how hot can you go?

This coming summer will be my first with my basement room full of running (and generating heat) boxless motherboards (14 of 'em). All winter and spring, they kept the room about 78 degrees, with no heat in the basement and the door to the room open (although the room does have the house water heater in it too). For summer, I'm thinking about putting a wall a/c unit in. But will it be necessary? At what point do you start to get meltdowns? I mean, at what air temperature is a stock fan/amd 1700-2100xp combo not going to get cooled enough, such that it melts down or the cmos cpu temp safety thingy shuts it down?

I suppose that if in the cmos you have it set to shut down at 160 degrees, say, and the air temp is 120, the fan/heat sink can't dissipate heat fast enough, where if the air temp is 70-80 it can. Would a/c be necessary, or would box fans do the trick? Any lessons of hard experience you'd care to share?

If the basement has a window at ground level, you might consider installing a little exhaust fan in there--
if you can pull air from the conditioned space of the house, through the basement, and dump it outside, you should be in good shape, I would think. I'll bet your getting more heat off the hot water heater than off the boxes.

When ambient air in the room gets to above 100F, you may start to see a few lock up. If you have two windows, put an exhaust fan in one and open the other one that is on the shaded side of the house (hopefully with a screen) to let fresh air in. Close the door ;) You can position a box fan to blow air across them as well to move the heat away from them.
14 of em... Nice! :D

Thanks for the responses! :D

In this room, the window is made of those clear glass blocks and I'd rather not break them. But it does have two doors: one to the basement and one to the garage. I guess I could have an exhaust fan on a thermostat switch in the top of the garage-side doorframe and the other door with a vent in the bottom. Or just replace the garage-side door with a framed-in window a/c unit. If only I could remember what the heat was like last year. I had two in there then.

100 degrees ambient air temp? That doesn't sound so bad, but then right now the temp in the rest of the basement is about 62, so my computer room is about 16 degrees hotter. I don't know much about thermodynamics, but if the air in the basement goes to 85 or 90, I could have some trouble (maybe?). Just the upstairs has a/c, and there are times in the summer when I'll be gone for periods of time, and I've usually turned off the a/c then. I could end up pulling 100 degree air from outside into the house and through my computer room. Maybe 24/7 a/c is an additional price to pay for summertime crunching?

Oh, I know. I'll just put the whole mess under a tarp on the shady north side of the house. The air temp would only get to 100, plus there's breezes. :crazy:

I wouldn't put a residential type AC unit in the room. I think that would cause more problems than it would solve:

1) Cycling on and off might cause dips in the current to your machines.

2) The unit probably won't have a thermostat that can be set at 85-90f (my suggested good range for non-OC'd machines).

3) Manually cycling the air would cause the room to cool and warm in cycles. That is much worse for a PC than a relatively constant temp.

I would make sure that there is good airflow within the room, and vent the hottest (ceiling) air completely out of the house if possible. Try to get rid of the heat, and don't let it back into your living areas (or the people you co-habitate with will tend to get cranky).