The temp of my hard drives are much increased when suspended compared to when they are fitted securely in my case. So it seams that my alu case works as an effect heat sink. I was wondering if anyone had used the case as a heatsink for any other components. Maybe running heatpipes from the gfx card cooler to the case?
It's such a waste of a large chunk of heat conductive metal not to be used for cooling.
Using case as heatsink?
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http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=28560
Yep they have. Hyphe is in the advanced stages of building one as we speak. Click the link above and gawp at an incredible piece of pc modding.
He hasn't posted in his log for a while though. Shame, as he was just about finished on his last post.
Yep they have. Hyphe is in the advanced stages of building one as we speak. Click the link above and gawp at an incredible piece of pc modding.
He hasn't posted in his log for a while though. Shame, as he was just about finished on his last post.
I've thought about this for a while too. And I want there to be a way to do it without heat pipes. Heat pipes are cool for what they are, but I'm not sold on their effectiveness and they look really ackward to set up (Zalman's tower cases for example).
I used to be way into tweaking and diy-ing audio equipment and almost built a class-a power amp. Class A amps are horribly inefficient and require massive heatsinks to keep their output transistors (and power resistors, etc) within their operating ranges. You can heat a decent sized room with a class-a Krell or Pass amp. It would be great if we could somehow mount the heat-producting IC's in our pc's directly to external heatsinks, the same way output transistors are mounted in power amps. The big difference is that those power transistors don't need the short traces our CPU's require to function.
This would require radically re-thinking motherboard design though. Something as simple as mounting some components on the underside of the motherboard (cpu and chipset for example), and pressing them against the case side panel (a large extruded Al heatsink) would be very elegant.
At the moment, retail motherboard designs follow industry design standards, which is unfortunate in some ways. Sure they differ in features and individual components, but we don't see any really jaw-dropping innovation. No one is designing in 3 dimensions. The pc world is stuck on our motherboards being rectangular boards. Maybe it's the "board" in motherboard that keeps them thinking in flat designs. Think of how small they make the pcb(s) if they mounted components on both sides. Or if they split the single motherboard into separate daughterboards to get heat-producting components on multiple case walls.
I'd be thrilled with a SFF barebones that had all the "rarely-touched" components on the backside of the motherboard - like the cpu, chipset, all cable headders, etc. Then the front side has only the card and memory sockets. That's it.
The apple G4 cube was an amazing piece of packaging engineering that we simply don't see in ATX BTX whatever. No fans - pure convention cooling up through the middle of the chassis. In fact, most of apple's non-tower computers are/were amazing from a design perspective. Not that they don't have their faults...
You'd think the barebones community would be leading the way in radical packaging, but most of them are just smaller version of our desktops. I also expected more from mini-ITX than just a board shrink and lost expansion. Maybe someone will put a bunch of PCI card slots on the underside of a mini-ITX board some day.
Sorry for the rant,
Jay
I used to be way into tweaking and diy-ing audio equipment and almost built a class-a power amp. Class A amps are horribly inefficient and require massive heatsinks to keep their output transistors (and power resistors, etc) within their operating ranges. You can heat a decent sized room with a class-a Krell or Pass amp. It would be great if we could somehow mount the heat-producting IC's in our pc's directly to external heatsinks, the same way output transistors are mounted in power amps. The big difference is that those power transistors don't need the short traces our CPU's require to function.
This would require radically re-thinking motherboard design though. Something as simple as mounting some components on the underside of the motherboard (cpu and chipset for example), and pressing them against the case side panel (a large extruded Al heatsink) would be very elegant.
At the moment, retail motherboard designs follow industry design standards, which is unfortunate in some ways. Sure they differ in features and individual components, but we don't see any really jaw-dropping innovation. No one is designing in 3 dimensions. The pc world is stuck on our motherboards being rectangular boards. Maybe it's the "board" in motherboard that keeps them thinking in flat designs. Think of how small they make the pcb(s) if they mounted components on both sides. Or if they split the single motherboard into separate daughterboards to get heat-producting components on multiple case walls.
I'd be thrilled with a SFF barebones that had all the "rarely-touched" components on the backside of the motherboard - like the cpu, chipset, all cable headders, etc. Then the front side has only the card and memory sockets. That's it.
The apple G4 cube was an amazing piece of packaging engineering that we simply don't see in ATX BTX whatever. No fans - pure convention cooling up through the middle of the chassis. In fact, most of apple's non-tower computers are/were amazing from a design perspective. Not that they don't have their faults...
You'd think the barebones community would be leading the way in radical packaging, but most of them are just smaller version of our desktops. I also expected more from mini-ITX than just a board shrink and lost expansion. Maybe someone will put a bunch of PCI card slots on the underside of a mini-ITX board some day.
Sorry for the rant,
Jay
On my old w/c machine I glued alu profiles on to copper plates which were glued to the back, bottom and top of a g-Tower aly case. The waterline was split letting a small part pass this outer route to cool, making the whole case warm to the touch. It worked very well!
Since this article was written, lots has happened. I tried change it so that a separate small pump cooled my hdds using the outer case water-line, but having two pumps added noise so I quit cooling my hdds with water and went back to the split main line instead.
Nowadays,watercooling is not as beneficial, because aircooled heatsinks have caught up, without thetons of mess that comes with w/c making it so hard to recommend.
Since this article was written, lots has happened. I tried change it so that a separate small pump cooled my hdds using the outer case water-line, but having two pumps added noise so I quit cooling my hdds with water and went back to the split main line instead.
Nowadays,watercooling is not as beneficial, because aircooled heatsinks have caught up, without thetons of mess that comes with w/c making it so hard to recommend.