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I never really did take the time to research the airflow dynamics inside of a typical PC but my general understanding was (in ATX anyway) that cooler air was drawn into the system from the bottom front of the PC and exhausted near the back top as hot air rises which is why PSU are up there. Recently I've been beta testing an MMO and after some CTDs with video artifacting similar to that present in overheating I started toying around with the temperature monitor in my system and after some experiments the results completely contridicted my hypothesis.
I'm running a 3.2 P4 on an Abit AA8-3rd Eye with an authentic ATI X700. The stock fan was replaced with an Arctic Cooler. With Catalyst 5.3 the ATI Tool reads 35 degrees Celsius at idle and 53/54 scanning for artifacts with the two variable control ThermalTake primary and secondary fans running at 1500 RPM. I kicked them both up to 5000 RPM and the temperature rose to 58 degrees. The heck? Turned them both back down and the video card temperature dropped back down to 54 degrees. Then I took the case side panel off. The temp dropped to 51. Why is this happening? Both fans are blowing in the same direction: The front one pulling air in and the back one blowing it out.
Being very puzzled I began to study how the video card GPU fan was designed and how it functioned. I hadn't given it a second thought when installing it but upon checking the exhaust slot I noticed there's virtually no airflow out the back of the system. There is air being drawn into the fan to be blown across the heatsink (I suppose) but how is me even putting the side panel on raising the temperature? I noticed the molding in the cooling unit isn't completely contained all the way through. I thought this was a defect at first but it seems to have been machined this way. I believe I'm going to block up this hole with tape to attempt to direct the air OUT of the case, instead of back into it, and see if I don't get better temperatures.
Every review I read says these Arctic Coolers are so great so I must be doing something very wrong here. Any ideas?
--Fox
I'm running a 3.2 P4 on an Abit AA8-3rd Eye with an authentic ATI X700. The stock fan was replaced with an Arctic Cooler. With Catalyst 5.3 the ATI Tool reads 35 degrees Celsius at idle and 53/54 scanning for artifacts with the two variable control ThermalTake primary and secondary fans running at 1500 RPM. I kicked them both up to 5000 RPM and the temperature rose to 58 degrees. The heck? Turned them both back down and the video card temperature dropped back down to 54 degrees. Then I took the case side panel off. The temp dropped to 51. Why is this happening? Both fans are blowing in the same direction: The front one pulling air in and the back one blowing it out.
Being very puzzled I began to study how the video card GPU fan was designed and how it functioned. I hadn't given it a second thought when installing it but upon checking the exhaust slot I noticed there's virtually no airflow out the back of the system. There is air being drawn into the fan to be blown across the heatsink (I suppose) but how is me even putting the side panel on raising the temperature? I noticed the molding in the cooling unit isn't completely contained all the way through. I thought this was a defect at first but it seems to have been machined this way. I believe I'm going to block up this hole with tape to attempt to direct the air OUT of the case, instead of back into it, and see if I don't get better temperatures.
Every review I read says these Arctic Coolers are so great so I must be doing something very wrong here. Any ideas?
--Fox
As at this point I can only conclude that Arctic Cooler apparently cools via quantum physics by the use of either microscopic singularities or worm holes which transfer the hot air drawn into heatsink into a hypercompressed ball of dense matter or are channeled into another dimension.