My system so far & P180 GPU chamber design ?

jackal2513 · Post by **jackal2513** » Mon Dec 18, 2006 8:08 am

well, looks like ive sorted my CPU cooling in my P180. Tried various combinations of fans at the rear of the case and ended up with just 1 exhaust Nexus at 7v in the rear of the case and a huge dividing duct runinng from the bottom edge of the rear fan across to the bottom of the lowest 5.25 bay. in this way the cpu and mosfets are in their very own chamber.

Cooler is a Ninja on a 3.06 P4. With 0.1v undervolt, the cpu is around 39C idle and 57C Prime95 load. Ambient room temp is between 22-24c. After 2 minutes of stopping the load the temp i sback to around 44C. I am quite stunned by those temps and more than happy given that there is just one 7v inaudible fan up there & esp. as i know from past systems that my Gigabyte board overreads a bit on the cpu core temp. Also, the case temp does not heat up under load because the hot air is efficiently removed from the case. Undervolting makes a massive difference, around 7C on load in my system. Potentially i still could undervolt some more as well.

Incidentally, if i also switch the rear top intake nexus on at just 7v then cooling is dramatically affected and my load drops to 49C max. The extra noise with this top fan on is almost negligible. I cant hear it unless its dead of nitght and my kitchen door is closed and my boiler is not humming. It might be nice to just keep that fan on there and get it controlled to come on under heavy loads. having said that prime95 operation is way beyond anything normal real world use that my cpu will see so maybe there is no real point.

Now my VGA temps are a different story. Now that i have a huge piece of cardboard just above the GPU and isloating the VGA in its own middle chamber, well the thermalright V1 heatsink is directly facing and almost touching this piece of cardboard so its not getting cooled at all and i dont have a fan on it. With just a small papst blowing onto the underside of the card i was getting idle vga temps of 77C ! The card is an X850 XT PE.

So basically I have to ebay the thermalright V1 and today i bought a zalman 900 seeing as it worked quite well at low fan CFM on the SPCR roundup. Also this faces downward and does not snake up to the topside of the card like the V1 so there will be plenty of space around it and plenty of air passing over it.

Thing is, I have been thinking about the design of this GPU chamber and wondering whats the best way to go about it. I intend to swap out the fan on the 900 with a nexus 80mm and run that at 7 or maybe 5v. But would people recommend that I also have another fan producing some general airflow through the middle GPU chamber ? If the only fan there is the fan on the Zalman cooler then surely any hot air wont really be removed that well and you could just end up with a cloud of bad air around the whole graphics card (remember it cant rise as there is one long piece of card there. The Zalman VF900 fan just points straight into the copper fins so it doenst facilitate air movement through the case. Should i add an intake fan in the "middle" position on the end of the removeable HDD bay ? Or maybe its better to follow the negative pressure rule and remove the blank PCI expansion bay strips attach a small exhaust fan there sort of mounted on the outside of the case. Another idea is to try the Zalman completely passive, have an exhaust fan at the rear and some duct tubing from the front fan intake to the zalman.

all feedback welcome. be interesting to hear from any other successful VF900 owners.

bsdie · Post by **bsdie** » Mon Dec 18, 2006 11:26 am

Check out this thread:

viewtopic.php?t=33530

I did something very similar (with lost of inspiration from this site).

jackal2513 · Post by **jackal2513** » Tue Dec 19, 2006 8:59 am

zalman VF900 installed at 5v

idle GPU now 35C

will experiment with disabling the zalman fan altogether and installing just one 92mm exhaust fan in the custom vga chamber