Where the heat goes

Understand the fundamentals

Computing equipment produces heat

Nearly all the electricity a miner uses turns into heat. That heat must move away from the chips and, in the end, out of the facility. A surface near the machine may seem cool, but that does not prove the whole path is working. The real question is whether heat moves away fast enough at the miner’s current load. Load means how hard the miner is working.

In a miner, heat moves in two main ways. Conduction is heat passing through materials that touch, such as a chip and the metal pressed against it. Convection is heat passing from a surface into moving air or liquid, which carries it away. Miner cooling uses both. Heat first moves from the chip into the metal or fluid touching it. Then moving air or liquid carries it onward.

See how it works

The path has several links

The thermal interface is where heat leaves a part, such as a chip, and enters the cooling part. A heatsink is a block of metal with many thin fins. The fins give the air more surface to take heat from. A cold plate is a metal plate with liquid flowing through it. It presses against the hot parts, and the liquid stays inside the plate and its pipes instead of touching the electronics. Immersion means placing suitable equipment into a dielectric fluid made for that use. This is a special fluid designed to insulate against electricity under its specified conditions.

For an air-cooled miner, the path is: chip → thermal interface → heatsink → moving air → facility exhaust. Each cooling type has its own requirements.

Heat rejection means moving heat out of the cooling system and into the surroundings. Poor contact, too little air or liquid flow, or weak heat rejection at the facility can all limit cooling. The fan is only one link, so a new fan does not fix every heat problem. In the same way, a running pump does not prove that enough liquid reaches every part that needs it.

Connect it to the field

Example: normal rotation, rising temperature

Suppose a miner’s fans keep spinning at the same speed, but the air coming in gets warmer. Even with the same airflow, the air cooling the chips is now warmer. So the chips run hotter and get closer to their temperature limit, even though no fan has failed.

Write down the load, the intake air conditions, the measured temperatures and readings from similar miners nearby. How these readings relate to each other tells you more than any single number. Later troubleshooting builds on this full picture of the heat path.