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If you're plugged in all the time, lower TDP is nice but not critical. And if you live in a cold country, you have to heat up the house six months per year, TDP is just heating with a computing side effect.

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> And if you live in a cold country, you have to heat up the house six months per year, TDP is just heating with a computing side effect.

Except it is still direct electrical heating which is atrociously inefficient.

>Except it is still direct electrical heating which is atrociously inefficient.

Electric heating converts practically all energy into heat, making it ~100% efficient. You can make statements about cost-effectiveness compared to burning things, but not all houses can.

CHP configurations are more common in colder climates with district heating, so their "waste" heat during generation often isn't wasted at all.

> Electric heating converts practically all energy into heat

No, not even close. There are huge losses in electricity production and transmission.

Which is why I covered them in my comment about CHP, which recoups a large portion of those "losses". Either way other power sources also require logistic challenges and/or big equipment installs to use, so it isn't exactly 1:1 comparison.

But a heat pump is more than 100% efficient.

I feel this is a bit disingenuous, because using the same logic burning wood is thousands of % effective, or even ∞% if the system only uses convection, making heat pumps seem like a poor choice even when they're perfectly valid.

Until the temperature drops below 4 C

Which is why you bore a hole deep enough that it isn't a problem.

I'm in Quebec (Eastern Canada). Most of the electricity is produced from hydraulic power (dams) up north, while cities are in the southern part of the province. Most houses are electrically heated (especially those built after 1970). Production from water turbines is very efficient. Transmission losses are about 30%, because of the distance (> 1500km). Heating itself is 100% efficient, no moving parts, no maintenance. In this context, heating with a baseboard or CPU makes no difference.

It's 100 efficient, and the amount of houses with a heat pump is <1%

Here in Sweden, roughly 50% of all small houses (ie one household) have a heat pump. Direct electricity heating is just somewhere around 15%.

In bigger houses direct electricity just isn't a thing, most have some sort of central heating, and lots have either some combustion or heat pump solution. The latter is gaining.

This winter I'm going to experiment with having a Raspberry Pi act as a thermostat that starts/stops containers running on a server in our basement. That, combined with the laptop we just got for gaming that has a 3070 in it, should do nicely to supplement our heating system.

Watts go in, Watts come out. So basically, find a space heater with the TDP of your server, and that’s the upper bound on what you can expect heating-wise.

I know that’s a bummer for people who want to heat their house with their computer, but Thermodynamics is always a bummer, I don’t make the Laws.

> So basically, find a space heater with the TDP of your server, and that’s the upper bound on what you can expect heating-wise.

I wonder how many CPUs I need to build a cryptocurrency miner water heater... That would be so much better than just wasting energy heating up dumb elements.

That's why I heat my house with a dell C4140! The _lowest_ power throttle it has is 1.4KW.

Modern heat pumps provide a lot more than 100% efficiency. I'd stick to the heating system unless those containers are doing something profitable (mining?)

Literally nothing provides 100% efficiency. You're conflating coefficient of performance with efficiency. They're not even close to the same thing, modern heat pumps reach their CoP because they don't actually generate heat, they simply move it around, which provides more heat indoors than if you had converted an equivalent amount of electricity directly into 100% heat.

Thermodynamics would not take kindly to you having a >99.999...% efficient anything.

> because they don't actually generate heat Heatpumps still do use electricity(or other power), and all that electricity also ends up as heat. It's why heatpumps have higher CoP than the same system as a refrigeration cycle.

> Thermodynamics would not take kindly to you having a >99.999...% efficient anything

Well the cogen gas powerplants here can produce 50kWh of electricity from burning 100kWh of natural gas. I can use 50kWh of electricity to put 200kWh of heat into my house with a heatpump.

Seems like a good deal to me, and I think carnot would be fine with that.

Nobody said "thermodynamic efficiency". You're butting in for no good reason.

Coefficient of performance is a type of efficiency.

> modern heat pumps reach their CoP because they don't actually generate heat, they simply move it around

That's not even true! What a mess of a pedantic correction.

As someone who lives in south-east Queensland, Australia, lower TDPs and thermal output is always welcome, at least for me. I adore my Ryzen 5600X/3060 Ti mini-ITX desktop, but mining on it makes my room annoyingly warm, and it's not even summer yet.

Was semi-useful in winter though, all 6 weeks of it...

>If you're plugged in all the time, lower TDP is nice but not critical.

"If you're plugged in all the time" then try the Mac Pro version when it comes out.

This is about performance in laptop models, where it IS critical.

A hot laptop can have significant impacts on fertility in men. And in the summer you have to dissipate that heat. A heat pump is more efficient for heating, to boot.

It's a temporary infertility, at least.

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