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Sat 13 Jan 07 @ 7:02 pm

I've had a few issues with cooling, but now I think I've finally managed to get it sorted. Read my solutions below...(",)

Here's my 'Mercedes' setup. From the front:


You can see that I've removed a floppy drive from the front to allow for airflow into the case. The bottom bit is actually a cover for an inactive USB hub. The front 2 fans sit in the case just underneath the floppy drive behind the main cover of the case. Both these openings allow for air intake at the front of the case.

From the back:



You can see the new power supply, the two fan guards and the fact that I've removed all of my PCI slot covers. The only slot I have getting used is the AGP slot for my 6600gt. This gives extra ventilation at the back as well.

Inside the case:



You can see the fans sitting there allowing for good airflow through the case. Air coming in the front is passed over the memory, motherboard, graphics card (although it has it's own fan anyway), and the CPU. The PSU has twin fans as well.

The tangles of spaghetti mess are my 'neat' versions of the tied up cables to keep them out the way, again improving airflow. The biggest problem with cables is the fact that because I've put four fans in the case, there is quite alot of it all jumbled up there, especially because there are two cables for each fan. I've cable tied even them together as well to try and minimise the amount space they all take up. I'll soon be looking to change my flat IDE cables as I've heard you can get round ones, which again improves air flow.

The two side by side fans at the front also act as hard drive coolers, because they sit directly in front of the hard drives behind the case cover.

Fan guards:



Don't get me wrong, cutting the mesh away from the case was a pain in the neck, considering i didn't have the correct tools, but a bit of patience and you'll be in there. The edges are very badly rugged, but the fan guard covers this fine. Watch out for sharp bits of metal jutting out though - this stuff is lethal!

Fans inside the case:



You can clearly see from the inside of the case that there's no mesh behind the fans. It's really just a plate of thin metal with holes cut in it. Case makers seems to think that this is enough to completely vent a case - not so. Like I said, I managed to reduce my CPU temp by a whole 10 or so degrees...which I'm sure you'll agree is great when it comes to stuff like this.

Fans and fan guards are dirt cheap, so I'd recommend getting as many as possible. I do, however, need to use at least 2 molex plugs from my PSU (with Y splitter on them). In this case, I'm using 3 directly connected to three fans and the other fan is running off the motherboard as normal. I'm not a great fan of splitting PSU molex cables because I think cases can become cluttered, and quite simply I'm not sure if I trust the splitting procedure. My new PSU is good because it has 6 molex connectors, but i'm sure you can get them with 8 if need be. In this setup, I don't use a cd-rom. I can if i need to by unplugging one of the fans for a while, but hopefully shouldn't need to.

At the front, the mesh is still there, but this will hopefully stop too much junk getting sucked up into the fans, so I'll leave it there for now.

You can check what power supply you 'should' be using here. According to the site, with all my stuff hooked up, I only need about 250 watts, but hopefully the 450w psu will keep my Mercedes running for a good while yet.