One of these days I'm gonna pipe these bad boys into my homes duct work LMAO

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ALWAYS. A. RELEVANT. XKCD.

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Sadly, for a few years now I've had TDP as one of the main criteria when buying parts for my machines, so there really isn't enough waste heat from my machines to even just keep a room warm in Winter by playing heavy 3D games (the worst one tops at around 180W, so basically a really bright incandescent light bulb)

On the other hand what I save in power consumption on my machines can be used on a dedicated heating solution that's ON only when I need it rather than the whole year.

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whilst my home server uses about 20W at 100%)

I'd love it if my equipment used so little, but I'd rather just pay a higher electric bill and be able to spin up whatever VM, container or DB I need for a project whenever I want without having to worry about resource usage

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It's really down to fitting the machine to Requirements, present and forecasted ones.

So my home server is just a N100 Mini PC because it's just a TV Media Box on my living room that doubles as home NAS and Torrent server with a dedicated VPN connection, for which an N100 with not especially large or fast memory and a decent-sized SSD, is more than powerful enough since the CPU heavy stuff - video decoding - is done in dedicated silicon inside the N100 whilst the other functionality is mainly bottlenecked by network speeds and my network is just Gigabit Ethernet.

If I expected heavier CPU loads I would have gone with a different CPU (plus associated elements such as motherboard and memory) whilst if I wanted to run the heavier AI stuff (such as image generation) it would've been a Desktop PC with a dedicated Graphics Card with lots of video memory (though as it is, my games PC doubles as Image generation machine).

If I want to play with VMs or Databases I can just use my gaming PC since that's running Linux and is a lot more powerful in every almost way (curiously, not disk speed since it's a bit old with upgraded parts, so it's still using SATA rather and does not support M.2 disks on PCIe) than that Mini PC.

JackbyDev

Yeah, I've been saying we should make crypto mining space heaters. I don't think there's much of a market for it, but it's an interesting thought. Worst case, it would be an amazing gag gift.

Or, if you believe all crypto is immoral (arguably fair), then make a space heater that runs something like folding at home.

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Like this?
~~https://www.gov.uk/government/news/thousands-of-homes-to-be-kept-warm-by-waste-heat-from-computer-data-centres-in-uk-first~~
Edit: Actually more like this https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/12/heata_offers_free_hot_water/

JackbyDev

Oh my goodness, YES!

The initial concept developed by the company involved using heat generated by Bitcoin mining rigs, according to Heata Co-founder and CTO Chris Jordan.

"We literally put a Bitcoin miner in a barrel of mineral oil and plumbed it up to a radiator," he told The Register.

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The efficiency of a heat pump in part comes from the temperature of the heat source. For an air source heat pump it will be more efficient at higher outside temperatures and less efficient and lower outside temperatures, and at extreme temperatures may be less efficient than resistive heating

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Technically those are orders of magnitude. 2x or 3x efficiency compared to resistive heating is quite a bit. But in the scheme of getting actual heat into an actual home and real world energy costs it's not a huge difference

MudMan

Hah. Don't think I haven't thought about it. The outside unit is right besides the window to my home office and I could get some nice overclocking going with a tube and some tape by just opening the hot water.

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And just like that, Intel is the best in the game again /s

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Depends on your workload, pi digits calculation for example require a lot of compute, but the bandwidth required to communicate the result is trivial. Not saying every workload is the same, but compute to bandwidth relationship is not linear

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Order of magnitude is 10x, at least in the common usage of that expression.

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Planning on sitting in front of the heat pump in summer with the BBQ going and I can tell my partner to go have a really long shower. Really is win win, the hot water would be almost free with the hot air outside and I get a nice cool breeze outside.

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Ah crud yeah you're right. Good catch