Passive Cooling - Home Engineered
Leonardo
Wake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, Alaska Icrontian
Neither of my home systems have fan cooling on the northbridges and video card GPUs. When I built these systems, the goal was for quiet high performance. I'm getting there.
Here's what's cooling the GPUs. Here's what's cooling the northbridges. If you want to know how I mounted them, just post, and I'll explain. The video card coolers are big; no room for anything in the two PCI slots beneath the AGP slot.
Stock video card and northbridge coolers were replaced by these inexpensive heatsinks. It was a very tight fit on the IC7; I had to cut down the heatsink to reduce its two dimensional size.
Both systems are quieter now, with no apparent loss of performance. Interior case temperature did go up a bit in the IC7 system after I installed the new northbridge heatsink. Perhaps that means the new heatsink is removing more thermal energy from the northbridge than the itty-bitty stock cooler was?
System No. 1 now has only four fans: two fans (stock) integral to the PSU, which is a Robanton 600w monstor; one intake and one exhaust fan, each Panaflo 120mm L1A. System No. 2 has five fans: same PSU and fans; intake 92mm Panaflo M1A; exhaust fans are two Panaflo 80mm L1As.
I think next I will replace the PSU cooling fans with Panaflo L1As.
Here's what's cooling the GPUs. Here's what's cooling the northbridges. If you want to know how I mounted them, just post, and I'll explain. The video card coolers are big; no room for anything in the two PCI slots beneath the AGP slot.
Stock video card and northbridge coolers were replaced by these inexpensive heatsinks. It was a very tight fit on the IC7; I had to cut down the heatsink to reduce its two dimensional size.
Both systems are quieter now, with no apparent loss of performance. Interior case temperature did go up a bit in the IC7 system after I installed the new northbridge heatsink. Perhaps that means the new heatsink is removing more thermal energy from the northbridge than the itty-bitty stock cooler was?
System No. 1 now has only four fans: two fans (stock) integral to the PSU, which is a Robanton 600w monstor; one intake and one exhaust fan, each Panaflo 120mm L1A. System No. 2 has five fans: same PSU and fans; intake 92mm Panaflo M1A; exhaust fans are two Panaflo 80mm L1As.
I think next I will replace the PSU cooling fans with Panaflo L1As.
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Comments
In the end, i actually have BETTER cooling but also dead silent.
I believe that getting little air through the psu is MUCH better that just have a high-powered exhaust fan.
The stock fans actually aren't that bad; it's more of a harmonics-induced slight noise from slightly different rotational speeds of the two PSU 80mm fans and the Vantec's 80.
The computer certainly is no loud though. My goal was to build a high performance computer with very little noise. I think it was a success.
http://sidewindercomputers.com/thsl4.html