Lower your heating bill... with GAMING

oh wow you idiot you bought a one of these for one of these and i bet you're enjoying your pc doubling as your room [Laughter] heater that's been a running joke for over 15 years now so we figured then why not purpose build a system that is specifically designed from the get-go to warm your room could this actually be practical and how would it compare to a purpose-built space heater stay tuned to find out after i tell you about our sponsor noble chairs their icon series real leather edition gaming chair was designed in germany and inspired by luxury sports car interiors learn more at the link below let's start with some college dropout level physics according to the first law of thermodynamics energy can either be created nor destroyed it can only be changed from one form into another which means that other than the small amount of kinetic energy to turn like your fans and the light energy to run your dope ass rgb all of the power being consumed by your gaming rig right now is being dumped into the room as waste heat making every pc basically a sophisticated space heater all right so this is our space heater pc it's got an amd thread ripper processor it's got a gtx 1080 it's got a fanless power supply so you know we're not generating any more kinetic energy than we absolutely have to and the whole thing has been tuned to match the power consumption of this guy right here one of the key aspects of the design of the system was using ek's phoenix mlc water cooling kit so it's a modular liquid cooler that allows us to quickly connect or disconnect any components we want so we can either use an internal radiator for testing purposes or unplug the whole thing here to connect it to our external cooler this is bertha she's a little rough around the edges but with this plan we think we can use an old radiant heater which would traditionally be hooked up to a gas firing something to cool our pc and heat our room so first order of business whenever you find a radiator behind like a jamaican guy's house is cleaning now cleaning something like this is not as straightforward as you know throwing some water in it shaking it around calling it a day we filled the radiator up with water and vinegar let it sit for 24 hours and drained it the contents were the worst after the initial flush we filled the radiator up with tap water and let it run upside down for a while messing up ivan's ltt adidas in the process oh no my shoes uh-oh after half an hour of running water at tap pressure through it it started to look clean now in order to mate the radiator's original piping to our water cooling hoses we needed to thread the stock pipe unfortunately the die bit so hard on reverse that the tube disconnected from the adjacent elbow and when we tried to vise the tube without the elbow it ovalized luckily we had compatible sections from another project sitting around so we teflon tape the threads and here's the result after rigging the radiator up with an industrial pump in a reservoir we were ready to fill it up ivan was so upset that i got his adidas wet that you can clearly see him trying to electrocute me here completely okay we have to turn off the water ivan there's so much water we're going to kill the pump the good news is that he failed better luck next time chump the bad news is that with the liquid pumping at an industrial pump pressure oh it's so dirty not only did it become brownish again but we also detected a minor leak it is a pretty substantial leak that like that will affect no that won't work you need teflon tape just tightening it more will not work after going gordon freeman on the joint with a crowbar we were able to disconnect it and teflon tape it adding a t-line drain in the process you know just in case good thing too it ended up taking four fills and flushes before the water stayed clear now as those of you who watched our full room water cooling project know mixing metals in a loop essentially creates a battery causing corrosion this can be mitigated by adding sacrificial anodes to the loop but due to our testing being very short term we omitted this step while we were doing all that we had our space heater running inside the room that we call the sanity closet so in here and we didn't want anybody opening this door because that would let the stank out so to speak so in here this is a five cubic meter room approximately accounting for the the boxes kind of taking up some of it we've got a wirelessly monitorable temperature sensor here and then we had our 350 watt heater running here so the sanity closet started at 23.7 degrees celsius which is our office temperature and then what we've done is we have configured our test to stop at 36.7 degrees which is the temperature of the human body you wouldn't really want your room any warmer than that would start to feel like a sauna so if our pc heats up this room from the same temperature to the same temperature in the same amount of time then we consider our experiment a success one last thing we needed some kind of opening at the back of the case to pipe the quick disconnect through finally we just needed to drag our beast into the closet hook her up to the radiator via the quick disconnects so all we've got to do is hook these babies up to these babies and uh let it bake for a bit finally time to check on this and see how we did with our pc so this is interesting our fps are is lower and even though it's water cooled our gpu is over it's over 85 degrees oh our power consumption is only about 275 280 watts our graphics card is thermal throttling okay let's have a look at what's going on in here whoa wow that is a heat wave and i think it's pretty clear what happened it looks like oh that's hot oh oh i think once our system heated up it made it easier for it to gather gunk that was still stuck on the inside of the radiator oh that's a real shame all right come on over here dennis come have a look oh so here's our gp yeah okay our gpu is totally gummed up what a shame so that affects the amount of heat that we were kicking out into the room actually we found a silver lining here so we didn't factor in that this high-powered pump consumes a lot of power it turns out that it's actually about 75 watts so our numbers should still be okay okay so after importing all the data it wasn't immediately obvious how it all came together and made sense because upon initial inspection they actually look like really different results between the space heater and the pc but what we didn't factor in initially looking at it is the immense thermal mass of the water inside the radiator so what's actually happening here is that water is taking a long time to begin to heat up enough that the radiator itself is able to start dissipating heat to the surrounding air so in effect all we need to do is time shift our graph a little bit and what you can see is that even though the pc it lags about two degrees behind the space heater they both heat the room at the same rate so conclusion time can you use your pc as a heater for your room the answer is yes but we don't recommend the way we did it because if you do it the way we did it you're gonna lag behind by two degrees and all gamers know that any amount of lag is unacceptable which obviously is totally not the problem like this this this gunk in the in the water that's that's the problem speaking of problems if you don't already have a vpn that's a problem go check out private internet access they support a variety of vpn protocols and types of encryption and authentication which allows you to dial in the exact level of privacy protection that you need they've got apps for windows mac os android ios linux and google chrome with support for other platforms coming soon you can connect up to five devices at the same time and their apps include dns leak protection and ipv6 leak protection with an internet kill switch that will block all traffic if the vpn becomes disconnected unexpectedly so check it out today at the link in the video description and if you've already got pia hey they've got gift cards so we'll have that linked below as well so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it you can hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured uh at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join sometimes we just do stuff you know it's like yep we did a thing but why

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 3,657,061

Keywords: pc, heating, room, space, heater, radiator, output, heat, energy, light, computer, gaming

Id: 1WLIm4XLPAE

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Wed May 09 2018