Case cooling.

[whabang]

I have an Athlon 750 ( Slot A ) in my PC. A nice little computer, not the latest, but still sufficient for my needs.
The problem is the fans; I have two fans on the CPU, one on the GFX board ( Kyro II ), and one in the PSU.
When I turn it on it sounds like a small aircraft.
If I cut the wire for one of the CPU fans, the computer will still run OK, but the CPU temperature will go up to 60-65 degreed C, far to hot IMHO.
I'm thinking of ditching the fan on the GPU, replacing it with a heatsink, but I'm not sure that the chip would survive that.
The PSU is no real problem as it is rather silent.
Unfortunately, none of the fans are temerature controlled.

Does anyone have any ideas about how I could make this baby a little more quiet without spending any cash?

Except the GFX-card, I have the following HW:
C-media 8738 sound card.
Diamond Voodoo 2 3D accelerator.
Viking winmodem ( conexant HSF )
3Com NIC, unknown model.
Chronos videoshuttle II video capture card.

I'm thinking about ditching the NIC, the modem and the capture card to save power and heat.

Any other ideas??? :-?

[KennyR]

I know somebody who used a rheostat dial mounted on the front of his tower to manually control fan speed. He cranked it up when it was running 3D games to stop the board melting itself, and turned it down when he wasn't, since the fans inside sounded like a chainsaw.


Personally, I really don't know how people can put up with this badly designed, heat-blasting crap modern corporations call computer chips. I have an idea - let's go back to the diode. It made as much heat and noise as computers do nowadays. Only problem is you'd need a six storey house to get the same computing power as a Spectrum. ;-)

[KrasH]

whabang wrote:
I have an Athlon 750 ( Slot A ) in my PC. A nice little computer, not the latest, but still sufficient for my needs.
The problem is the fans; I have two fans on the CPU, one on the GFX board ( Kyro II ), and one in the PSU.
When I turn it on it sounds like a small aircraft.
If I cut the wire for one of the CPU fans, the computer will still run OK, but the CPU temperature will go up to 60-65 degreed C, far to hot IMHO.
I'm thinking of ditching the fan on the GPU, replacing it with a heatsink, but I'm not sure that the chip would survive that.
The PSU is no real problem as it is rather silent.
Unfortunately, none of the fans are temerature controlled.

Does anyone have any ideas about how I could make this baby a little more quiet without spending any cash?

Except the GFX-card, I have the following HW:
C-media 8738 sound card.
Diamond Voodoo 2 3D accelerator.
Viking winmodem ( conexant HSF )
3Com NIC, unknown model.
Chronos videoshuttle II video capture card.

I'm thinking about ditching the NIC, the modem and the capture card to save power and heat.

Any other ideas??? :-?

If you want to get a quieter case one way is to get a fan speed for the front of the case (some can be bought for anything from 4 to 16 fans to control) One way of making things silent. I've actually just bought a 4 dial 4-16 case fan controller for my PC. Can't wait till it arrives.

As far as I know, Athlons can take alot of heat. My athlon 1.33 Ghz can withstand upto 95 degrees celcius, but with my fan setup it runs at 45 degrees celcius on average. I did have a cpu fan that was a fast 6000 rpm and it sounded like an airplain. Since that one I bought an AMD  fan and heatsync, and it seems way quieter. There are specially made quiet CPU fans and Heatsync combos available aswell. Another solution seems to be 80mm to 60mm convertors, allowing normal 80mm case fans to be used as a cpu cooling fan. Same/more airflow as the 60mm fans but at way lower rpm, and therefore a little bit quieter.

You could always go for a water cooled system aswell

[jumpship]

@whabang

I have a similar problem, I am running a 1.4GHz Athlon (not the XP variaty) and just sitting here typing this out it is running at 55°C! And if I run WinUAE it goes up to 66+°C once it reaches 70°C the system shuts down to prevent damage to the CPU. I have added in two extra fans to try and get more air in and out but it doesn't seem to want to work. Plus it now sounds like I have a Harrier Jumpjet taking off every time I switch the thing on!

I am going to try adding some thermal heat compounnd to the CPU, try to get the heat conducting better, if not maybe I'll try a copper heat sink, and failing that, water cooling!

[whabang]

I'm gonna try to re-build the PC when I get home  tonight.
The Voodoo2, the capture card ( never really used it anyway... :-D ), the NIC ( not using it anyway :-D ) and the modem ( I haven't sent a fax for months now ) will have to go.
Also, I'm ditching that old 324 meg hard drive which is makin some noise ( and probably heats up the system aswell.
Hmmm... what else?
I'll try to run the CPU with only one fan, more cooling paste on the GPU and on the chipset heasink, I'm going to throw out my secondary floppy drive out the window...
 :-D  :-D  :-D

Hopefully I'm going to end up with a quiet system.
In the worst scenario, I'll have to ditch my Kyro and start using that ol' ISA SVGA card that I have lying around...  :-P

[KennyR]

whabang, you can remove what you like, but I guarantee you 90% of the heat from your system is coming from the CPU and gfx card GPU.

Why not ditch the Athlon board and get a nice PPC? ;-) :-D

[whabang]

KennyR wrote:
whabang, you can remove what you like, but I guarantee you 90% of the heat from your system is coming from the CPU and gfx card GPU.

Why not ditch the Athlon board and get a nice PPC? ;-) :-D

1) Probably, but reducing the load on the PSU will probably cool it down a bit.

2) Voodoo2 cards emits enormous ammounts of heat.

3) I can't afford it! :-D

[Hammer]

@whabang

Tried with brushed finished Aluminium casing for slightly better cooling properties (avoid tin/painted cases)?    

Refer to this link for AMD cooling guidelines .
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/cooling_guide.pdf

[Paul_Gadd]

You need something like the below.

[Blomberg]

@ Paul_Gadd

 :lol:  :lol:

[whabang]

@Paul_Gadd
I doubt that would be very silent... :-)

[odin]

I wonder why that dude is wearin headphones, can't be all that noisy? :crazy: :-D

[jumpship]

I think I have found out why my system was over heating. I removed the heatsink from the CPU and found that it was clogged with dust! As my house mate pointed out, that meant that there was a restricted air flow (doh!).

Second, the thermal compound that was on the bottom of the heatsink had been placed on wrong, so that meant that it was only covering half of the contact part of the CPU.

So after hoovering out the dust from the heatsink (and the case while I was there) and re applying the heat transfer compound, I have got my system from 55°c @ idle to 40°c @ idle. Even at 100% CPU load I only get to 48°c!

So basically check your heat sink is clear and make sure you have got good connection with the heat transfer compound.

You might also want to goto this website: http://www.hmonitor.com/. It will monitor your heat sensors and fan speeds (as well as so a few other things) and also does a log file so you can put that into a spreadsheet and check how you are doing.

[whabang]

@jumpship.
My CPu is down at 35 C when ideling, so I doubt that that's the problem.
The problem is that the fans aren't temperature controlled. They run at maximum speed constantly... :-(

[jumpship]

@whabang

I have tried temp controlled fans and they aren't all they have cracked upto be. I found the one I had soon ran at full speed oncee the system had got to its working temp (about 25°c or so) which kinda makes the whole point of them useless.

What size fan do you have on your CPU?