Idea for Cool & Quiet case & cpu.

[RandyHarris]

This may be hard to follow without a diagram, but I'm really curious to hear what you think of this idea. I think it could be really effective and quiet. Granted this is a fairly involved modification, but nothing about it seems too dificult to me other than some time and minor fabrication.

I'm not sure which heatsink would be the best to do this with, my thought was an Orb because it would be easy to make the air flow through the heatsink, but there may be a simpler choice.

Take an INPUT flexible tube and mount it to your case so that it draws in fresh air from outside the case. This tube gets mounted to the top of the the heatsink. Next is to make a shroud to fit around the heatsink body, this shrould is connected to another OUTPUT tube which goes to a Panaflo 80mm or 120mm fan. The fan exhaust is ported up to the bottom of the power supply.

Benefits are that the Panaflo is super quiet while still moving serious amounts of air. Your heatsink is cooled with colder outside (of the case) air, and instead of heating up your case with the hot air coming off the heatsink, the hot air from the heatsink is ported through the Power Supply and out of the case.

Granted, this is for a serious tinkerer who enjoys this sort of thing, it's not for everybody out there. It seems to be a very effecient, and yet still very quiet way of cooling the CPU while also reducing the case temperature at the same time. Hell you may not even need the fan from the power supply turned on if you used a 120mm for the cpu - which would REALLY decrease the noise of your system.

Thoughts, suggestions, other ideas? (no flamers please.)

 

[BA]

Couple thoughts.

PEP66 would be the ideal HSF for such a project, well defined intake and exhaust on that puppy.

Seems kinda redundant though, do you need to duct the air entering and exiting the heatsink? Seeing as how the CPU is the major source of heat in there, if it gets ducted right out of the case, the case temp shouldn't be all that much above ambient.

 

[RandyHarris]

Good point, with the hot air exiting the case, there is really no reason to port outside air to the heatsink!

Not to mention that you just cut out about 1/3 of the work to the project.

 

[ericd]

Keep in mind that you wouldn't be able to do only that. You would still need at least one case fan to cool of the video card, HD, CD-Rom and other heat producing components.

Eric

 

[mcvan]

Idea's a variation of what I am doing -- which is to use an 80mm fan on the back panel to blow outside air through a flexible tube to the CPU heatsink. But I have to say it's not that quiet, even tho it is quieter than something like the 7k rpm Delta. You get less whine but more lower frequency and wind noise, and because the fan is closer to the outside of the case, any sound dampening effect of the case is reduced. Try looking through this thread for some other ideas. The "muffler box" really works well...

 

[miniMUNCH]

BA it right about the HS choice,

You definitely want to go with a heatsink that has a shroud which is suitable for an induced flow cooling set-up. The PEP66/66t seems ideal.

I would simply cut a whole in the door of my case and some ducting out of plastic, like a chopped off pyramid focusing the chopped off point right onto and alpha PAL6035 or mabe on of those swif-tech's (which would need a shroud) and hook up a Panflo on 5 or 7V instead of 12V...really quite and still about 35-40 cfm which is all you really need.

 

[rlism]

Hrm... you mean something like this? link

I think it's a great idea.

 

[RandyHarris]

rlism - hey great job finding that!

that's 1/2 of what I was thinking. The other would be porting the hot air out, not just letting it "sit idle" in the case heating things up.

 

[max105]

i remember seeing someone on one of those many hardcore overclocking/cooling sites where some guy did pretty much what you've described. they had some sort of those air ducts used for housing to connect a fan from the 5.25" bays to the bottom of a PEP66. The PEP66 fan then sucks the air out at the top of the heatsink. I suppose if you have a power supply with 2 fans (ie ENERMAX) right above your CPU, then this would easily move all that air back outside without the need of extra air ducting

 

[Galileo]

I think it's a good idea, specially if the ducting don't have too many bends on them and you need extra cooling for your cpu. The ps fan should be able to keep the system temp cool.

To keep the ps fan more effective, I'd make sure the ambient room air has entry points are in strategic places where air have no choice but come in close contact with warm objects. Those vent holes on the side panel, not the mb side, I think don't do much for cooling since air will just shoot straight to the ps from those vents unless there's a fan inside to stir up the air a bit.

Also, from a very short term experiment, one 20GB 7200rpm HDD adds 3C to my system temp. To keep it cool, I installed it in a 5.25 bay with a BayCooler face plate without the fan. The negative air pressure inside the case sucks some air through that and keep the HD cooler and the air that went in useful.

EDIT:
I second the PEP66 or PEP66t, very plexible and effective.