Opinions on where to locate fans...

techguy

Hi,
First of all see the attatched pic to get a gist of what I am at.
What I want to cool is the heatsink located at D. I want to remove the small fan that is screwed onto it and put A bigger fan onto either the top of the case (A) or the side of the case (B). Whicever on of these fans will be blowing onto the HS and I will have a PCI blower to blow air out of the case.

In your opinion guys Is A or B a better location for the fan? At A i will have ducting onto the heatsink as shown (C)
But at B would it be ok to have a big 90cm or larger fan blowing directly onto the heatsink from the side??

I might be keeping the PSU outside altogether as it is placed very bady for my situation! Looks dont matter anyway.. it will be a server in the corner..

Thanks in advance guys..

oh and sorry about the resolution of the pic,don't know how to resize it..

Anti

Im not being funny, but thats a p3. Just buy a ne pc for 100€.

But if you really must do it:

a: sould be exhaust

b. should be a input fan.

Also at the very frnt of your case there is room for another 80mm intake fan. And you are screwed for a fan for the cpu, as your psu hovers over it. So there is no room. and leaving it outside is just not wise.


Honestly i would reccomend you buy some new hardware, more to a low end celeron of sempron. You ca salvage your hdd and cd rom. The rest is useless.

Endurance Man

Just strap a bloody fan onto the heatsink, 5minute job, you dont need a hectic cooling system for a bloody P3 .

techguy

:rolleyes: its an AMD athlon btw.. a small fan will spin too fast and vibrate and be too loud. because its going to be a server (on all day) i need it be really quiet.. So bigger fans spins slower and less noise..

Chosen

I was using a similar case for my fileserver and the modifications I did were:

- PSU went on the front, under the HDDs area.
- HDDs (3 of them) went in the 5.25" area, with a big & silent 120mm fan keeping them cool and fresh (intake fan)
- Big kick-@$$ heatsink on the A64 3400+ that the PC based on; passive
- Big & silent 120mm exhaust fan on the back (where PSU used to be).


There was a nice flow on the top half of the fileserver, where all the sensitive parts are located (CPU, memory, disks) and the PSU fan was sufficient for the lower half of the case.
The whole thing was very silent (I had to mod the PSU fan for that) and the temps never went over 40-45C for the 1Mb S754 Athlon and 35-40C for the 3x 250Gb HDDs.

techguy

What about this?
- I move the PSU to the area under the HDD
- I put a big 80mm/100mm fan at B, blowin directly onto the heatsink. This fan will be going on the lid of the case but I will put an extension to the lead so I can still remove the case..
- have a PCI fan blowing air out of the case.

Q's
Chosen, what kind of mods did you do to the PSU.
Will the PSU have to have its fan drawing air in from outside, or can it just sit there in the corner and draw air from the input of the input fan and the big whole where the PSU used to be??

Chosen

techguy wrote:

Q's
Chosen, what kind of mods did you do to the PSU.
Will the PSU have to have its fan drawing air in from outside, or can it just sit there in the corner and draw air from the input of the input fan and the big whole where the PSU used to be??

The 80mm fan in the PSU was spinning full speed @12V and it was noisy. I pulled the fan cable out and changed it's individual cables, so that it works @7V through a motherboard connector.
I left the PSU fan act as an exhaust towards the lower front side of the case.

Too bad I didn't take pictures of the setup to show you how I had it working...

techguy

Had you any worries about the PSU fan not giving sufficient cooling properties? I will probably mod the PSU and put it there so.
Also, Do I need a fan over my HDD? It won't be doing any major work??

Chosen

Hey techguy, I just got your PM. Here's how it works:

The psu fan is most likely fed by the 12v line; there should also be a 5v line as well somewhere there

By combining the 12v, the 5v and the ground cables, you can get the following for your fan:
* 12v (standard)
* 7v which comes from 12v-5v=7v
* 5v
* 17v which comes from 12v-(-5v)=12v+5v=17v

The last one is only useful to overclocking freaks with Delta fans that don't care if their €30 fan fails after a couple of months and they definitely don't care about the noise


Here are some pictures; note that on every psu, the yellow cables are 12v, the red are 5v and the black ones are ground (neutral).

12v



7v - Note that no ground is used here; by closing the 12v circuit on the 5v line, the result is 7v. If you do the opposite (by inverting the two fan cables), the result is 17v



5v

techguy

Thanks.. now to get my head around it..