Cooling my HTPC

[notarat]

I've been using my Asus AT5IONT-I for a few weeks now and, after recovering from a crashed hard drive, I decided I'd make an attempt to cool it a bit better.

Temps before my mods were in the high 40s C on the CPU to low 50s C on the GPU, and those results are measured in a room that never exceeds 74°F.

I pulled the system out of the NXT Rogue case I had it in, and placed it into a Thermaltake V4 mini-tower.

Then I made a few mods to the TT Case to increase cooling.

First up, I cut out part of the front case grille that was in front of the hard drive cage so that there was less restriction of cooling air. Yeah, it's a gnarly job but the only thing I had handy was a pair of wire cutters

I then installed one of those 3-speed Antec fans that came included with the Antec P-180 case.

I set it to medium speed and it is cooling the hard drives.

Temps are >12°C cooler now so I feel satisfied it was a good change

My second mod was to take the plastic fan holder from the P-180 that sits in front of the HDD Cage and use it to mount a cooling fan for the CPU and GPU.

I drilled small holes in the portion that the arrow is touching, and I mounted the fan that was included with the Thermaltake case pointed it down to cool the CPU/GPU.

Temps are WAYYYY lower now, as in 20°C cooler

Given the temperature drops, I think I may overclock this little puppy a bit.

 

[notarat]

My motherboard only gives a few basic overclocking settings so the best I was able to get without upping voltage was a 150MHz overclock.

Any more than 215 on the bus fails to boot so I set it back to stock 1800MHz

I didn't really notice any difference in performance between 1950 and 1800 so I'm just going to leave it stock for now.

 

[CrimandEvil]

My god!! Shrink those pictures down and then maybe people will care.

 

[Activate: AMD]

My god!! Shrink those pictures down and then maybe people will care.

qft. I'm sure what you did was cool and all, but damn

 

[Godmachine]

My god!! Shrink those pictures down and then maybe people will care.

Yea .. seriously those are horribly LARGE pics , I even have a fast connection but those took forever.

Nice temp drop though.

 

[fensterlips]

Maybe we can help when you post smaller pictures but I'm concerned that you solved your problem the hardest way possible.
Why is this overclocked? Is it an HTPC? O/c will run temps up fast and HTPC's don't frequently need this.
With some pictures of the machine that are a bit smaller as well as more info on your build could yield better info. That machine seems a little warm but not impossible.
There's a lot that can be done with fan arrangements, better coolers and inside cleanup that can be a bit more elegant than taking a chainsaw to the case....