 55 during full load , with about 45 during gaming 

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1 hour ago, silvermert said:

I'm fairly new to the whole PC building deal and I recently learned how to monitor temperatures. I live in a latin-American country (really hot), my case is a 780t with 2 frontal intake fans and one exhaust fan (all 140) and I tested at idle and while gaming during 11am to 2pm for a whole week. my average is 29c at idle and 54c while gaming. but theoretically, if I were to use water cooling and add more fans it would be cooler right? so my question is: how cold can it get? 20c? 10c? and is there a point where the computer would start failing because it's too cold?

also, what are your temps? just curious.

Without using some kind of refrigeration system the laws of thermodynamics prevent the computer from ever going below room temperature.  Due to inefficiencies, you'll never ACTUALLY reach room temperature either. ...unless you turn it off.

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As the temperature of a semiconductor decreases, it's resistance increases and vice versa. So there is a point, and I don't know that point, where a semiconductor will not work because it's too cold.

I have a blog! And a list of guides I've posted

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2 hours ago, silvermert said:

 and is there a point where the computer would start failing because it's too cold?

The answer to this question is "yes"

All technology will breakdown when you hit low enough temps.  What temp that is varies from tech to tech.

 

Modern CPUs can actually function at sub freezing temps, but i dont know what their limit is.

 

You can use some sort of refrigeration method to achieve temps below room temperature.  However you increase the risk of condensation getting to the CPU which will fry it.  

 

 

I suggest watching this video if you haven't already. Linus goes into a lot of detail about some of this stuff. 

 

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As cold as you want to make it.

Whether or not still works below a certain temperature well... and whether or not you want it to continue to work of course...

 

 

 

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