HTPC Silent Case Project

[krzywica]

Ok guys so I was so excited to get my Thermalright TRad2 on Friday. It performs amazingly well as it has lowered my temps 30c+ on both idle and load for my 4870.

However, the twin Yate loons seem to blow air right across into my PWM, CPU, and NB area, creating much higher temps for all of those components.

This is a HTPC case and as such is completely silent at the expense of airflow. I think the issue is that I am not getting enough intake of fresh air to sustain the best possible temps.

So I went crazy on www.performance-pcs.com last night and ordered some new stuff.


Airflow of my case currently blowing hot air right onto the CPU.


Plan on putting one of the Nonoxia 80mm fans here. Not sure if it should be a push or pull yet. Thoughts?


Plan on putting another Nanoxia 80mm here to pull fresh air into the case.


Here is the parts list....
1x 140mm Yate Loon Silent Case Fan

3x 80mm Nanoxia FX08 Fans

Thermalright AXP 140 HTPC CPU HS

2x 60mm SilentX IXP Ixtrema Pro Fans


What do you guys think?

Also when I get my stuff in I will be doing a step by step picture log. I plan on making a few holes.

 

[krzywica]

So my girlfriend cleaned the house and I couldn't find the camera for step 2, IE-modding and cutting the case and mounting everything.


Here are some pics and a link to the gallery if you care to take a peek.


Thermalright AXP-140 ---------The cooler is so big I had to move my memory to DIMM's 2 and 4.


AXP-140 and 140mm Yate Loon




One of the Nanoxia F08's. These things move a ton of air and are silent.


CPU temps before mod 38c/75c
CPU Temps after mod 27c/45c

 

[MidnightSensi]

Nice!

I always wanted to try one of those water cooling kits, but when I was interested it was really expensive and kind of troublesome at the time. I guess now they are a lot better and use alternative liquids. But, that's another option you have.

 

[krzywica]

Not really MS....true water cooling is still a huge PITA and not worth it unless you are on the cutting edge of overclocking....which is not my scene anymore

 

[Djizasse]

Is WC worth it? This is one of those questions that are debated over and over again.
It's like debating if auto tuning is worth it.

This was my setup until recently:
AMD Opteron 165
2x1Gb
2x250Gb
8800GTS

All cooled in a LianLi PC6070 with a 360 radiator on top. I got waterblocks on the CPU, disks, chipset and GPU. The system was cool and +-quiet. In two years I only flushed it once. Not really a PITA.

 

[krzywica]

Is WC worth it? This is one of those questions that are debated over and over again.
It's like debating if auto tuning is worth it.

This was my setup until recently:
AMD Opteron 165
2x1Gb
2x250Gb
8800GTS

All cooled in a LianLi PC6070 with a 360 radiator on top. I got waterblocks on the CPU, disks, chipset and GPU. The system was cool and +-quiet. In two years I only flushed it once. Not really a PITA.

Yes....its a case of where your priorities lie.

If you are really into synthetic benchmarks or you want to get that extra .0075 frame per second on that video game then WC is worth it.

But IMO with the CPU and GPU power available today you really don't need that extra fraction of overclocking headroom that WC provides. Air cooling has become very, very good over the last few years and rivals all but the more expensive high end WC setups.

Plus unless you have a house with a basement or garage, or somewhere else to drill a bunch of holes in your case its a PITA.

 

[Djizasse]

That's so true. Air cooling really has come a long way. A big case, a freakin big heatsing and one 120mm fan pulling air on top is very efective. If you plan the air flow correctly you can have an almost silent and cool system.

Looking at your 2 60mm fans makes me want to take both off and put a single 120mm fan outside, with a 60mm to 120mm adapter.
I would also study the possibility of getting a 250mm fan on the top, sucking the air up. A carefully implemented tunnel could pull the air right where it is hotter.

 

[lsiberian]

Nicely done. And I must say I love this section. Those are pictures I understand.

 

[krzywica]

That's so true. Air cooling really has come a long way. A big case, a freakin big heatsing and one 120mm fan pulling air on top is very efective. If you plan the air flow correctly you can have an almost silent and cool system.

Looking at your 2 60mm fans makes me want to take both off and put a single 120mm fan outside, with a 60mm to 120mm adapter.
I would also study the possibility of getting a 250mm fan on the top, sucking the air up. A carefully implemented tunnel could pull the air right where it is hotter.

I wanted to go the route of just a giant 250mm fan on top of my case but a good quality one does not yet exist...the 140mm on my CPU heatsink works extremely well though.

So you are saying to mount an external 120mm fan on the outside in a pull orientation with a louver that would fit 2x60mm----->1x120mm?

 

[Djizasse]

So you are saying to mount an external 120mm fan on the outside in a pull orientation with a louver that would fit 2x60mm----->1x120mm?

Yeah, the louver will also create clearance to access the ports.

Another thing you can do is to make a hole right on top of the CPU heatsink fan and use it to pull the air out. That would be more effective, the air gets out faster. Depending on the success of this option you might even be able to just remove the 60mm pair. You have another side fan.

Modding is fun, there's so much things we can do with a simple case

 

[Sheep]

HTPC cases are so limited in their cooling, I'm surprised a better layout hasn't been made yet. Look at the Silverstone's Raven for example. How long did it take before they realized that heat travels up, and so should the air? The HTPC case needs either ample side to top airflow, or front to back. Since no one wants fan grills on the front of a HTPC case, they need more side air intake options.

My Sivlerstone Lascala 13-B has a port near the CPU, and a mesh screen for the powersupply to get fresh air. I removed the middle HDD cage and put a 120mm Antic Tricool there with some double sided tape. Still, the stock Sapphire cooler on my HD4870 sucks.

SheepStar

 

[Audioholics]

Look at the Silverstone's Raven for example.

Holy cow that case makes me want to get back into modding!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-hDoKZz1QQ

Nice video, if you don't mind listening to Casey Kasem (Shaggy) deliver the review.

 

[jinjuku]

HTPC cases are so limited in their cooling, I'm surprised a better layout hasn't been made yet. Look at the Silverstone's Raven for example. How long did it take before they realized that heat travels up, and so should the air? The HTPC case needs either ample side to top airflow, or front to back. Since no one wants fan grills on the front of a HTPC case, they need more side air intake options.

My Sivlerstone Lascala 13-B has a port near the CPU, and a mesh screen for the powersupply to get fresh air. I removed the middle HDD cage and put a 120mm Antic Tricool there with some double sided tape. Still, the stock Sapphire cooler on my HD4870 sucks.

SheepStar

The drum that I am going to beat is that you need to design your system so cooling as a factor is minimized...

 

[krzywica]

Yeah, the louver will also create clearance to access the ports.

Another thing you can do is to make a hole right on top of the CPU heatsink fan and use it to pull the air out. That would be more effective, the air gets out faster. Depending on the success of this option you might even be able to just remove the 60mm pair. You have another side fan.

Modding is fun, there's so much things we can do with a simple case

Yeah I thought about making a 120mm hole above the CPU, but the solution that I came up with actually works perfectly as the CPU fan is blowing onto the Motherboard which cools the PWM's and SB....all components stay nice and cool as they have direct external air blowing on them. Thats one of the biggest keys and one of the reasons positive air pressure works so good. You can blow the hot air around in the case all you want, but if you don't have enough fresh air coming in you can have as many fans as you want and the system will never stay cool.

 

[Sheep]

The drum that I am going to beat is that you need to design your system so cooling as a factor is minimized...

It's not hard with a normal case. My current case has 4 fans spots. One in the HDD cage, 2 on the rear for exhaust, and one on the side to blow on to the CPU. When you throw a 10inch video card in your case, and have an ATX board, you really run out of room, and the ambient rises quickly.

There is no cold air flowing in the case in any given direction, just the intake for the CPU. I can't even use the HDD fan as the cage is no longer in the computer, and even if it was, the HDD would have to stick out a fair ways. I'm thinking of transferring my HTPC rig into an Antec 900 and putting my old computer into my HTPC case. That way I can have some decent temps, and run the gaming rig in my room.

SheepStar

 

[jinjuku]

It's not hard with a normal case. My current case has 4 fans spots. One in the HDD cage, 2 on the rear for exhaust, and one on the side to blow on to the CPU. When you throw a 10inch video card in your case, and have an ATX board, you really run out of room, and the ambient rises quickly.

There is no cold air flowing in the case in any given direction, just the intake for the CPU. I can't even use the HDD fan as the cage is no longer in the computer, and even if it was, the HDD would have to stick out a fair ways. I'm thinking of transferring my HTPC rig into an Antec 900 and putting my old computer into my HTPC case. That way I can have some decent temps, and run the gaming rig in my room.

SheepStar

I am planning on a 64GB Solid State Drive so a warm HDD is out of the mix. Use a 45Watt TPD Athlon and you can passively cool that. The built in Radeon 3200 on the 780g chipset doesn't get that warm (it is passively cooled).

Modify a 120 MM fan to run on the 5 volt rail and exhaust that case. Been running a setup like that for 2+ years now. Runs great. Runs quiet.

What I am waiting on is nVidia's 1080p solution for the Atom.

 

[lsiberian]

I am planning on a 64GB Solid State Drive so a warm HDD is out of the mix.

I want one of those for my laptop. Those things are just awesome. Especially the Intel ones. Seek time of 0.1 ms. Insane read rates.

 

[Djizasse]

What I am waiting on is nVidia's 1080p solution for the Atom.

I've read the review on Anandtech.
It looks very good. I even like the external power brick.
I would just get a small CF card for the OS and use the network for getting the media.
It's so small, it can fit anywhere, I could even hide it behind my wall mounted LCD.