Lay HP Pavilion on side?

[JuneBug18]

Hi, can I lay my HP Pavilion Desktop 595-p0074 on its side?  I know I need to keep the fan side up and nothing covering the vent.  

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

I don't see any reason looking at the specs or the service manual why you can't.

Here are the links to the user guide and service manual...from what I can tell, it just indicates not to block any vents.

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c06087806

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c05934592

[jtpolk]

I see no reason you could not lay it down on its side with no vents blocked and with the CPU fan facing up.

I do not think that will heat things up more. The airflow for tower cases is supposed to come in the bottom (cool outside air) then as it gets hotter it is supposed to rise, from bottom to top, and get sucked out top of the back of the case. In fact, some of the original thinking was that with enough engineering of the air flow just from the hotair being sucked out at the top of the case, bringing cool outside air, you could make a fanless quiet case. Ah-hm. That worked out well (think 1990s Pentiums, they needed a LOT of cooling, loud, LOUD cooling otherwise, zap).

I don't think the HP case has that high of a degree of engineering. Way too expensive.

I have laid down towers on their sides no problem, for business cases.  I would never lay a server tower onto its side, but that is a 24/7 case.

I would do one thing. Take a series of reading of temperatures. Write them down. Then put the case onto its side, then take a series of temperature readings, and periodically check. If the variance between being upright and laying onto its side is small to non-existant, you should be good to go.

Our problems of cooling are almost non-existant. This is compared to the teacher I learned a lot of this from. He related running a 1.5 million dollar mainframe for a co-op, that had a grand total of 16K memory. In Texas Panhandle summers he had to wear sweaters because of the cooling. Ah, history...