As a new member I had to think of something important to ask to be qualified to post in other areas, and wanted to ask something useful that I've been having an issue with.... Heat.
Currently I'm running 2x r 280x cards in a computer case. The idea is/was buy the cards now, put them in my current case (replacing the nVidia card temporarily), and if things are going well after a month invest in a cheap motherboard, risers, psu, etc. I didn't want to invest the extra $$$ in the hardware if the difficulty keeps growing exponentially. I fear that the cost to continue mining will shortly be outweighed by the income (I am holding all coins in the hopes that value only increases over the next year).
I've been running these 2 cards now for a week, and have to throttle them which seems like a waste of money. They can easily get 700kh/s, but to avoid burning down my apartment building I leave them throttled to about 600kh/s. Even at these speeds the cards sit at around 83 Celsius with the side panel off, good airflow, and more fans than the case can even support directed at them.
So my question is; are there any recommendations to cheaply lower the temps more? I've thought about adding a desk fan to the configuration, or even using some extra dryer ducts going out the window but I don't trust the area I live in to leave the windows open when I'm not around.
Any tips, ideas, or unique solutions that are escaping me would be greatly appreciated!
As a side note the computer as is is heating my apartment quite nicely
![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
The thermostat is sitting at 60 Fahrenheit, but the room temperature is sitting at 71-73. Although today the outside temperature went up a lot (it's been below 30 degrees recently, and today and this weekend it's suppose to get up to the mid 60's) so I have a feeling I might be walking into a sauna when I get home.