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The Quest for Quiet Computing with Air Cooling
Date: Thursday, January 8, 2004
Author: Rbreb13
Provided By: None
Page: 1 of 5
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This idea started out as a quest for a quieter computing solution without going through the hassles of water cooling. I also wanted to see what could be accomplished with just air cooling.
I'll start with a little background information. I have been into computers for a while now. I have only owned one OEM machine (HP 700 MHz Celery) and I will probably never own an OEM machine again. That experience was enough. I am also very anal when it comes to cooling. I tend to freak out at temperatures most people are willing to accept. I have dabbled in water cooling some and it was a good learning experience. For the most part I have learned to live with the whine of many fans to get acceptable (in my view) temperatures. Recently though I decided to see if this obnoxiously loud environment could be changed and still maintain reasonably low operating temperatures.
At the time I decided to take on this project my system was setup as follows.
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Case
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Chieftec Full Tower
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Motherboard
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Asus P4B533
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Processor
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Intel 2.53 GHz-533
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Memory
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Xtreme DDR PC3000 (1 x 512 Mb)
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Heatsink/Fan
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Swiftech MCX4000 w/YS Tech TMD 70mm/5600 rpm/36 cfm/38 dBA fan
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Video Card
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ATI 9700 Pro w/stock cooling
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Soundcard
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Hercules Game Theater XP
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Power Supply
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Antec TruePower 430 watt
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Hard drives
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2 x 80 GB, 7200 rpm Western Digital "Special Edition" w/8 Mb cache
1 x 160 GB, 7200 rpm Maxtor w/8 Mb cache on a PCI controller card
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Optical drives
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Lite-On 16x DVD, Lite-On 40x12x48 CD/RW
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Other normal stuff
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NIC, floppy drive, rounded cables, etc.
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The Chieftec case came originally with space for 2 intake fans at the front and 2 exhaust fans at the back. From the manufacturer it comes with only 2 cheap fans (1 in back and 1 in front). The cooling was anything but great. I don't remember right off hand what the temperatures were but I modded the case shortly after getting it because of the poor cooling performance. With the provided fans this case was absolutely horrible at trying to get reasonable temperatures. They were noisy and inefficient.
To increase the cooling efficiency I cut 2 80mm holes in the side panel and a 120mm blowhole in the top. I also replaced the low cfm sleeve bearing type fans with better quality and quieter ones.
Upon completion of the modifications I had my case setup like this.
Intake was from the front and the side panel:
Front: 2 x 80mmx25mm Vantec Stealth fans (2050 rpm, 21 dBA, 27 cfm)
Side: 2 x 80mmx25mm YS Tech fans (3700 rpm, 37 dBA, 48.5 cfm)
Exhaust was from the back and the top blowhole, also the PSU exhausts but it mainly only takes care of its own heat and should be discounted.
Back: 2 x 80mmx25mm Panaflo fans (1900 rpm, 21 dBA, 24 cfm)
Blowhole: 1 x 120mmx38mm Sunon fan (3100 rpm, 42 dBA, 108 cfm)
I also added a ThermalTake Tiger i845 chipset cooler (5000 rpm, 23 dBA, 5.1 cfm). I'm not really sure if this helped much but it looked cool. As you can guess from the setup this was not a very quiet system. I tried using the "fan only" headers off the PSU but they really didn't work very well. The 120mm fan never turned on and just sat there and chugged a few revolutions every 5 minutes or so. So I ended up having every fan on at full power. I also tried a rheobus but as I said earlier I'm very anal about cooling and I ended up leaving the fans at full power all the time anyway so I removed the rheobus when I did a system cleaning.
With all this my temperatures were usually in the neighborhood of:
Ambient: 27°c
Case: 28°c
CPU: 31°c @idle, 36°c @ full load
To me these were acceptable temperatures for a P4 processor. With an AMD processor I would expect temperatures about 10°c higher, maybe even a little more. Perhaps I will test an AMD in this case in the future. Oh boy another project!
Okay, enough with the prelude. On to the quest.
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