drvnbysound said:
WRT to heat... I've got (3) Mid-tower PCs that have run beside me for the past 12-18 months. I'm definitely aware of the heat that they can generate
Heh, I'm reminded of a situation from quite a while ago. I had a Sun 3 workstation at home. I was seated directly in front of it while getting it configured. The amount of heat it was putting out was quite comfy given the 100+ year old farm house I had at the time. So warm in fact that I didn't notice the furnace had crapped out until I got up and moved away from the beast. The rest of the house was pretty darned cold, the furnace must've been out for at least 5 hours, in the dead of winter. Thankfully it was just a matter of cleaning/resetting the igniter.
I think folks underestimate just how much power all this stuff consumes and how readily it converts that into heat. And that consumption at idle is
considerably less than when being actively used. Amps can start pumping out a
lot of heat when you crank up the volume. So playing an active game on a console with sound pushed out at a decent volume to the speakers, while the PC is doing something 'in the background' like downloading or transcoding videos, can
really push out a lot of heat.
Which might go unnoticed until one or more of the components in the closet starts acting flaky due to being overheated. And it's that intermittent flakiness that can get maddeningly difficult (and expensive) to have debugged. The problem 'goes away' for the technician coming to fix it because the home owner left the closet open to help, thus hiding the temperature problem.
One suggestion when you've got any kind of place that would benefit from temperature monitoring is get a thermometer that tracks both high and low temps. I've been using these in my refrigerators and on the boat:
http://www.amazon.com/ACU_RITE-Refrigerator-Wireless-Thermometer-00986/dp/B004QJVU78/
The nice part is the display receiver tracks both the highest and lowest temps it's detected. That way I can tell on the boat during winter if the cabin or engine room has ever dropped below 41F (the temp at which a heater should kick in). Or if the stand-up chest freezer has ever risen above the 2F setting (because of the door being left open).
I mention this because it's handy to use a device like this to monitor a new setup to learn just how warm it might actually be getting when everything is set up and closed up to look pretty.