Quote:
Originally Posted by sphelps
As for fans, they are not needed, there are already plenty of LED lights for other applications which use high powered LEDs with properly designed heat sinks and no fans. It's a simple mater of cutting costs and the temperature gradient and heat transfer rate of LEDs is high and low enough respectively to eliminate the need for convective cooling. Computer components like CPUs run much hotter, their heat flux is way higher than an LED and require convective cooling. Computers are also built as cheap as possible, it's a huge commodity market.
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Im not so sure about that, give me an example of high power LEDs thats out there that doesn't utilize some form of active cooling, the ones found in the new Audi cars utilize passing air from inside the engine bay is a quick one that comes to mind. Its not so much cutting cost, im sure that has something to do with it, But if the heatsinks were made adequate enough for the LEDs to start the addition of fans only adds to the overall benefit of the fixture by keeping the LEDs at a much cooler temperature than without. You keep pointing out that fans have reliability issues. If you rip open one of the fixtures made for our hobby you'll quickly see that the fans they use inside to reduce cost....only costs $1-2. A Prop fan that is made by a good company usually run in the range of $10-12 and are 10x more quite than the cheap ones and push more air as well.
Also i would differ to say that computers are build as cheap as possible, at my previous job i was custom building PCs to fit the need of individual people and if you dont get into the watercooling side of things, the heatsink design + fan is really focused upon in the design of a system. The cooling of a system sometimes allows you to push that much more "juice" out of the system without getting lag. Theres only so much a heatsink can do, in other words you'll never see a top of the line computer system run without some form of active cooling on its components.