Ceramic/Stone tile under PC tower viability for cooling

[somenoob]

Hi all,

 

Wondering if placing a ceramic or stone tile under my PC town will help with heat absorption. If you have tried it which one worked for you ceramic or stone? 

Thanks in advance.

[bleedblue]

PC town?

 

Even if you have intake fans at the bottom of the case, I doubt there'll be any real difference in temps.

[suchamoneypit]

Its affect on heat absorption will be pretty much zero. For the tile to get warm, the heat has to leave the system anyway. If it worked, the only thing you'd accomplished would be putting a large heat sink that soaks heat and is in contact with your case. The effects would be negative if anything.

 

I do have friends who have their PC in a room with carpet so they will put it on a tile so its off the carpet and takes in less dust. That makes sense.

[emosun]

you want dissipation not absorption

[somenoob]

Thanks for the no sense replies! I live in Australia where the ambient temperature gets above 30-40 degrees. Wanted to see if a tile would absorb the heat in the room to prevent it from effecting the tower. I think I might have not made that clear. 

[dizmo]

If you're on tile instead of carpet it'll help. My PC is just sitting on a large marble tile. Rest of the room is carpet.

You need to quote or tag people for them to know you've replied to them

Welcome to the forum!

[bleedblue]

11 minutes ago, somenoob said:

Thanks for the no sense replies! I live in Australia where the ambient temperature gets above 30-40 degrees. Wanted to see if a tile would absorb the heat in the room to prevent it from effecting the tower. I think I might have not made that clear. 

Turn on the AC.

[somenoob]

22 minutes ago, dizmo said:

If you're on tile instead of carpet it'll help. My PC is just sitting on a large marble tile. Rest of the room is carpet.

You need to quote or tag people for them to know you've replied to them

Welcome to the forum!

Thanks man. Do you see any noticeable difference with or without the tile? I have the same issue carpets in room.

[somenoob]

15 minutes ago, bleedblue said:

Turn on the AC.

Yeah good point. 

[somenoob]

4 hours ago, suchamoneypit said:

Its affect on heat absorption will be pretty much zero. For the tile to get warm, the heat has to leave the system anyway. If it worked, the only thing you'd accomplished would be putting a large heat sink that soaks heat and is in contact with your case. The effects would be negative if anything.

 

I do have friends who have their PC in a room with carpet so they will put it on a tile so its off the carpet and takes in less dust. That makes sense.

Thanks for the no nonsense replies! I live in Australia where the ambient temperature gets above 30-40 degrees. Wanted to see if a tile would absorb the heat in the room to prevent it from effecting the tower. I think I might have not made that clear. 

[suchamoneypit]

2 minutes ago, somenoob said:

Thanks for the no sense replies! I live in Australia where the ambient temperature gets above 30-40 degrees. Wanted to see if a tile would absorb the heat in the room to prevent it from effecting the tower. I think I might have not made that clear. 

The thermal mass of a tile is not anywhere near enough to make a difference on an entire room, nor does it have any way of conducting heat effectively from the entire room. Even it it could, it would be heat saturated extremely quickly and serve no purpose. Even if you cooled the tile to below freezing and put it under your PC, it would have practically zero effect on the computer.

[somenoob]

15 minutes ago, suchamoneypit said:

The thermal mass of a tile is not anywhere near enough to make a difference on an entire room, nor does it have any way of conducting heat effectively from the entire room. Even it it could, it would be heat saturated extremely quickly and serve no purpose. Even if you cooled the tile to below freezing and put it under your PC, it would have practically zero effect on the computer.

Thank you! You saved me some money!

[Neo-revo]

46 minutes ago, somenoob said:

You saved me some money!

benefits of putting it on the tile could easily be achieved by a plank/coffee table or any hard flat surface. unless you have some gross office like carpet, the weight of the computer with sink down into the foam layer and carpet possibly choking intake from the bottom and allowing easier access to carpet level dust.  if say the 'foot print of your computer is 10"x24" you could get a 12X26 plywood to help with this,  but unless you significantly raise it off the ground 6-10" you still expose it to the carpet dust. the key is the clean filters regularly. and or make sure to avoid things using the upside down mount of a psu to suck air in from the bottom/things of this nature, all dependant on case design and over all carpet'y nature of the carpet and how 'long' its strands are. 

[somenoob]

4 hours ago, somenoob said:

Thanks for the no nonsense replies! I live in Australia where the ambient temperature gets above 30-40 degrees. Wanted to see if a tile would absorb the heat in the room to prevent it from effecting the tower. I think I might have not made that clear. 

 

[somenoob]

I wrote ‘thanks for the no sense replies’ I meant ‘no nonsense replies. My apologies if I sounded like an ungrateful asshole. 

[TechyBen]

A tile does not "cool" the PC. A carpet does not "warm" the PC. What they do is block heat, or conduct heat.

If your PC is in a 30-40 degree room, you cannot remove the heat *in* the room, you have to move it *out* of the room.

So, a carpet may act like a blanket and stop the heat exiting the PC, a tile may be smooth and conductive and the air or heat leaves the PC easily. The tile will conduct a tiny bit of energy/heat through it, but it would go into the ground or air around the PC

 

If the air around the PC is 30 to 40 degrees, then you can only match that temperature (slightly above actually).

 

You would need to send the hot air out the room, or use a heat exchanger like AC (air conditioning). This works by using gases to compress/decompress and when it does it gets one side hotter than the room (so 50-60 degrees) and one side cooler (so 20 or 25 degrees). You send the extra hot air out, and the extra cool air in. However, no one runs a whole PC air conditioner because it's soooooo expensive that way. Well, Computer Servers do have these, so Steam/Amazon/Microsoft etc have AC cooled warehouses.

 

A "tile" or metal "feels" cold to us humans, because of how our senses work. Those things just move the heat from our warm hands (like 32 degrees or so, so we are usually quite warm) and a warm tile/metal can feel cooler than a cool bit of wool/fabric/fluff because those items don't move heat away from us. But if you put a thermometer on tiles, metal, wool, carpet... they would all be the same temperature.

 

TLDR Video explains it all!!! :

 

 

[PineyCreek]

The tile won't conduct heat all that well away from the computer if you're talking of placing the flat bottom of the computer against the tile.  If you're doing this to maybe reduce fans, I'd say this isn't right approach...you'd want to go with liquid cooling or oil cooling maybe, or a low power build with heatsinks.

 

The plus to putting tile under the computer could be if you have carpet where you would otherwise set the case.  A hard surface for the usual rubber/plastic case feet to sit on would make sure no lower vents were blocked.

[Usagi]

Adding to this stale topic, as I #1 wondered if I could use the cold stone floor as a heatsink because I #2 also live in Australia, I did some further digging, so sharing.

 

It's down to something called "thermal conductivity", or how well heat is transferred through something - we- assuming here that the floor can soak up all the heat you throw at it.

 

Aluminium is WAY up there in the 200's of watts per m-squared per unit time - in other words, it conducts heat well. Why we make heatsinks of it.

Iron and steel are down in the 70's, as comparison.

Stone? That's WAY down at 2 or 3. So, even if you DID shunt heat down to the floor using some special aluminium wrapping, the floor wouldn't take it away fast enough (unless you have tiny amounts, and PCs typically consume 100's of watts of power which comes out as heat).

The air is in contact with the floor anyway, so if you warm the air, heat will be lost through the floor without doing anything.

Carpet is even WORSE than stone (why we put it on floors, it stops heat leaking away), so there IS something you could do to cool things down.

 

So if you want to keep your computer room cool, use stone floors, not carpet, and use air con to shunt heat outside if it becomes an issue.

Which every Australian knows anyway!

(FINALLY my high-school physics has come in useful. Thank you. Mr Bramwell!)