Sharing my experiences living in tropical climate (say 30°C average ambient room temperature):
- My NetGear Night Hawk R7000 used to run with its CPU at 77°C placed on top of a cupboard, no covers either on the sides or above - running a few months old DD-WRT firmware as router and AP (both 2.4 and 5GHz), serving DHCP and proxying DNS, but no CPU intensive functions like VPN (22% CPU load average, no overclocking: at 1000 MHz)
- I have raised the unit putting four Duplo blocks :) under its feet to enable airflow underneath: this reduced the long running temperature to about 72°C
- this should probably help any other confined electronics device that gets hot during use! - I have purchased an USB powered and speed controllable AC Infinity Multifan S3 (120mm) with rubber feet (ro reduce migrations). After placing the unit on the powered fan (set to "medium" speed) the long running CPU temperature was reduced to 63°C (wifi chips: WL0 49°C, WL1 52°C).
Noise level is less than the background noise 1m away, can hear only hear some whine from the bearings if listening form less than 10cm at above indicated medium speed.
I am planning to set up more CPU hungry functions and see if I:
- Run out of CPU capacity and need to overclock.
- Need to further my thermal enhancements by replacing the thermal pad between the CPU and the heat spreader in the unit. :)
