jshoffit

We are heading out for Rennsport tomorrow and are taking two laptops. Wendy asked me which would be a cooler environment for our computers - rear trunk, behind the engine, over the exhaust, BUT with the cooled interior air; or the front trunk which is behind a radiator and no interior cooling, and next to road heat.

Has anyone determined if one is cooler or warmer than the other?

Thanks,

James Shoffit (just got my GT4 from Porsche Plano Saturday night.

ShakeNBake

Frunk gets REALLY hot on the 911.

consolidated

Pretty hot James. Melted my ice cream and fish sticks effing Porsche.

Congrats on the GT4, can't think of a better way to break it in.

Dr.Bill

With the GT3 front end, the front trunk will get much hotter than the rear hatch (which is air conditioned). After a spirited drive, the GT3 hood is almost too hot to open. I imagine the GT4 is similar.

f4 plt

Put them in the rear trunk, but not directly on the bottom and they will be fine. Have a safe trip

Ajjra

GT4 Frunk also gets very hot, just like GT3.

bemmett

Yep. This was the first thing I noticed when I got back from Tahoe in my GT4 this weekend. The frunk lid was quite toasty.

My previous 981CS frunk actually didn't get any hotter than ambient, but I presume the extra radiator and center air intake in the front apron are the reasons why the frunk is hotter in the GT4.

jphughan

What accounts for the frunk getting so hot? Is it just the massive brakes and the radiators?

OP, given that you're dealing with presumably laptops, couldn't you just keep them in the passenger footwell, or maybe even on the floor behind the seats?

RocketGuy3

Massive brakes should stay cooler if anything. It's a light car, too. Your brakes aren't going to get that hot in street driving. I guess it's just the radiator.

e46mike

It is perfect to keep your takeout warm on your way home.

supercup

+1 - picked up hot food on Sunday and put it up there - got it out when I got home and it was still very hot! Was 104 degrees outside and the front trunk was probably 120 degrees plus - the perfect warming oven!

I would put them inside where the cool air flows.

jphughan

120 F is actually probably fine for laptops, especially if they're either shut down or asleep. The fans might fire up with a vengeance if you power them on immediately after pulling them out of the frunk, but it's not unusual for CPUs and GPUs to hit 190 F during operation, and spinning hard drives can easily handle 120 F, in fact Google's massive study revealed that higher operating temperatures even when sustained over the long term did not correlate very well with observed failure rates. The closest correlation was the number of platters in the drive itself. SSDs can go even higher. Granted the system needs cooler ambient temperatures for those components to exhaust their heat out to when operating at these temperatures, but that just goes back to making sure the system is shut down or asleep when being transported. The components can definitely handle those temperatures at rest.

jphughan

Well bigger brakes do indeed mean cooler brakes because the fixed amount of energy to stop the car can be distributed across a greater surface area, but that heat energy still gets vented somewhere, and I suppose the frunk area could be one such area -- but you're right, it wasn't correct to imply that bigger brakes mean more heat. I guess I was assuming harder braking people might be doing in this car that drove Porsche to equip it with bigger brakes in the first place. But I agree that brakes shouldn't get that hot under street driving. I guess I'm just surprised that the radiators give off as much heat as they do.

usctrojanGT3

+1

bigkraig

store your cookie dough in the front and when you get home you got fresh baked cookies. makes the car smell nice too