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quizzicus
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Post by quizzicus » Mon Aug 15, 2005 1:09 pm

Unfortunately, I've been running them at 12v this whole time.

vertigo
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Post by vertigo » Mon Aug 15, 2005 1:11 pm

I tried unplugging the fan to the Silencer, and the temperature of the card kept rising as the system temps got even higher!
Sorry, I see that now. Well, I'll wait to hear what Isaac has to say. I imagine the air is going into the duct because there is negative pressure there. I don't think it is worth trying to seal the duct, etc.

If it was my machine, I would go back to negative pressure. That means putting that fan back on the exhaust, running it at 12v (it is an 80mm after all), buying a better cooler, running a suck fan, etc.

vertigo
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Post by vertigo » Mon Aug 15, 2005 1:18 pm

Okay, let me just restate my points about negative pressure. You need more air to exhaust than comes off the cpu, to stop the case temp rising uncontrollably. Because you only have that one 80mm exhaust, and no side panel fan, you will almost certainly have to rely on the psu exhausting some air too.

Otherwise, you will need a very efficient cooler, so that with a slow running 80mm enough heat would be lost. This works on my Athlon64 3000+, although I have a 120mm case fan, but I think you could get this to work.

You would need the hot air to be concentrated, so that it can be removed more efficiently. I use a suck fan on an XP/90, you would have to do something similar.

Otherwise, let's see what Isaac recommends.

quizzicus
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Post by quizzicus » Mon Aug 15, 2005 1:23 pm

What if I flip the front fans so that I exhasut from the front AND the silencer, while all the air gets drawn through the hole by the CPU?

IsaacKuo
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Post by IsaacKuo » Mon Aug 15, 2005 1:26 pm

Okay, this calls for radical measures. Here's my recommendation for something to try:

1. Plug the ATI silencer back in, since you obviously need it. I'm guessing that this monster is moving a heck of a lot of air, overwhelming the efforts of your other fans.

2. Flip the fan on the PSU, so it becomes an intake. Get rid of the duct, but leave the front 5.25" bays open (for now).

3. Add a fan back to the rear case exhaust, but flip it so it's an intake. [edit:] Oh, you will probably NOT need the CPU heatsink fan, because this rear case fan will be blowing air straight through the CPU heatsink.

This will mean your case is devouring fresh air through FOUR 80mm intake fans (two in front, one rear case, and one PSU fan). I don't care how much air that ATI silencer is vacuuming out of the case, these four fans will feed it and then some.

The "then some" should exhaust out the open 5.25" bays.

If this works and the temperatures become acceptable, then you can try closing off the 5.25" bays and instead removing all unused PCI backplanes.

At this point, I guess I was wrong about the hot Barton being the main problem, and that the real main problem is the GPU.
Last edited by IsaacKuo on Mon Aug 15, 2005 1:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

vertigo
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Post by vertigo » Mon Aug 15, 2005 1:27 pm

What if I flip the front fans so that I exhasut from the front AND the silencer, while all the air gets drawn through the hole by the CPU?
Try it if you like. Unfortunately, I think the case temperature will be quite warm that way. The cpu would be first in line. It would cool the cpu at the expense of other components like the ram and hard drives.

Tell me something, how were the temps before you added the duct? I know the power supply fan was ramping up, but probably the temps weren't that bad before.

vertigo
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Post by vertigo » Mon Aug 15, 2005 2:09 pm

At this point, I guess I was wrong about the hot Barton being the main problem, and that the real main problem is the GPU.
Don't be too hasty to say that. It's a Palomino 2100+, it probably costs about 50W or so. Also, it has that atrocious flower heatsink. It's far from desirable.

I think that heatsink could do better if the airflow strikes it from the side, so that the air can move between the fins. With airflow from directly above it, I can't see that it would cool well at all. I think this heatsink compounds the cpu heat problems.
Last edited by vertigo on Mon Aug 15, 2005 2:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

vertigo
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Post by vertigo » Mon Aug 15, 2005 2:12 pm

Continuing: ... and moreover, buying a heatsink+fan (of the right type) will put the machine in line for a very effective negative pressure solution.

IsaacKuo
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Post by IsaacKuo » Mon Aug 15, 2005 2:20 pm

vertigo wrote:I think that heatsink could do better if the airflow strikes it from the side, so that the air can move between the fins.
Conveniently, my "radical plan" involves throwing air through that CPU heatsink from the side (flipped rear case fan). The "radical plan" feeds the PSU, CPU, and hard drives fresh air. The GPU should hopefully receive mainly cool air from the front intakes, while the hot air from the PSU and CPU mainly exhaust out of the open 5.25" bays (hopefully).

But I find that layout aesthetically unappealing, because of the gaping holes in the 5.25" bays. Opening up the PCI slots and closing the 5.25" bays would eliminate this eyesore, but would feed the GPU somewhat warmer air.

vertigo
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Post by vertigo » Mon Aug 15, 2005 2:41 pm

Conveniently, my "radical plan" involves throwing air through that CPU heatsink from the side (flipped rear case fan). The "radical plan" feeds the PSU, CPU, and hard drives fresh air.
I saw that :). I was hoping that a similar thing would happen with the exhaust hole, but obviously in that situation it made no difference.

Your plan is good, but you can get by with less fans using negative pressure (although it would cost more money). Your plan requires reversing the psu fan which may not be feasible, because some of those only have mounting holes on one side of the fan.

If he is looking for a solution that incorporates that flower heatsink, your plan is the way to go, but again, I would buy a better heatsink+fan and be done.

PS. Actually, it would be nice to see how well it worked in that arrangement (your plan). If quizzicus is game he can try it out.

quizzicus
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Post by quizzicus » Mon Aug 15, 2005 3:09 pm

vertigo wrote:The cpu would be first in line.
Isn't that how BTX works?

quizzicus
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Post by quizzicus » Mon Aug 15, 2005 3:59 pm

IsaacKuo wrote:2. Flip the fan on the PSU, so it becomes an intake. Get rid of the duct, but leave the front 5.25" bays open (for now).

3. Add a fan back to the rear case exhaust, but flip it so it's an intake.
Won't the back fan and PSU fan be sucking in hot air from the GPU?

IsaacKuo
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Post by IsaacKuo » Mon Aug 15, 2005 5:17 pm

quizzicus wrote:
IsaacKuo wrote:2. Flip the fan on the PSU, so it becomes an intake. Get rid of the duct, but leave the front 5.25" bays open (for now).

3. Add a fan back to the rear case exhaust, but flip it so it's an intake.
Won't the back fan and PSU fan be sucking in hot air from the GPU?
As long as you don't place the computer too close to a wall behind it, air recirculation shouldn't be a problem. There's some vertical separation, and the air leaving the ATI silencer should have some directionality to it.

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Post by BillyBuerger » Mon Aug 15, 2005 6:45 pm

This reminds me of some problems I had with my Palimino 1600+. In that 'case', the problem was that there was no room for cool air to get in. There was a 80mm fan mounted to the front, but no real ventelation where it could get in. The 60mm rear fan with a very restrictive grill didn't help either. I found an old case that had better airflow and my temps are much better now. I have a 120mm front intake fan, an 80mm rear exhaust fan and an 80mm PSU exhaust fan. My system temp is 31C and my CPU is 43C.

The front of your case worries me. There doesn't seem to be any good way for cool air to get in. In which case, it's just recirculating the air inside the case. The exhaust fan might then be pulling cool air in throughh the side vent and out the back without cooling any of the parts. I'm also wondering if the fan over the CPU is causing turbulence around the exhaust fan and keeping it from removing the warm air.

Good luck!

quizzicus
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Post by quizzicus » Mon Aug 15, 2005 6:52 pm

So lousy CPU, lousy heatsink, lousy case. This is what I get for being cheap. Actually the heatsink wasn't cheap, but seemed promising based on what I knew at the time.

K, I'm gonna try Isaac's "Radical Plan" now. I only have 2 fans, so I guess I'll just seal off that other front intake.

frankgehry
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Post by frankgehry » Mon Aug 15, 2005 8:39 pm

Q,

You need more air flow. You can't have a low impedance free flowing case with one 80mm exhaust fan. The psu duct is a good move as your psu is not going to be able to suck enough air out of the case and over the capacitors and coils to make much difference. Your psu will not play the "evacuate the heat" role. It will only ramp up. So its best to keep it quiet by using a duct.

Image

From this photo it looks like you may be able to add another 80mm fan or perhaps 2 92mm fans. A 92mm fan providing the same air flow as an 80mm fan is approximately 6 dba quieter. If you can fit another 80mm or better a 92mm you will be able to move some air. Of course you will need to make sure enough air can flow through the front and perhaps supplement the air supply with a side duct over the cpu. You can get some fairly inexpensive 92mm yate loons that would really help. - FG

vertigo
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Post by vertigo » Tue Aug 16, 2005 1:08 am

Isn't that how BTX works?
I understand the motivation behind it. ATX has a major flaw, the gpu is neglected. This is because video cards weren't heat generators a few years ago.

The solution is getting the same air that cools the cpu to cool the gpu. There's not many ways to do that. Intel has decided to move the cpu to the front of the board, more in line with the gpu. This also benefits them because they cpu's are so damn hot. This means that the air in the case will always be hotter than the air outside the case. Other components will actually run hotter, although overall gpu's should benefit by the greater airflow.

So it's a compromise of the air temperature in the case in favour of a cooler cpu and gpu. The memory is included in the air flow with that tunnel mechanism.

The thing I don't like is that the air in the case will get hotter, and there's nothing you can do about that except to have more airflow. Low airflow ATX systems work because the hot air from the cpu is exhausted immediately, without heating anything else up. I think low airflow BTX systems will be much harder to implement (nigh impossible).

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Post by IsaacKuo » Tue Aug 16, 2005 5:35 am

Hmm...I hadn't noticed that there was such a large offset between the case fan and the CPU heatsink. Some sort of duct to deflect air in the direction of the CPU heatsink would be needed (in order to remove the CPU fan and rely entirely on the flipped rear case fan).

Honestly, this system must be pretty far outside my region of experience. Even my 2.4Ghz Northwood system is cooled by a single 80mm fan undervolted to 5v. I only need to switch the fan to 12v when I do something very CPU intensive (like reencoding video files). My GPU is a Radeon 7200, which had a fan that I simply removed--it gets a small amount of air blown at it from the flipped PSU.

So, I'm just not used to anything that requires so much airflow to cool.

You're running those fans at 12v? I can say without a shadow of a doubt that this system would be shockingly loud to my ears. Maybe the best thing would be to throw some money at the problem, but my gut feeling would be more along the lines of replacing the CPU and video card with something cooler, rather than struggling to acheive sufficient cooling for your hot hardware.

Or maybe this beast could be converted into a closet file server, so you can start fresh for a true "quiet system". For the new system, you could keep the case, the quietest hard drive, some RAM, and maybe the PSU. That leaves the mobo, CPU, and GPU to get new.

vertigo
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Post by vertigo » Tue Aug 16, 2005 8:29 am

Okay, let's not think of spending money just yet. After all, that is an AGP video card and it probably would be better to wait for that card to become obsolete and then to upgrade to PCI-e than upgrading now and buying another AGP motherboard. It seems a waste to spend money on a Socket A heatsink, since that Zalman was probably quite expensive, and another one would be expensive again (and there's no XP/90 for Socket A :)).

Secondly, positive pressure is not going to work. He doesn't have four fans, and even if he did, it's hardly a nice solution. The thing to do is to make that cpu heatsink more efficient.

One of the main problems I think is that the cpu heatsink is not a great design, air blowing from the direction it is can't really move between the fins, also the hot air that comes off scatters in all directions, which means it can't be extracted nicely. The way to improve that is to locate a fan just in front of the heatsink (sitting flush against the board), blowing toward the back of the case. It would blow air through the chipset heatsink and the cpu heatsink. The hot air would collect behind there in one location, near the exhaust fan, hopefully most of it would get evacuated.

That would have two effects, getting the heat into the air more effectively and exausting more hot air. It should have a big impact.

Then, the duct should be removed. Most of the hot air should exit the back exhaust or through the ATI silencer, but just in case not enough is removed, the psu can remove the rest. Regardless, the psu will never move a large amount of hot air, so it shouldn't ramp up too much.

Quizzicus, enough with the 'radical' stuff. Remove the Zalman bracket and try to locate the Zalman fan as I have described (edit: remove the duct too, I did mention it above but not in this summary). The front fan must be an intake, the back fan an exhaust, the psu fan an exhaust. I know this seems laborious, but this will work. Negative pressure will win the day.

(... I did say positive pressure was more technically challenging...)
Last edited by vertigo on Tue Aug 16, 2005 9:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

IsaacKuo
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Post by IsaacKuo » Tue Aug 16, 2005 8:55 am

vertigo wrote:Secondly, positive pressure is not going to work. He doesn't have four fans, and even if he did, it's hardly a nice solution.
He does have four fans. I'm counting the CPU fan.

Honestly, I don't have high hopes for this system but the positive pressure plan I gave is at least DIFFERENT from what he started off with.

The problem with your negative pressure plan is that it really isn't very different from the airflow layout he had to begin with. You may have doubts about the efficiency of CPU cooling with the original CPU fan position, but I tend to doubt moving it would do much--if anything--to improve his CPU and case temperatures. The nearby rear exhaust fan at 12v would have already been doing a good job of removing CPU heated air.

In essense, your negative pressure proposals are fundamentally similar to the original layout. The original airflow was limited by the airflow of the rear case fan plus PSU fan plus ATI silencer. Your negative pressure plan doesn't change this overall amount of airflow. You're hoping that moving the CPU fan will have a good effect, but I tend to doubt it.

In contrast, my positive pressure proposal actually increases the total airflow a lot. My proposal adds two 80mm fans worth of airflow, at 12v. The way quizzicus is trying it out, only one 80mm fan worth of airflow is being added, but it should help.

BTW, I'm not exactly a positive pressure fan. I don't use air filters, and without air filtering there simply isn't a big difference between postive pressure vs negative pressure. I merely find positive pressure convenient for my designs simply because it's easier to "blow" air at a heatsink rather than making well sealed ducts to "suck" air through a heatsink. Also, the sort of fan flipped PSU designs I tend to favor have the small extra convenience of working regardless of whether the case side is open or closed.

If there were more room for more exhaust fans, then I think a traditional negative pressure layout could work best. Even if it were just one more 80mm rear case fan, then airflow through the CPU heatsink could be greatly boosted. As it is, I really think he's pretty close to the limits of what can be acheived with a traditional layout.

vertigo
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Post by vertigo » Tue Aug 16, 2005 9:19 am

The problem with your negative pressure plan is that it really isn't very different from the airflow layout he had to begin with.
I'm counting on the fact (if this is true) that the temperatures got out of hand when he added the duct. When he added the duct, he removed one fan's worth of exhausting. He added the duct because the psu fan was ramping up.

I hope to improve this because with the fan as I have proposed, the hot air will be concentrated between the cpu heatsink and the back of the case, less should be able to get to the psu. Hopefully the psu ramps up less and he is happy not to have the duct there.

Also, I am counting on the fact that the psu fan ramped up because the air inside the case was getting too hot, and it was getting too hot because the hot air wasn't getting to the exhaust, it was dispersing in the case because it scatters off that heatsink. In other words, there was a big difference between the temperature of the air coming off the heatsink and the average temperature of the air being exhausted.

By increasing that, hopefully it will be sufficiently stable to work properly. If it proves unstable, I would actually recommend making the fan hole bigger or cutting a new fan hole, to increase the exhaust capacity (as you noted).

So you say it isn't an improvement. It has the case fan, the gpu fan and the psu fan. Hopefully it's enough. I can only say that I would try it on my own machine, in this situation.
The original airflow was limited by the airflow of the rear case fan plus PSU fan plus ATI silencer.
Just noticed this. He had a duct, remember?

vertigo
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Post by vertigo » Tue Aug 16, 2005 9:31 am

Anyway, that's as much as I can suggest. If it proves unstable, the 'standard layout' is unworkable given that heatsink and that case. Isaac predicts it is unworkable, but I still have some hope.

As for the other plan, the cpu could still benefit from locating the fan where I put it (blowing either direction). Personally, I would rather cut a new fan hole.

Anyway, I've said all I can say. Quizzicus can try what he wants to try, and if he has further questions I will answer them then.

quizzicus
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Post by quizzicus » Tue Aug 16, 2005 10:28 am

I took my power supply apart last night, and the fan only had screws on one side, so I couldn't flip it. Also, the wires to the fan were soldered to the board, so it wouldn't have been a simple matter of rearranging a plug.

Actually, I had already looked at placing the fan next to the HS so that it blows at the back of the case. The problems are that there are 3cm tall capacitors on that side of the HS, and there is no obvious way to mount the fan there. I also looked at putting the fan on tho other side of the heatsink, but the ATX riser is in the way.

Considering that most of this discussion has been about airflow, it seems to me that the Antec p180 would be a wise investment. The PSU gets its own thermal environment, and the CNPS6000, which is more or less a passive heatsink, has 2 120mm fans (a third if I use the bracket) blowing on/sucking from it.

The idea of getting a mobile CPU is an attractive one, but doesn't seem like a great choice in the long run, as it won't let me put off my next upgrade for any substantial amount of time (I've never upgraded within the same architecture before, for this reason). A new heatsink presents the same sort of problem, as whatever heatsink I buy now for my Socket A system will most likely be incompatible with my next system.

The p180 will be a good case for years to come. I'm not worried about BTX completely bumping it off anytime soon, judging simply from the fact that I was able to run a competent AT system through 2002.

I'm not worried about spending a little money, I just can't afford a total overhaul.

Thanks to everyone who replied to this thread. Even though the hardware on hand was unfit for the many ideas you had, I have gained a lot of knowledge, which I will put to work when I get my new case. I will also consider all the points raised when I make my next big upgrade at some point in the future. Needless to say, I was not an SPCR reader when I built this system.

IsaacKuo
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Post by IsaacKuo » Tue Aug 16, 2005 10:49 am

Hmm...my experience with 80mm PSU fans is that they're crammed in so tightly that you can merely flip the fan and it's not going anywhere (no mounting screws necessary).

vertigo
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Post by vertigo » Tue Aug 16, 2005 2:43 pm

Needless to say, I was not an SPCR reader when I built this system.
Believe me, no one is blaming you for anything. You have been very ambitious at trying stuff, more than most people would have been.

Well you know more now about what works and what doesn't. I do think a case is a good investment, as you can use it for a long time still. This current case would always limit you. As you can see, it (pretty much)needs the power supply to suck hot air, which is no good. If it had a side panel fan or a larger case fan you could manage, but as it is it isn't any good.

quizzicus
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Post by quizzicus » Sat Aug 20, 2005 8:08 pm

Well, I thought I'd give everybody an update:

I went and bought the Antec p180 (only $100, used the search box at the bottom of the SPCR page), and am pretty satisfied with the quality. I was surprised at the heft of the plastic tabs on the side panels, being that so many people have complained about them breaking. One would have to be pretty forceful to break these. I did suffer another common problem, though: the door does not sit flat when it is unlocked. Anyway, I ditched the Zalman fan bracket and constructed a cardboard duct that covers my CNPS6000 and shrouds the top fan; that fan and the ATI silencer are the only exhausts in the upper chamber.

What I primarily hear is the top fan. It is set to medium because the CNPS6000 needs a good amount of airflow to do its job. However, the sound from the top fan is only that of air moving. It is far less offensive than the whine of my 92mm Zalman fan. Temps are down, my System/CPU temps are around 40/50 at idle and 45/60 at full load, which is pretty good for this particular CPU/HS combination.

I'll post some pictures as soon as I get my hands on a digital camera.

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