cool tower

[Andrew Pratt]

I installed an Athlon 1.33 the other night and currently have it running at 9.5 * 150 allow (1425 Mhz) allowing my DDR Ram to run at 300 Mhz which seems to give me the best benchmark scores vs a higher clock speed at a lower FSB rate. Anyway given that the Athlons run a tad on the warm side I decided to do a little case modification this afternoon and proceeded to move the front air intake fan to a new location. I also added two more case fans to the side of the case all blowing air into the case. There's still the fan near the CPU blowing air out as well as the fan in the power supply so in total I now have 3 large fans sucking in air and two blowing air out. (also 5200 RPM fan on Themal Engine CPU cooler and a small fan on northbridge chip) The effect of all these fans seems to work rather well. My case temp has plumeted to a cool temp which helps to keep the video card and RAM cooler (two fans blowing onto video card and one onto CPU) as well the max temp isn't much higher then idle (44C at idle vs 48C at max)

Here's a pic of the new fans

[S-Goose]

Whoa! Get some grills on those bad boys.

Great temps...it's all about airflow. I think I'm going to follow your lead and install a side fan too. A nice 92mm Panaflo on a case window would look very nice.

[Bing Fung]

Cool Andrew, I like thet utilitarian look, kinda Starwars like. Lot of surface detail




Bing

[Andrew Pratt]

I thought about mounting them on the inside but since there's a wall a few inches away no one will ever get near them so I just left them on the outside

[AndrewM]

Now you just need to get a fan or two to blow some air away from the hard drives and you will air blowing over all of the major heat producers in the case.

So does your computer sound like a jet aircraft getting ready for take-off yet? I remember an old computer I had that I seriously over-did on the cooling side, had like 5 of those bigger 120V 110-120CFM steel bladed, 3000RPM fans (and a couple smaller fans). That thing was noisy, but it kept things nice and cool.

Andrew

[Gordon Moore]

Hey I think we have the same case...looks like a Supercase to me. If you haven't done so...although with your cooling experiment I assume you have... make sure you cut off the stock grills for the intake and exhaust fans. It make a huge difference. Nice job on the fans though. How's the noise? Where did you pick up your fans?




"A RONSTER!"

[Andrew Pratt]

Actually noise isn't too bad these fans aren't all that loud...cetinaly not as loud as some of the 7000 RPM CPU coolers I've heard screaming. The two bottom fans will provide a good flow of air over the video card and there's plenty of air flowing around the hard drive so I think I'm okay on that front as well...though I do have a 5 1/4 hard drive cooler that I could install in the bottom slot but its a noisey buggar

As far as fans I often come into posession of old junk cases that I rip apart and steal the fans from the power supplies so thats were a couple came from..the other I think I picked up at Princess Auto (a wonderful source of odd ball PC parts cheap)