General airflow recommendations needed

I

IDversusEGO

Supreme [H]ardness
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Oct 30, 2003
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I have an Antec vsk2000 that I am trying to bring the noise down on while maximizing airflow. Currently I have this...

Corsair 450hx
Intel q6600 CPU
Coolermaster 212+ w/ stock fan
gigabyte 5830 stock cooling
NZXT Sentry 2
2x Yate Loon D12SL-12 intake fans
1x Yate Loon D12SL-12 exhaust fan

here is a crude drawing of the case. I am realizing now that I should have labeled some stuff. Whatever. the big rectangle at the top is the PSU, the smaller squares denote 120mm fans. darker gray boxes are my drive cages. a note, my HDD sits on a foam block on the floor of the case so all the lower cages are completely empty. The green thin rectangle is my 5830.

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For normal computing I only run the exhaust and lower intake fan at 40% and turn off the upper intake. Its pretty low noise, but I want it less. My goal is to have near silent for basic computing and low noise for gaming. I am ok with eliminating fans as long as my temps are good.

I am building my wife a new PC so she is going to get my 212+ and one of the YL fans. I am going to replace the 212+ with a Mugen2.

The 5830 is by far the loudest thing in here. I am going to get an S1 or Scythe Mushashi to take care of it. Since I am getting rid of one of the fans I thought about upgrading it to something better...like the nexus or a noctua, to reduce my basic operation noise.

any opinions or suggestions are welcome but here are a couple of questions or scenarios I have already thought of.

1) I am going to use speedfan and coretemp to try and get some readings. I really don't care about case temps as long as the CPU, GPU, and HDD are cool enough. which brings me to my question...what is cool enough? How low should my temps be at idle? I am digging around the web for full load temps.

2) if I built a CPU duct to direct the warm air off the HSF directly out of the exhaust fan opening, could I remove the exhaust fan and still get effective case cooling? This would leave the ducted CPU fan and the PSU fan as the only exhaust. I would consider doing push/pull on the mugen to make the CPu cooling more effective in this scenario. the idea would be that the fans could run even slower being right on the HS and still cool well.


3) duct the lower intake to force 100% of its airflow into the video cards space and leave PCI slot covers off for rear exhaust. This would make the video card cooling more efficient and also act as an exhaust, taking some of the duties off of the CPU fan and PSU fan.

The extra black lines indicate partitions or ducting...

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or

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IMO your duct ideas are excellent and before I scrolled down and saw you are ahead of me I was going to suggest ducting the cpu heatsink/fan and rear fan. Not sure if the lower duct would buy you anything but the fun is in the experimenting and a few minutes with some cardboard would tell the tale.

Idle temps not important other than a good guide the heatsink mounting is correct. its load temps that really matter.

Try Realtemp its what most of us use, accurate and easy to install and use, no bloat, and it should report your GPU temp as well and supports logging of temps.

All the C2D are almost impossilbe to damage with heat, most of us call a stop to OCing/adding Vcore somewhere in the lower to mid 80's. Coretemps "delta to TjMax" feature will tell you how many deg C you are away from the point the cpu will begin to throttle to reduce heat. In theory you can go right up to 1C from TjMax 24x7 but most of us like a 15 to 20 deg of headroom. But it is all your call on how hard you want to push it. Unless you run Vcore up past 1.4 - 1.45 volts you cant kill it. Intel absolute max Vcore is 1.55 volts but since the cpu voltage requlation circuitry allows for a .05V overshoot the "real world" max is 1.5V and again most of us like a bit more margin and usually there is little or no improvement in OCing past 1.45 anway. Now you will find plenty of people that run the systems balls to the wall etc. Its your stuff and your call. But one has to wonder at the added stress to the system that creates for a couple of 100MHz.

If you are not OCing (a crime as 3.2 GHz makes the Q6600 sing compared to stock 2.4 and it will do it forever) it is going to be almost impossible for you to get anywhere near a troublesome temp unless there are mounting issues with the Heatsink/Fan assembly.

Experiment away and have fun.

If you really want to play try turning the heatsink/fan so it blows up into the PSU and flip the top rear fan around so it is intake. But wait tilll you get Realtemp going and establish a good baseline of data so you can be sure what you try helps or not.


Hmmm if you try the bottom duct/dam be sure to try leaving the slot covers on as I think that would help force air into the video card air intake.

The other thing that springs to mind is a lot of fan noise is due to air being blown or sucked through the stamped out of case metal fan grills. On my personal machines the first thing I do is cut those out with avaiator sheetmetal snips, The front fans are coverd by the fascia so looks is not critcal but I try to do a better job with the rear but this is before the board is mounted so I dont have to worry about metal shaving inside the case. I use a round file to clean up the hole and use a wire grill. It is susprising the reduction in "airflow sound". Your fans might be running slow enough its not an issue, I tend to run mine at higher speed levels than you mentioned as I am almost deaf from a series of Grateful Dead and Supertramp concerts in the dim past.

I like your ideas - have fun. Whatever works, works.
 
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not OCing yet. I want to wait until I have performance issue, then it will be like a free upgrade. Right now everything chugs away just fine for me. If I can get low enough temps with low noise then maybe I will go ahead and do it.

I am only going to leave one of the slot covers off. whatever ends up being equivalent to the video heatsink.

funny, I was shopping for metal snips yesterday. My case could benefit as could the Coolermaster 341 I am doing for my wife.

Here is the setup I am trying first...

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No CPU duct and the lower section is completely cut off from the top as is possible. I dropped the duct for now because of time and concern over a dead spot it would create at the north bridge.

The cooling setup would consist of the following:

2 YL 120mm fans
Mugen 2 with single stock fan
Accelero S1 passive on 5830
120mm fan in the Corsair 450

This eliminates 1 intake and 2 GPU fans from my current setup, as well as upgrades the CPU cooler. I'll probably still build the CPU duct and do some A/B comparison. I imaine if I could contain the heat off the heatsink to the duct and the GPU to the lower section the rest of the case should stay cool on its own.
 
If you are trying to minimize fans. I would go with 2 intake fans and 1 exhaust fan. Don't count your psu as an exhaust fan. I find that going with a positive pressure system decreases temps overall as well as reduces dust inside the case. But then again my psu does not breath in the case air. It breathes in directly outside air, then vents it out the back independently.
 
I ran prime95 for on hour in current setup. My peak temps at 100% load according to CoreTemp are below:

Tj. Max 85C
Core 0 - 47C
Core 1 - 48C
Core 2 - 44C
Core 3 - 45C

I am playing with real temp, trying to find how to check gpu temps. how to I stress the GPU to 100% for load temps?
 
removed the rear exhaust and turned off the upper intake and am getting the following max temps using realtemp with prime 95 stressing cores at 100%...

Core 0 - 56C
Core 1 - 57C
Core 2 - 52C
Core 3 - 52C
 
Stress the GPU with FurMark, and use GPU-Z to monitor temps - that program lets you view both GPU core temps and VRM temps, which are often different.

OCCT also has a GPU stress program, but it appears to only stress a single GPU. That may not be an issue for you. OCCT seems to stress VRMs more than Furmark, while Furmark often gets higher core temp readings for me.
 
Also, I'm not sure about the capabilities of the Sentry, but getting a controller that you can customize air flow profiles based on temperatures would let you fine-tune your fan speeds to be as quiet as possible.

I went with the Koolance TMS-200, but that has water-cooling functionality you may not need. You could look at the Aquatune Aquero or mCubed T-balancer as possibilities. Both have software interfaces that let you customize the fan profiles, letting you be precise as to when the fans are idling at low speeds (or off) and at what temp they kick up the RPMs for cooling.
 
I can program the sentry but usually dont. I find that the controllers rely on temp probes and I dont care what the air around it is, I specifically want to monitor CPU and GPU temps. Now if there is software that I can use with hardware controller, maybe. Would have to be able to pull those temps and use htem to adjust fan speeds. I have taken a look at the speedfan application but havent figured out how to use it yet. if anyone knows of a tutorial I would love to be able to just use the mobo fan headers and speedfan. cleaner look, programable and uses core temps and GPU temps...of course, I GPU doesnt show up on speedfan for me.
 
Not all MB headers can be manipulated with Speedfan, but there is a helpful Help file included with the Speedfan application that can walk you through setup, and the website has some FAQs.
 
the help guide is very...helpful. The IP35 is listed as a compatible motherboard and I have an IP35E so it should be fine. I just picked up a couple of goodies and will be diving in while my wife is at the Twilight marathon tonight :rolleyes:
 
Once I got Speedfan configured correctly, I put it to start minimized and now start it via a Task, scheduled to start at logon. Works pretty well. Doesn't need elevated priveleges.
 
Installed my toys and got some good results.

Accelero S1 on 5830, passive - GPU idle is up, but not huge. from 47C to 54C. Still have to setup furmark to do load testing.

Mugen 2, single stock fan - ran prime for an hour with following 100% load peak temps:

peak temps under 100% load for 1 hour
Core 0 - 50C (-6)
Core 1 - 52C (-5)
Core 2 - 48C (-4)
Core 3 - 49C (-3)

stumbling through speedfan now. I dont like it. Its more than what I am looking for I think and the associations dont follow the same logic I would use. I think I am going to dumb it down some and go pick up a trusty fan controller.
 
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