When running at full CPU load during video conversion/encoding, the stock CPU fan speed was running at max speed of 6300 rpm. This create a lot of noise and is pretty annoying, I tried many method to disperse the heat away from the chassis but due to limited space in an enclose cabinet, most of my attempts are not effective. There was even one time that the chassis was so hot that the CPU temp reading was almost 60C with a motherboard temp reading of 58C. The fan was spinning at full speed but the hot air was recirculated inside the chassis which makes the matter worst.
With recommendations from a vendor that sold me the HTPC chassis, I decide to invest in a CPU cooler to solve this heat issue. I was still concern that the hot air would still be re-circulated inside the chassis but this top performance low profile CPU cooler managed to solve all my problems at one go - the fan runs silent, blow the air downwards to cool down the CPU heatsink plus all the surrounding components like chipsets and memory. Best of all, this CPU cooler height is very low and can even be fitted into small form factor (SFF) chassis.
This is the Zalman CNPS 8700 LED CPU cooler with a nice blue led. It have 2 heatpipe connected to a full copper heatsink. The installation was a bit challenging as the nice ASUS designed chipsets heatsink was blocking the clip from going down all the way to lock in the CPU cooler. Luckily the chipset heatsink are adjustable with small springs on the screws so that I can lift it up a little to allow the clip to lock in the CPU cooler. I would not want to repeat this process again in such small space to work with.
This is how it looks like with the Zalman CNPS 8700 LED installed taken with flash and CPU cooler running. The CNPS 8700 LED being a low height cooler, is design to fit all motherboard as mine had only a 5mm space between the copper heatsink to the side chassis fans.
Here is another picture with camera flash turn off to show the cool blue LED.
Overall, I was very satisfied with this Zalman CNPS 8700 LED as it was able to lower BOTH fan noise ( the max RPM is only 2400 ) and both the CPU & motherboard temp. With full load, the CPU temp is at 52-54C with motherboard temp at around 37-40C depending on the ambient temp.
I made the air flow in the following directions, cool air comes in from the black 80mm fan near the hard disk bracket ( with another 120mm fan blowing cool air from behind the tv cabinet ), cool down the hard disk and flow towards the CPU cooler blowing air downwards to copper heatsink and all surrounding components and finally hot air is blown out by the two orange fin fans. From the front of the HTPC chassis near the DVD drive, I can feel hot air being push out from the tv cabinet.
With the current setup, I should be able to run this HTPC 24 hours without worrying about noisy and heat issues.
I have almost identical setup (which i copy from you, thank you), but with ATI HD 5770 in the middle to separate the casing into two part and also blocking the fresh air coming in from HDD side.
ReplyDeleteWhat I did was replacing all of the non-vented PCI L-brackets with Silverstone Aero Slot to maximize incoming fresh air and putting Evercool Fox 1 cooler (remove the L bracket and use 3M double tape, Fox 1 produce less noise than Fox 2 but weaker in air flow) in between motherboard and PSU to suck the cool air (also the hot air from ATI GC) to the CPU side, it helps a lot to cool the ATI GC (dropped by 5-8C) and HDD.
But it won't help to reduce temperature greatly on CPU side (normal load 45C, AMD Phenom X2 550 unlocked to 4 core) as the chasis fan from XQBOX is too weak to suck the air out, and Zalman 8700 air flow in all directions to "cool" chipset and ram, leaving hot temp. at middle part of the motherboard and the chipset heatsink is extremely hot.
I then put a 80MM cooler master silent fan on top of back panel of motherboard (again, using double tape) to suck out the hot air contributed from backside of ATI GC and CPU, now the normal load temp. is about 38-40C.
With this setup, i able to enjoy both Home Theater and gaming station in one PC by adding Genius Wireless Luxemate 810 (keyboard + mouse pointer + MCE Remote) and two wireless Logitech Rumblepad 2.
Future plan: upgrade to BD-Rom for BD movie, but have to save bullet to change AV Amp that support 7.1
Nice mod to reduce the chassis temp...
ReplyDeleteI hv purchased a Sapphire Vapor-X 5770, installed it into the HTPC. This GC seems to be much cooler than other ATI 5770 reference card out there. Not much issues with heat as this card was much shorter and I can run folding@home whole day without any major heat issues.
After I upgraded my desktop PC to ASUS motherboard with Phenom II X2, I moved the 5770 there for a gaming PC and leave the HTPC as an Internet / media purposes. No issues watching HD movies on Media Center Classic homecinema edition with Direct-X Video Acceleration (DXVA).