Yeah, I’ve been saying we should make crypto mining space heaters. I don’t think there’s much of a market for it, but it’s an interesting thought. Worst case, it would be an amazing gag gift.
Or, if you believe all crypto is immoral (arguably fair), then make a space heater that runs something like folding at home.
And just like that, Intel is the best in the game again /s
Sadly, for a few years now I’ve had TDP as one of the main criteria when buying parts for my machines, so there really isn’t enough waste heat from my machines to even just keep a room warm in Winter by playing heavy 3D games (the worst machine tops at around 180W with 3D and CPU heavy games - so basically the same heating as a really bright incandescent light bulb - whilst my home server uses about 20W at 100%)
On the other hand what I save in power consumption on my machines can be used on a dedicated heating solution that’s ON only when I need it rather than the whole year.
whilst my home server uses about 20W at 100%)
I’d love it if my equipment used so little, but I’d rather just pay a higher electric bill and be able to spin up whatever VM, container or DB I need for a project whenever I want without having to worry about resource usage
It’s really down to fitting the machine to one’s Requirements, present and forecasted ones.
So my home server is just a N100 Mini PC because it’s just a TV Media Box on my living room that doubles as home NAS and Torrent server with a dedicated VPN connection, for which an N100 with not especially large or fast memory and a decent-sized SSD, is more than powerful enough since the CPU heavy stuff - video decoding - is done in dedicated silicon inside the N100 so doesn’t really run on the CPU cores, whilst the other functionality is mainly bottlenecked by network speeds and my network is just Gigabit Ethernet.
If I expected heavier CPU loads I would have gone with a different CPU (plus associated elements such as motherboard and memory) whilst if I wanted to run the heavier AI stuff (such as image generation) it would’ve been a Desktop PC with a dedicated Graphics Card with lots of video memory.
As it is, my games PC doubles as Image generation machine and also works fine if I want play with VMs or Databases since that’s running Linux and is a lot more powerful in almost every way (curiously, not disk speed since it’s a bit old with upgraded parts, so it’s still using SATA and does not support M.2 disks on PCIe) than that Mini PC.
A machine on my living room is supposed to be quiet (so, no loud fans, hence low power consumption), so I was hardly going to over-dimension that living room TV Box / Server just to once in a while I could play with heavy stuff in it, given that I already have a different and much more powerful Linux machine at home that I can use for that, hence why I partitioned my needs this way and can have an always ON server that just tops at 20W (though generally it uses less than half that power).
PS: Also keep in mind that merely running a database isn’t by itself any kind of heavy load (even for heavy stuff like Oracle, much less mySQL or PostgresSQL), it’s what uses it that dictates the load, so even running a DB there is not an issue unless I’m doing tons of massive non-indexed queries against it (or huge dataset indexed ones, since non-indexed ones on huge datasets end up disk bound unless you have insane amounts of memory) or a similar pattern of usage.
My home server was serving a dual purpose of keeping my closet full of 3d printer filament dry, but then the most recent TrueNAS Scale updates killed it by dropping my average CPU load from 10 to 4%.
Relevant xkcd:
ALWAYS. A. RELEVANT. XKCD.
Just open a few Chrome tabs. That’ll ramp the resource usage back up again.
He didn’t say he wanted to make another sun
Does ram really have that much thermal load/power draw? I don’t even account for it when I’m picking a power supply.
Just start a scan with a second anti-virus, they’ll fight it out and warm up your house quite nicely.
Or double dip and mine crypto when it’s cold out.
Even for a large amount of RAM that you’d find in a big server, it’s a few dozen watts at most. Here’s some charts showing the jump from DDR3 to DDR4 on a 16GB stick:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ddr3l-vs-ddr4-power-consumption.2012014/
DDR5 dropped the voltage from 1.2V to 1.1V compared to DDR4, which tends to make it even more power efficient. Not quite as dramatic as DDR3 to 4, but in any case, it’s better still.
Those bastards.
I saw an interesting post that said
All electronics are 100% efficient in the winter
Now that we have reverse cycle AC (heat pumps), 100% is a low bar.
Love my heat pump, although its not AC. In the UK if you get ground/air to water the government give you £7.5k towards it. Air to air you get nothing. I suppose it is quieter, but for the 2/3 days in summer where it goes over 30°c having AC would be nice.
I’ve heard tell of mystery tech to make the water heat pumps make cold. I’m sure I’ll be more tempted to investigate further when summer comes.
I live in the UK, its always humid. You will end up with a condensation radiator.
Yeah, that’s the issue to be solved. Apparently there is some sort of contraption that includes fans to prevent the condensation, but whenever I asked the heat pump people they just shook their heads despndently and told me to let it go.
Hey, all my pipes are outside the walls. Maybe I can just build some sort of acrylic enclosure and put fish in there or something.
If you want a janky setup for it I have one for you and its probably slightly better than the fish tank condensation collector. Turn your heating to full power, then connect the heat pump to a tube that takes the cool air and directs it to you.
Optional: Watercool your sofa by putting a few PC rads next to the heat pump and they pump water round a hose pipe on your sofa. Turn off the radiator in the room you want cooling in.
I have been kinda thinking of the hosepipe watercooled sofa idea myself though without using the heat pump for it, just a bucket of water and a pump, put some ice cubes into the bucket. Or freeze a 2L bottle and put that in. Avoid thermoelectric, its inefficient. Passive cooling or perhaps make use of cooler underground temperature are also interesting thoughts. But in reality I doubt I will end up doing something like it and it just remains in the idea phase.
Hah. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. The outside unit is right besides the window to my home office and I could get some nice overclocking going with a tube and some tape by just opening the hot water.
I know, but I didn’t wanna pollute my comment with a bunch of pedantry, despite my name. Also people living in apartments often don’t have access to heat pumps.
People used to mine Bitcointhis was. Only in winter.
Back in high school, my buddy used to VNC into his Athlon 3200+ WinXP machine from school and start SuperPi calculating a million digits. Took 40minutes and got his room proper toasty by time he got home.
Is there any way to store surplus waste heat for redistribution months later? The only thing I can think of is just a really large, high heat capacity mass surrounded by incredible insulation material, with a heat pump system built in to it. Which would be incredibly impractical.
Look into geothermal heat pumps. During the summer they pump heat from your house underground, and during the winter they pump it back in.
But the energy doesn’t really stay there. The thermal mass and temperature of the ground just means that you can always efficiently take heat from it or effectively dump heat into it. Always predictably the same efficiency.
If the heat was actually stored, the start of summer and winner the pump would be super efficient, but by the end it’d be inefficient working hard to move the heat. So it seems kinda wasteful that the energy isn’t being stored, but it’s actually kinda better that it isn’t.You just described a water heater.
One that would potentially store heat at super dangerous pressures of steam granted.
I have actually gotten up to run benchmarks on my PC on particularly cold nights.
Been done years ago and failed miserably: Nerdalize
Maybe a failure at a commercial level, but
peopletech nerds are still heating their homes in the winter with crypto miners
My server rack (in the cold garage) is now enclosed and the air filtered and piped into my grow tent which then regulates with cold air from the garage.
That’s the dream right there.
my grow tent
One of these days I also need to get around to starting my grow operation myself lol
I was given some white widow clones and unfortunately could only keep them outdoors most of the time. Meant some generally early harvesting. I’m ready this year lol
I’m just kinda hunkering down with carts and waiting for MN to get dispensaries cause I’m lazy.
For the heat and electricity, it’s stunning how much compute I get from my somewhat modern gear vs. my 40U rack of 10-years ago.
My server only draws like 300watts max, not a very good heater
Put a 4090 in there and pump those numbers up!
My homelab is in the same space as my furnace so the ambient heat in that space is preheating my ducts. In the summer when the AC runs the cold air leaking into the space helps cool my homelab. In my garage office my desktop with 9 spinning drives and 3070 really keeps the space comfortable.
Gaming PCs are about to top out at 1500W, which is a very solid space heater. Honestly, it complements a heat pump just fine. If you can set up a fan pushing air out of your gaming den and/or home server room you’re at least starting to justify your stupidly wasteful setup.
I have to be honest, all the PC master race bros are deep into the awkward monkey puppet meme hoping all the AI haters don’t realize they’re using hardware that can easily run very competent genAI at competitive speeds to play CounterStrike. If you want to make and post that one you have my blessing.
That’s why I like my mini PC with a laptop GPU. Its not the most powerful, but it can play most stuff at 1080p Very High settings and get 60 FPS all while using 300ish watts. Good enough for me. I really don’t want to deal with noise, size and power consumption of a kitted out gaming rig anymore.
This conversation is two steps away from rediscovering the concept of consoles and I’m here for it.
You haven’t heard my PS4 take off like a jet liner on any menu screen.
Hey, it was still a 150W machine.
It was just devoting 100 of those watts to attempting liftoff.
Do you expect me to teabag you in 1080p at 120 Hz like some medieval peasant? My nutsack textures require at least 4K at 240 Hz or else you can’t make out the individual hairs as they brush your nose.
my gaming PC literally is a primary heat source in my cold office.
