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The Rattler
Cool Cases from ANTEC. (I chose the black one.. ) Overclocking makes everything run hotter and to avoid excessive heat (or any, now, for that matter) I grabbed 3 fans and went to work!
This was where I was going to start - It's from www.whirlpool.com But then, I thought that might be too much, so, I guess it's the 3 fans, for now.
I couldn't put a "Blow Hole" in the top because of this handle...
Here's the stock fan housing - not much good, too restrictive and no opening through the front of the case. (bad idea for such a well designed case!) But I did come up with an idea for that housing!
Ya think?
The stock ANTEC case has a very cool duct that blows cool air right onto the chip area. (great design)
Here's the mouth of the beast! But I still needed to add in these three fans, seeing as I paid about 12 bones for each of them.
Here's my handy dandy hole saw from Sears (about 14 bones) the drill was a gift from my woman!
I carefully laid out the fans and tacked them into place using duct tape, once I was sure they'd fit, I started sawing....
Here's the case, nearly ready to go. I used some of that plastic snake tubing (which I'd always meant to use on that snake behind the desk but never got around to it) to keep the wires dressed (this unfortunately came as an after-thought when I first fired it up only to hear a horrible grinding sound as one of the plugs was scrapping against the exhaust fan!)
One more thing, while I was trying to be cool, I also found a great use for my old PIII 800 fan - INSTANT VOODOO COOLER! With a few nylon cable ties, she was good to go. The voodoo runs well overclocked using the Powerstrip software.
Notice the spacers/shims I made (from some old screws from some IKEA curtain rods) to keep the fan from grinding on the chip. *This card is so cool now, that the sink is never even WARM to the touch!
Here's the completed case, through the translucent side, you can see that there's nothing blocking the fans. The bottom two suck in air, while the middle fan extracts the heat from the chip area. There's also the power supply fan which acts to scavenge any heat left in the upper area. (Again, a blow hole would have worked better, but this case didn't allow for that)
And here's how it looks on my desk. There's also small holes on the sides, and you can feel air coming from them - indicating that the case is pressurized and that all that cold air sucking is working well. Remember there's a balance, you don't want to have the fans working against each others so I tried to approximate and so far it works. This puppy runs cool.... The chip never gets hotter than 23C and the system has never been hotter than 23/24C - ish. *Average is 18.5 TO 21C for the CPU and 19-21C for the System! Not bad, eh? THIS JUST IN!
I added a drive cooler (now when my second drive for raid arrives, I'll have to get another - When will it stop?!?!)
These are gourmet food scissors - great for home projects NOT involving food - you can get them at Target and I figure if they'll cut CHICKEN BONES they'll cut nearly anything, this side of metal! (And they do!) Now that I have all these induction fans, I wanted to filter them, these are just lil' filter/grilles and rather than have to re-drill, I used Velcro. (Black color would've been better but you couldn't see it in the photos, so I used White as that's all they had! LOL) The Linksys DSL router / firewall and the USB Port Nic adapters rock! (Not only are they cool lookin' but they WORK great,too!!)
Next up - 1200 BLACK MAMBA! Abit Kt7 Raid, Mushkin PC150, Dual Maxtor 20g's 7200rpm's (now as low as 129 on the net!) Creative G-Force Ultra, Creative Platinum 5.1 wrapped in a Fongkai 320 Case (and a lot of SUNON fans!)
Btw - check out these all aluminum cases at www.coolermaster.com. Benchmark your system at www.madonion.com . Ciao! Also - Check out Rasta's economical cooling solutions at: /msnhomepages.talkcity.com/MSNGamingZone/rasta123/cool.html |
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