We keep our computer in an armoire.
We also keep our computer turned on most of the time.
Usually we don’t close the doors on the armoir, but my nieces & nephews were coming over last night (4-8) and I didn’t want them screwing around with it, so I closed the armoir door & locked it.
Today I opened the the door. Holy smoke! The heat the burst out was staggering. I never even thought about it when I closed the doors.
Was there any danger in this? Could the CPU have over heated with the doors closed? More importantly, could a fire have started? I know I’ll never close the doors again with the unit on.
Anything could happen. Computer fires aren’t exceptionally rare and computers don’t stand up well to heat in general. It sounds like your problem was transient though. It it is still acting Ok, there was probably no long-term damage but that doesn’t mean there won’t be the next time. It is generally fine to err on the cool side but not very good on the hot side with computers.
A computer CPU can overheat in a closed space. Whether yours could or not depends on the details of your computer and the size of the armoire, among other things.
Did you have the monitor in the armoire with the computer, and is it a CRT monitor? A CRT monitor in the armoire with the computer could significantly increase the risk of overheating.
If the computer’s working fine now, you’re probably OK, but overheating does tend to reduce the lifetime of computer components.
Seconded. My google-fu is weak, but I have seen a picture of a laptop that was zipped into its bag while running and left overnight. It had melted.
Computers can easily put out more heat than a 100w light-bulb, and if you put one of those into a small enclosed space with no airflow, things can get plenty hot.
Most modern PC’s have the ability to shut down if the CPU gets too hot, but that doesn’t help much if something else is getting roasted while the CPU is at a mere 70 centrigrade or so.
I strongly suspect that my laptop fried its own hard drive – once over easy. My data were OK, but it wouldn’t boot or restore or nuthin’. It’s a titanium Apple PowerBook, a model known to overheat.
It may have been… my co-worker was complaining about how hot his PC was in it’s hutch for weeks before it exploded, killing all components inside.
I also have a small Dell Optiplex G150 (one of those desktops of low-profile style that uses a laptop-style CD drive) that I’m fairly certain slowly cooked the video card I upgraded in it. The lack of space (and hence cooling) was too much for the card, as it displayed odd video artifacts for a month before preventing booting of the PC.
When things get really hot, most Intel processors have the sense to say “I’m too hot” and gracefully halt. I don’t know about current AMD chips, but they used to have a reputation for chugging along until they ultimately burned up. Normally, this is an issue only in the event of heat sink fan failure, rather than prolonged running.
Of course, that says nothing about how the video card, power supply or drives will behave.
A while ago, I had a laptop running in an overhead cabinet in my cube - one of those flip-up door things that’s about 18" tall, 12: deep and four feet wide. Running like that for nine hours at a time’s not a problem, but when it had been left on for two days, it got hot enough that the hard drive had physically warped to the point that the boot sector was undetectable. Happily, shutting it off and letting it cool until it was back to room temp brought it back to life with no apparent lasting effects.
I’d be most concerned about the hard drive. I too suspect one of my hard drives died from excessive heat. (It was in a badly designed Sun clone workstation; I later discovered there was a metal plate behind the case fan.) If I were you, I’d start making regular backups of the hard drive.
We had an industrial computer and a bunch of stuff in a small 19" rack at work. The only reason it was in the rack was so that it was easy to trasnport somewhere. The door was never meant to be closed during operation, because it was a tiny rack and had no fans in it. Basically, with the door closed, it was the same situation as the OP’s armoire.
Usually this wasn’t a problem, but one day someone who didn’t know any better closed the door while it was running. Some time later, someone smelled smoke. They opened the door to the rack, opened the front cover of the computer, and when the air rushed in it made a neat FOOOOF noise and the motherboard immediately burst into flame. The computer actually continued running for a couple of seconds with flames shooting out the back of the power supply. Then the computer crashed, someone got the power off, and we proceeded to put out the flames.
Not only was most of the motherboard charred, but even the power supply fan was melted. There was basically nothing salvagable inside the entire box.
Do you mean a GX150? I can’t see a G150 as a model on Dell’s website. If so, if you open the box, you should find that it uses a full-size CD drive. Leastwise, the ones we use at work do.
Yeah, I think I meant gx. It isn’t full height though. Here’s a picture of a similar one. (For a while. Picture may change at some point, I’m assuming).