The toman diaries

PC case Cooling

søndag, februar 06, 2005

Like I said, I just got a new PC.. Not much to write about it, except its a lot better than my previous one :) If you want to know what parts it consist of, look here.

I've always been facinated by physics and technology, and cooling is a physical science.. Cooling a PC efficiently seems like a nice thing to do, and not too expensive either it turned out.

When I first started the PC and ran it for a while, I didn't really notice it was hot, and it probably wasn't either, compared to other untrimmed PC's. But since the case has a hole in the back meant for an 80mm fan and the CPU is almost exactly horisontally aligned with this hole, I started thinking about mounting an air duct to cool the CPU better. I decided not to use another fan, instead I let the cpu-fan do the job of sucking the air in. Now, what should I use for a duct?

A standard solution for ducting seems to be to use, exactly, flexible duct-pipes you would otherwise use in ventilator systems. Surely it works, but getting one with a diameter I neeed would prove to be difficult since the cpu fan is 60mm and the hole in the case was 80mm.

Standing in the kitchen flushing the remaining milk out of a cartoon (we recycle them), I got the idea of using just that, a milk-cartoon. It is about 75mmX75mm, ideally suited if I only use some tape, siccors and some construction skills.

Sorry I dont have a digital camera, so I'll do an ASCII draqing for you:

No I wont, just kidding.

But did it work? I'll let the numbers speak for themselves. This is after the temperature has stabilized after about 45 minutes of running folding@home.

As you can see, the result with the fan blowing the hot cpu air out of the case is far superior to any other solution.