Humidity and Hardware

[radioactivewiz]

So... I'm not entirely sure if this is the right subforum for this. If it isn't I apologise.

My question isn't exactly about PC hardware per se but, rather, about how you can design a PC to deal with humidity.

 

I recently had my doctor say I need to change my flat to have a high humidity level.

This is difficult as I have a rather small flat. My room is about 4x4m.

I've read that humidifiers and standard PCs don't really work well together...

Does anyone have any alternatives I could attempt?

 

My first thought would be to change from standard air cooling to water cooling so I could cover the PC so no air gets in.

This seems like a bad idea to me, however, as if humid air does get in it'll be even more likely to condense on the cold water tubing, right?

 

Does anyone else have any ideas how to design a PC for a high humidity level?

[FMod]

Water cooling still requires airflow, because it only cools a couple components. It's also expensive and difficult to assemble for the GPU. And again you still have airflow.

 

What you should do is:

1) If your case has a lot of holes, buy one that doesn't. Fractal Define and Antec P-series are two, but generally all noise-suppressing cases are built that way.

2) Install filters. Good stuff, not just any. Most noise-suppressing cases come with filters already, beef them up by adding dust filtering fabric (as used for e.g. aircons). Filters only go on the intakes.

3) Create positive pressure airflow. I.e., all the case fans should blow into the case, not out. Can't help the GPU fan, but every case fan should blow in. After a filter.

 

This will keep dust and some of the moisture out of your PC. Dust+moisture is the real problem, forming dirt. Since the PC's interior is hotter than the apartment, this way it won't collect water while running.

 

Asrock motherboards have a built-in dehumidifier function, which partially powers the PC up every couple hours to get rid of the moisture. Alternately, you can just keep it running all the time, provided you set up the power saving options everywhere to keep it running "at idle". It only has to be running while you have high humidity, can turn both the humidifier and the PC off while away.