Finally found the holy grail

[Mrvile]

Ok I was screwing around with my case fans and stuff and was wondering how I could take advantage of the BTX form factor of my case. I thought of a few different methods, wasted a lot of electrical tape and different doodads from around the house (tubes, boxes, etc) and when my final idea failed I was about to quit.

Then it hit me, I looked at Intel's new BTX CPU cooler they are going to sell with their P4s, and that's where I got the idea...

I took a big piece of cardboard, cut it down to a rectangular prism that goes from my XP-90 to my rear exhaust, which is about 5 or 6 inches away. I then took one of my 120mm fans, taped one onto the front of the prism, and had it pull air back across the XP-90 to the exhaust, which I had a fan pulling air out. Lot of electrical tape used, but this time at least it works. Sound level is insanely low (my two main howlers are my Panaflo CPU fan and my BFG 6800GT cooler), and by eliminating the need for a loud cpu fan sound levels dropped by almost half. Here are the results:

3500+ Winnie OC'd to 2.6 - temps are a bit high for me. Since I need about 1.55 or so volts to run it, I get 38 - 41 idle, and who knows what they are at load. So I dropped my OC down to...

3500+ Winniw OC'd to 2.5 - I backed it off a whole volt, to around 1.45 or so and I'm running P95 right now. Temps reach about 50 tops, and I'm praying it holds. Idle temps are beautiful, 33 - 35.

Wish I had some pics, but its late (kinda reminds me of "Wow Peter did you stay up all night thinking of that one? Nah, I got to bed around tw,o two thirty"), and I don't have a digital camera handy. Sorry.

What should my threshold be, 55? 60?

 

[NoToRiOuS1]

im trying to picture this but its 3 in teh morning and its hard to do so...but is your idea somewhat similar to the heatsinks on the dell desktops where there is a the heatsink and its connected to the real fan so when the rear fan blows air out...it creates negative pressure and "passively" cools the heatsink. if that doesn't make sense then please ignore it...im so tired my eyes are burning....

anywho...glad you were able to find something that works for you. hopefuly tomorrow i can give this another read and if it seems worth it i might have to follow in your footsteps....post some more info about it when the P95 is through.

 

[Mrvile]

I ran P95 for half an hour without any trouble. I actually backed down to like 2.4ghz so I could push my FSB to 300, I'm at stock voltages right now. I'm having other problems I posted under General Hardware.

Anyway no they aren't like the dell ones. Picture this, a big box going from heatsink to exhaust. Since I have a BTX case the heatsink is located right next to the exhaust fan. I have one fan blowing back into the box an one fan exhausting out the rear.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Look for a post entitled "Foam Board Mod" by a member named "Sentinel" sometime during December '04.

He links to page 2 of this article:

Ducting Mods of Cinnamon and Leggett

I've done it in my system with an XP-120 and Sunon fan, and 92mm twin exhausts. I can run the exhaust fans at around 3,000 to 3,200 rpm and the noise level is cut tremendously using the art-board. Other materials may not deaden the sound as well. Even with the XP-120, which probably reduces temperatures to a minimum for air-cooling without ducting, there was an improvement of 2 to 3C, but the best improvements were in chipset, VGA and memory cooling.

 

[Mrvile]

Hmm I have a hard time actually getting the duct to stay in place, any ideas? Right now I'm using electrical tape, but the thing is electrical tape doesn't stick to cardboard very well.

 

[NoToRiOuS1]

Originally posted by: Mrvile
I ran P95 for half an hour without any trouble. I actually backed down to like 2.4ghz so I could push my FSB to 300, I'm at stock voltages right now. I'm having other problems I posted under General Hardware.

Anyway no they aren't like the dell ones. Picture this, a big box going from heatsink to exhaust. Since I have a BTX case the heatsink is located right next to the exhaust fan. I have one fan blowing back into the box an one fan exhausting out the rear.

makes sense now. this might be stupid question but you have an ATX mobo in a BTX case? BTX is backwards compatible? what case do you have?