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Has anyone ever thought or tried to put their GPU mining rig in a fridge or freezer?

Obviously for purpose of max overclocking the cards

Same idea as using AC to cool your rig room. You would need quite a freezer and your electricity costs for cooling would be high. It takes a heat load of 3517 Watts 24 hours to melt a ton of ice i.e. if you would like to keep the air around your 3517W rig at 0 degrees Celsius.

I'd be worried about wicked high electric costs, as well.

Plus, I think I remember someone asking a similar question a while back. They said the best bet was a chest freezer, where the cold air would sink and not escape as easily (cuz you won't be able to shut the door completely running your cables/wires into the fridge). Also, they mentioned condensation being a potential issue.

In general, I don't think it's a good idea. Just crank those ACs if you're that worried.

Hmmm, Thats a thought, Because I'm in a "colder" country I don't have AC, So when I GPU mine it actually offsets my heating bill, But when someone in a hot climate GPU mines it costs them more in cooling, But I never thought about the freezer as crazyates said, The condensation is just too dangerous.

thanks guys for serious commentary

about condensation: You could drill holes and seal them for the wiring, then fill the chest freezer with dry air or put in a few desiccant bags to have a humidity below the condensation point in there. But as you concluded yourself, the extra power costs makes it pointless. I have experimented with water cooling my GPU cores, and if they got below 35 degrees Celsius they hung after a few hours, so extreme cooling / overclocking might not be doable. Do anyone here know of anybody trying liquid Nitrogen on a graphics card?

I think even a modest mining rig with a power of 500W would kill the compressor in the freezer pretty quick. The freezer would need to have the compressor running continiously, and they aren't made for that. It'd probably overheat and die in a week or so.

well 95F wow, odd

I know it sounds strange that the gpu's can get too cold. In my case it could be that the thermal contact between cooling heads and  VRM's are bad at low temperatures because of thermal contraction. I don't measure VRM temperatures and I didn't investigate further. But others have reported the same thing.

I watch a lot of Breaking Bad and Gustavo Fring uses these refrigerated trucks to distribute methamphetamine around the southwest United States while submerged in buckets of ingredients for the restaurants which he uses as a front for his drug operation. Imagine getting one of these refrigerated trucks and setting up racks and racks of cards/systems within the refrigerated box portion of the truck.

I realize that running the truck 24/7 may be costly in terms of fuel, but I've heard that..... there's this car.... it runs on water, man!

EDIT: Now that I think about it, as the result of a recent face off, Gustavo Fring is currently no longer using these refrigerated trucks, so acquiring said vehicles may be a viable option after all!

The compressors used in refrigerators will run perfectly fine at 100% duty cycle. However, the condenser, where all the reject heat is dumped, is sometimes embedded in the insulation layer around the refrigerator and is only capable of absorbing so much heat during a cycle. The fridge then radiates the heat away during the off cycle. Replace the condenser with a forced air finned variety and 100% uptime on the fridge is possible.

source: refrigeration is hobby of mine.

You may want to use some of these Peltier units :

http://www.conrad-uk.com/ce/en/product/182620/HighTech-Peltier-element-QuickCool-Max-heating-power-270-W

You gotta remember, colder is not better. IIRC, the optimal ambient temp/humidity even in a data center is 68F/45%. Run those AC's at 68F, and you're good.

A refrigerator only pulls the energy (heat) from the inside, and drags less energy into the inside. The hotter it is outside a fridge, it will get hotter inside the fridge.

A cold compressed solution going into fridge, cools stuff, heads to the back of the fridge, decompresses, and get cooled off with a fan in the back. Then it gets recompressed, making it cold, and pumped back into the fridge.

When my room was hitting 90'F in the summer, I had all of my windows open and fans blowing directly into my rigs. They never went above 80'C

and what temp inside ur fridge was it?

My best idea would be to have a water cooled rig and have the reservoir in the fridge/freezer (obviously use anti-freeze if using a freezer). This would dramatically drop temps without killing the fridge/freezer. This would eliminate most of the condensation problems.

sounds like a great idea

That is interesting.  I thought about putting my rig in a cooler, wine cabinet or something like that and what I could not get past is the condensation and or the risk of being to humid and then frying something.  I had an AC unit in a server rack but the cost to run it was too much.  The AC unit was killing the heat but it was also killing my profits so I killed it :).

If you do the water cooled rig with a reservoir in the fridge post some pics.   

Doesn't overclocking reduce overall rig lifetime tho? I'd think that attaining 10% greater hashes for 75% the lifetime may not be worth it..

Once you start overvolting, overclocking increases the power consumption more than the performance of the GPU, so it may not be to your advantage.

If your AC unit has a COP of 6 that means it takes up 6000W of cold and puts it outside per 1000W of electricity used. I think the added cost running the AC will not be made up by overclocking in most cases.

Not a great idea. The condensers on refrigerators are typically designed to reject the heat from a compressor that is working to cool food from room temperature to ~35-40F. Food does not continuously radiate heat like your reservoir would and would increase the duty cycle of the refrigerator. This will once again gradually overheat the system and destroy the compressor.

This is all not an issue if you are using a refrigerator like a walk-in refrigerator that is designed to handle large changes in load and/or run continuously.

Refrigerator compressors aren't designed to dissipate even 100W continuous. You'll blow out the compressor.

Burn that sucker up!  ASICs are coming out, lol.

Perhaps power the refrigerator with the waste heat of the miners?

how

This guy did (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut8mwo7vGBI).

A peltier junction, or simply the thermoelectric effect, works both ways - can drive a temperature differential with an applied voltage or generate a voltage from a temperature differential. Mining equipment is hot relative to ambient. You'd likely need a lot of miners or a very small refrigerator.

How? That's exactly the problem. That's the whole purpose of a power plant: to take heat from a reactor or fuel (coal) fire or other source and convert it in to mechanical energy.

Among other problems already noted...putting a rig in the freezer would not only heat up the freezer, but it's also subject to quite a bit of water and humidity...both of which don't quite get along with electronics.

If there was a cheap way to efficiently turn heat directly into power, they'd have implemented it by now.  The best system is like 3% efficient or something and it's generally about 10 years behind solar technology.

That is not true. Computers run better and better the colder they are. I have a competition PC with a tri-head cascade running -95c on the CPU and both GPUs. The only problem is condensation which starts at roughly 10c CORE temperatures at normal ambient. If the ambient and core temperatures have a low temperature delta, it can be as low as you want. You can easily fight condensation with proper hardware insulation (easily for ez
Experienced people though).

Although. That is very inneffective for mining. Any cooling assisted by a compressor (direct cooling, ac, water chilling) will be extremely inneficient energy wise once below high heat thresholds (is ambient over roughly 35c)

That's really great and all, but I mentioned data center ambient temps, not extreme OCing competition temps. Data centers have to run 24/7. There is no way we're going to be mining at -95C.

You might want to look at submerging the rig in a mineral oil bath and using a radiator to extract/transfer the heat to the outside or other purpose.

Actually if you dig a hole in the ground and go down a couple of feet it's like 50 degrees year-round (at least at my latitude).
Just stick the whole thing in a metal box and bury it with the cables coming out of the ground.  That's free!

No, that's a horrible idea... The soil would work as insulation. Everything would burn out within a few days. You would need air tunnels underground to pull the air out, cool it, and send it back. Simply burying a mining rig won't work.

its called geothermy, and its more than a couple feet. But other than that it is an extremely economical way to cool a PC (and a house obviously). But simply burrying something would be ineffective. You need to have a circulation over a great area so the process is usually done with something similar to a well. Although the running cost is extremely cheap, the initial cost for a geothermic setup is roughly 30k

I was merely targetting the "colder is not better" , because it seemed like you meant "PC's don't run better the colder they are". But I understand it could have meant "colder is not efficiently better as well". Which I also stated.

This wouldn't make much of a difference because you would still be dumping the majority of the heat into the fridge/freezer.

ooo,How about a chest with "dry ice"  ???

Condensation may still be a factor  ???

direct cooling with dry ice does need insulation. Boxing dry ice to create a low temps box would not, but would be extremely expensive to run 24/7. So does direct contact.

I mined in my basement and my cards were 62C with the fans at a very low level.  Tada :P btw if you seriously mined in the fridge, where would you get power from?  It's a sealed container.

This

I would think Peltier would be the only way to get sub-zero or very cold (Celsius) temps for long term & stable usage. Its was a pain(worth it tho :) ) to get proper insulation, power supply and temp management on my CPU using TEC. Trying to cool GPU's with phase-change, Refrigeration, or TEC would consume so many resources it seems pointless from a profitability standpoint at least. From a non-profitability standpoint having sub 0c temps is pretty awesome.

Move to the refrigerator.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904836104576560551005570810.html

I think anyone using an AC to run thier cards is a stupid fool and also one whom is killing the planet at uneccesary boosted speeds.
Just fucking underclock the cards when it's summer time, Dont turn your fucking AC on!

Stopped reading right there...

In my mining room the windows are open +1c outside keeps it cool............. The hottest GPU r 68c @full load

I close 1 window when there gets colder in winter

"Yes Masta..Right away, Masta..Ain't gonna be no bacon on the salad, Masta...no bacon..oh no no no. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hJFBLQ_CLs)"

That's all I could think about as you try to tell a bunch of people on the internet what to do...

yeah, go the pro-planet, eco green route and just stand by your GPUs and just blow on them every once in a while :P

mining in the refrigerator will make your GPU fan's freeze

>refrigerator
>freeze
I'll assume you meant freezer.

As long as there is no moisture, and not so far below that the oil in the fan bearing freezes, it should be fine.

what is the ideal depth for geothermal cooling? Has anyone tried setting up a rig in the sewers?

Yes, geothermal cooling the sanest suggestion in this thread. Bury a water loop or an air duct i.e. make a trench with a maze of bricks to draw air through.

Peltier-cooling! Did you sleep through physics class? Peltier has at best 5% efficiency worse than AC = increase your power usage 20 fold.

Wow i get that much hatred for telling people not to run an AC?
Just fucking wow, Open a damn window or turn a fan on.
I dug a trench in my lawn, Filled it with piping, and have geothermal cooling on my CRAPTACUTLAR $600 mining setup (piping cost included)

You dont need the damn AC on.