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Hidden Desk Computer
- Thread starter petertew
- Start date
I'd just go with lots of airflow instead of attempting to compress or decompress the air inside the case.
*shrugs*
Perhaps I'm just being silly
It's really more of a space issue. I wanted to make this case tiny and didn't leave a ton of room for cooling save for those two fans. I may have to run the one in front of the video card running full blast though if the heat sinks i ordered for my card don't do the job well enough. Oh, and those heat sinks, which I order at 11am Tuesday, won't be showing up until Monday, even though I selected 3 day UPS. At least Newegg reimbursed me for the shipping costs.
OK, so I finally got my heatsinks for my video card, and I have to admit I was pretty worried none of this would work and then I'd basically be out $150. Thankfully everything worked, better than I had hoped in fact.
Here is what I ordered to make this mod work:
I had looked around for anything that I could use on a low profile card that would adequately cool a 9600GT, and pretty much came up empty handed. There are a number of small heatsinks around for 6800GTs on Newegg, but they all look too puny to cool the card and too loud to make me happy.
In the end I just happened to browse through the memory and chipset coolers; I figured at least I could narrow down some ramsinks, and then I came across the Swiftech MCX159-CU. It looked like it could work and the dimensions looked as though they could maybe fit (thankfully a spec sheet I found via Google made me sure it could fit). I decided to drop another 50 bucks and try it.
The original heatsink was maybe a centimeter tall and worked by blowing a bunch of air through the fins you see in the photo below. The problem with the design is that you have to blow a hell of a lot of air through those fins and thus need a really noisy fan. Here was my card after breaking off the the original fan (you can still see the remnants of the original fan's power lines) and breaking off the heatsink shroud.
Here is what I used to replace the old heatsink. The Swiftech northbridge cooler is big, heavy, and well made. The reviews on Newegg are right about it; the copper pins do bend pretty easily. That aside the cooler is great.
Before I could mount the heatsink itself I had to feed the tall screws through the video card (pic below) however there was a problem; the screws don't fit through the existing holes (there are four of them). I had to tap the holes so the screws would fit through. There was just enough room for that to work...thankfully. If that hadn't worked I'd have been pretty pissed. Anyway, here is the card with the screws coming through and thermal compound applied to the core.
Here is the bottom of the heatsink. The thermal compound shows the heatsink and core made good contact.
Here's the heatsink mounted on the GPU.
Here's the heatsink and RAMsinks mounted with a comparison shot of the old heatsink. The new heatsink is much more efficient at idle, but not quite as good at load; I'll get to that more in just a minute. (Edit: this isn't actually true. I only played TF2 on my old heatsink setup and it barely broke 62c. The new heatsink performs about the same in TF2. I'd made this comment after playing HL2:EP2, and the card gets substantially hotter in that game).
Finally, here is the video card with the new heatsinks mounted in the case. Notice the small fan on the top of the card.
The heatsink isn't good enough to cool passively, which at first made me but then I plugged in the tiny Sunon fan it came with and was . The reason for the is that the fan is nearly silent, and if I had it secured to something it would be totally silent. Plus it dropped my temps down to 51c at idle. Even with the stock cooler my idle temps were closer to 57c.
At loads the story is a little different. When the card gets going it hits about 78c (the highest I recorded playing HL2:EP2 for about 20 minutes). On the stock cooler the hottest it got was in the mid to high 60's. Here's the trade off though, the stock cooler at load sounded like a hair dryer, at load this fan is just as silent as it is at idle. I may post this mod in both the home theater section and video card section of the forum.
I can now operate my computer in near silence (the cpu fan is still a tiny bit loud) and don't have to worry about it getting any noisier when I fire up a game. I'm as happy about that as I am about the idea of mounting this case up under my desk.
Here is what I ordered to make this mod work:
I had looked around for anything that I could use on a low profile card that would adequately cool a 9600GT, and pretty much came up empty handed. There are a number of small heatsinks around for 6800GTs on Newegg, but they all look too puny to cool the card and too loud to make me happy.
In the end I just happened to browse through the memory and chipset coolers; I figured at least I could narrow down some ramsinks, and then I came across the Swiftech MCX159-CU. It looked like it could work and the dimensions looked as though they could maybe fit (thankfully a spec sheet I found via Google made me sure it could fit). I decided to drop another 50 bucks and try it.
The original heatsink was maybe a centimeter tall and worked by blowing a bunch of air through the fins you see in the photo below. The problem with the design is that you have to blow a hell of a lot of air through those fins and thus need a really noisy fan. Here was my card after breaking off the the original fan (you can still see the remnants of the original fan's power lines) and breaking off the heatsink shroud.
Here is what I used to replace the old heatsink. The Swiftech northbridge cooler is big, heavy, and well made. The reviews on Newegg are right about it; the copper pins do bend pretty easily. That aside the cooler is great.
Before I could mount the heatsink itself I had to feed the tall screws through the video card (pic below) however there was a problem; the screws don't fit through the existing holes (there are four of them). I had to tap the holes so the screws would fit through. There was just enough room for that to work...thankfully
. If that hadn't worked I'd have been pretty pissed. Anyway, here is the card with the screws coming through and thermal compound applied to the core.
Here is the bottom of the heatsink. The thermal compound shows the heatsink and core made good contact.
Here's the heatsink mounted on the GPU.
Here's the heatsink and RAMsinks mounted with a comparison shot of the old heatsink. The new heatsink is much more efficient at idle, but not quite as good at load; I'll get to that more in just a minute. (Edit: this isn't actually true. I only played TF2 on my old heatsink setup and it barely broke 62c. The new heatsink performs about the same in TF2. I'd made this comment after playing HL2:EP2, and the card gets substantially hotter in that game).
Finally, here is the video card with the new heatsinks mounted in the case. Notice the small fan on the top of the card.
The heatsink isn't good enough to cool passively, which at first made me
but then I plugged in the tiny Sunon fan it came with and was . The reason for the is that the fan is nearly silent, and if I had it secured to something it would be totally silent. Plus it dropped my temps down to 51c at idle. Even with the stock cooler my idle temps were closer to 57c. At loads the story is a little different. When the card gets going it hits about 78c (the highest I recorded playing HL2:EP2 for about 20 minutes). On the stock cooler the hottest it got was in the mid to high 60's. Here's the trade off though, the stock cooler at load sounded like a hair dryer, at load this fan is just as silent as it is at idle. I may post this mod in both the home theater section and video card section of the forum.
I can now operate my computer in near silence (the cpu fan is still a tiny bit loud) and don't have to worry about it getting any noisier when I fire up a game. I'm as happy about that as I am about the idea of mounting this case up under my desk.
OofC_S7v7N
Gawd
- Joined
- Apr 9, 2007
- Messages
- 723
I might have done this a little different than you but IT WORKS!
I need one of these to replace this laptop on my desk to free up desk space.
I need one of these to replace this laptop on my desk to free up desk space.
Ive seen where someone mounted a shelf under there desk and set their laptop on it, then used an external monitor. Would probably be a little easier than making a full blown case like the OP.
matrix563
Fully [H]
- Joined
- Sep 1, 2006
- Messages
- 19,136
awesome
OofC_S7v7N
Gawd
- Joined
- Apr 9, 2007
- Messages
- 723
I dont want to make my laptop "permanent" just be able to pick it up and go of the desk or where ever it may be.
D
Deleted dick member 164665
Guest
That chipset cooler looks great on the video card. Nice idea with that mod. Have you tried mounting that little fan so that it pushes air through the heatsink in a parallel direction to your intake fans rather than perpendicular? It probably won't make a huge difference, but it may help some. Great build though, its a great idea.
I'm having a bit of a problem doing that atm because of where the mounting pins are located on the video card, but that is definitely what I want to do in the end. I'm going to have to try to fabricate some sort of mounting bracket, but the problem is I don't have the right kind of tools for that. We'll see. I've got a lot of time off starting tomorrow around 2 so hopefully I'll be able to figure something out.