BBC B, Issue 7 board - cooling

[Becky]

I'm the kind of person who will take the time to search the internet before asking questions, but I'm seeing different opinions on the issue. For the most part people seem to say that an Issue 7 doesn't need any extra cooling. The contradiction I saw was on a YouTube video by someone called Gadget147. He was saying that many of the chips in his issue 7 got really hot. He has put heatsinks on 10 ICs and has added two cooling fans mid board to circulate air. That really seems like he has a problem with his Beeb. I feel that if they ran that hot and had no cooling they would never have lasted several decades.

Is cooling something to consider as a matter of course? I could always put a wee fan behind the Econet hole if necessary.

Cheers.

[flaxcottage]

BBC computers do run warm, especially if they have upgrades/addons fitted, for example an ATPL sideways ROM board full of ROMs. The only time I ever had problems was BITD when the temperature in my computer room rose above 30 deg C. The Beebs used to leak a red liquid. One of my students was most upset by this and stated her BBC was bleeding.

In normal running I've never encountered any problems with heat except for early video ULAs which did need a heatsink.

[cmorley]

No, they don't need cooling. They do fall over in high ambient temperature though - but heatsinks won't help. The first thing that goes is the memory - you'll start getting random corruption on the screen & your machine will crash. My development issue 7 does this when the ambient is 30+.

If you put a big ROM board in then that makes this problem worse - hence part of the reputation for some of the ROM boards being terribly unreliable BITD.

[MartinB]

For less than a fiver and an hour’s work, your boot and <Break> screen can look like this......

B4582763-4E13-4C64-B544-5F989EB2A82F.jpeg (10.34 KiB) Viewed 320 times

....where the temperature display reflects wherever you choose to mount a miniature RTC & Temperature module inside your Beeb.


Clicky here for details.

[Becky]

That's all good to know. Thank you. I'm not worried now about temperature, but do fancy the RTC.

Oh, and what was the red liquid? That sounds weird.

[JasonStonier]

For less than a fiver and an hour’s work, your boot and <Break> screen can look like this......

Well...shoot. I thought I was coming to the end of my hardware hacks. Thanks a lot, Martin.

[JasonStonier]

I asked the same question a while back, and got the same answer...but...

I noticed on my beeb, after being left on for more than half an hour I was getting a blocky "sort of corruption" on the top half of the screen - nothing that would stop you using it, but noticeable, especially in Mode 7 with white-on-black text. I added a heatsink to the ULA and a small cooling fan inside the case, and the problem went away.

I have a few things packed into my case though, so likely that was affecting the passive cooling.

[MartinB]

Well...shoot. I thought I was coming to the end of my hardware hacks. Thanks a lot, Martin.

No worries Jason

btw - the manual only describes connecting I2C modules & gadgets externally but in the case of the cheap’n’cheerful RTC & Temp module, which is something I and many others have as a permanent feature, you can mount it internally with four tacked-on wires as shown below. Other than that, you just need the rom in a free slot.