Heating My House With My PC

Aaron McKenna has an interesting op-ed piece in TG Daily. Or at least it started out that way before it developed into a piece about the Season of Sharing we're entering.

At any rate, it reminded me of an article I was featured in last year (San Francisco Chronicle), about how hot PCs have become and how hot, in particular, my office has become. Interestingly, I have no reason to heat my office, despite the fact that the rest of my house is rapidly sucking up natural gas. I keep a PC on most of the time, and it's not even a particularly fast one (1.7 GHz P4, 768 MB of RAM), yet the temperature in that room doesn't drop below 65 degrees even on a cold night. And I keep the heating vents shut in that office.

And when I turn on my gaming PC ... whew. Even on a cold day the temperature in that room can get to 75 or higher. All that heat is wasted efficiency. People talk about water cooling, but water cooling still has to vent the heat somewhere ... my office, of course. And that's not even an up-to-date PC. Sure, it has 2 GB of RAM, but it's 3 years old and still using AGP, P4, 3GHz. Pretty old stuff by now.

I'm wondering just how much of a blast furnace that office of mine will become when I update to something current. The thought makes me want to break out shorts in the dead of winter. I'm hoping the new CPUs by Intel and some of the newer AMD stuff might mean I won't have to, but ...

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