Resolved Heat is the enemy, was: $4 and I'm happy!

[eyoungren]

You can build your own for probably about $30 each, probably less for more. That's what I plan to do.

Yeah, it's just a matter of the right time for me. We live paycheck to paycheck (I am the only one working) and one check is for the rent each month and one check for the bills and anything else. Doesn't leave much, especially when you have other unplanned bills such as medical copays and such (one of the reasons I own PowerPC Macs and not Intel).

It's also getting down there and getting the parts (my local Fry's Electronics or Radio Shack) then figuring out how to put it all together. The first one would be my test pancake of course so that will be the hardest.

 

[MisterKeeks]

Yeah, it's just a matter of the right time for me. We live paycheck to paycheck (I am the only one working) and one check is for the rent each month and one check for the bills and anything else. Doesn't leave much, especially when you have other unplanned bills such as medical copays and such (one of the reasons I own PowerPC Macs and not Intel).

It's also getting down there and getting the parts (my local Fry's Electronics or Radio Shack) then figuring out how to put it all together. The first one would be my test pancake of course so that will be the hardest.

It's actually pretty simple, people have designed PCBs (printed circuit boards) for it, so you just need those, an ADC plug, a DVI plug, power plug, and a 24v laptop power supply.

 

[robertdsc]

Once I get the converters I can run 5 displays. What I WANT, is 5 20" Hi-Def Cinema Displays (the acrylic ones).

I don't believe the 20 inch had a HD version. The ones I've seen are 1680x1050. The acrylic HD monitor I have is 1920x1200.

I also have a 23 inch acrylic rated at 1600x1024. I really really really wish I could trade this for a 1920x1200 version.

 

[eyoungren]

I don't believe the 20 inch had a HD version. The ones I've seen are 1680x1050. The acrylic HD monitor I have is 1920x1200.

I also have a 23 inch acrylic rated at 1600x1024. I really really really wish I could trade this for a 1920x1200 version.

Yeah, you're right. I meant the 23" version. And given the setup I have now, when I finally achieve my dream it will be six.

 

[Altemose]

Yeah, you're right. I meant the 23" version. And given the setup I have now, when I finally achieve my dream it will be six.

Are you trying to buy a 23" model now?

 

[eyoungren]

I wish! About all I can really afford for anything right now is free.

The last binge I was able to go on had my 20" at $30 with $30 shipping. Great price, but I can't afford that right now. Too, it's also a matter of getting the ADC/DVI converters in place as well.

This whole thing is a long term project. I see it taking a couple of years as cash and being able to justify it to my wife permits.

 

[eyoungren]

So, heat is still an issue, even with the 120mm fan I put in the bottom. That fan has reduced heat by about 10º but my drives are still hitting temps around 109-111º.

So, I went and got some HD coolers. Now I'm topping out at 106º for the boot drive and 100º for the secondary drive.

Here's what I bought: http://www.ebay.com/itm/271758534343?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT

$5. They work good enough, but I will probably replace them with better one's at some point.

Now, it's also time to start turning to cleaning up the mess inside the case (again) and making it all look nice.

*MODS* Not my auction!!!

 

[poiihy]

Wow this thread is huge...

Why don't you just increase the speed of some fans to make it cooler? Or do you want it to be quiet?

 

[eyoungren]

All fans are operating at max speed. The major problem is that the Quicksilver case was never designed to handle a full load in all four PCI slots and the AGP slot.

At least not with what I have in there anyway.

Apple appears to have designed the case to handle the heat of it's dual 1.0Ghz processors, plus a few extra low heat cards and maybe an extra drive.

I've got a SATA card with two SATA drives, a 1.2GHz processor, three video cards (one which needs Molex power) and a FW/USB card.

The space is already tight and I've knocked a hole in the bottom and fitted it with a fan.

I did do a little rearranging last night and the hard drives are now about 7º cooler (both under 100º).

The main thrust of this thread however, dealt with trying to get my dual CPUs stable at 1.8ghz and it just wasn't happening.

I put that down now though to the poor design of that processor.

 

[Cox Orange]

I lost track somewhere... did you yet test a new PSU? A PSU with active PFC will run cooler itself, but since it will also have to suck out the warm air of the QS, you will perhaps have to built in a faster fan (if that is possible) inside the PSU. The Apple PSU is still a hot part I imagine.

another thing, maybe drill holes in the bottom in the area between the front and the 120mm fan. So maybe the fan can get some more "new" cool air. (but I imagine it will collect a lot of dust, too). Or drill more holes in the bottom under the HDDs.

 

[eyoungren]

I lost track somewhere... did you yet test a new PSU? A PSU with active PFC will run cooler itself, but since it will also have to suck out the warm air of the QS, you will perhaps have to built in a faster fan (if that is possible) inside the PSU. The Apple PSU is still a hot part I imagine.

another thing, maybe drill holes in the bottom in the area between the front and the 120mm fan. So maybe the fan can get some more "new" cool air. (but I imagine it will collect a lot of dust, too). Or drill more holes in the bottom under the HDDs.

No, I replaced the fan inside the PSU with a higher CFM fan. That's all I did there.

I have all the drive holders and bottom plates stripped out of the bottom. I even have the shield that covers the speaker removed. I did all that to both gain space and allow me to drill the hole in the bottom for the 120mm fan.

There are already existing square holes in the bottom of the case that because I have removed the bottom plates now are uncovered. That's allowing fresh air in per your suggestion.

The rearranging I did last night was to shove one of the drives with it's cooler into the slot where the ZIP drive would be. Ultimately, I'm going to need to sort of cage or something here (support) but for now it's doing fine. My main drive is standing vertically and blasting it's hot air towards the big fan in the bottom.

I think, at least with my Sonnet 1.2 CPU I've finally nailed this though. Right now I am typing this in T4FX and streaming radio in iTunes. With everything I've done, both drives are below 100º (99º and 97º respectively). I am very comfortable with that considering it's only about 4º warmer than the temps on a cold boot.

 

[eyoungren]

Continuing evolution…

So, got another wild hair today and decided to do some more modifications.

Removed the front speaker (I have Apple Pro speakers, thanks RedCroissant) and hooked up a 80mm fan to draw air into the case across the hard drives (effectively blowing the heat from the HD coolers back towards the main case fans). It's got a blue led so chose that one specifically because of that.

Had to modify the cage that's designed to hold really long PCI cards and the airport card – with a hacksaw. It was running right into the fan.

So far I like it.

Edit: Woo HOO!! That brought me down about 8 degrees!!!

 

[poiihy]

So, got another wild hair today and decided to do some more modifications.

Removed the front speaker (I have Apple Pro speakers, thanks RedCroissant) and hooked up a 80mm fan to draw air into the case across the hard drives (effectively blowing the heat from the HD coolers back towards the main case fans). It's got a blue led so chose that one specifically because of that.

Had to modify the cage that's designed to hold really long PCI cards and the airport card – with a hacksaw. It was running right into the fan.

So far I like it.

Edit: Woo HOO!! That brought me down about 8 degrees!!!

OOooh that looks niice..
But I wouldn't think an 80mm fan would be able to draw much air through that tiny hole. Maybe a 60 or 50 or 40 mm fan would be better, but you said it brought you down about 8 degrees, so it must be working...

Have you thought about centrifugal fans for your Quicksilver? They're slim and suck in air from the top and blow air out from the side. They are often useful in some cases where axial fans aren't.
This is what they look like:



The one on the left is the rare kind where the output ramps open outward, and the one on the right is the common type of centrifugal fan. The NMB-MAT fans were commonly used in DELL computers. I have 3 of the fans in the picture on the left, and each has a heatsink attached. They are monsters and very powerful. Bunnspecial used one of those fans in his Quicksilver, in the zippy bay.
I noticed your zippy bay is empty. It would be great for a centrifugal fan, and it would draw air away from the hard drives.

Note: 4 wire fans like the one on the right are PWM fans, meaning the speed is controlled with a PWM signal on the 4th wire, instead of varying the voltage. Lowering the voltage to lower the fan may cause the fan to not work properly, or work oddly, because they have fancy ICs built-in. The proper way to do it is by using a PWM controller like this, but it's a little pricy. I've tested my fans with low voltages, and they function like they normally would, but slower. The fan speeds up much slower. You may be fine with this though.

----------

I see that you have a bit of a wire mess. If you clean that up well then the airflow would improve significantly. Those large hoses protecting some of the wires are wide in diameter and block airflow a lot.

Rather than have the wires floating in mid-air like that, what I would do is I would route each wire along the sides of the case, so it does not block any airflow (or anything else) at all. You may need some extensions and/or soldering skills and it may take a lot of work to reorganize it, but I think it would be worth it.

 

[bunnspecial]

I see that you have a bit of a wire mess. If you clean that up well then the airflow would improve significantly. Those large hoses protecting some of the wires are wide in diameter and block airflow a lot.

Rather than have the wires floating in mid-air like that, what I would do is I would route each wire along the sides of the case, so it does not block any airflow (or anything else) at all. You may need some extensions and/or soldering skills and it may take a lot of work to reorganize it, but I think it would be worth it.

A little bit of turbulence is not always a bad thing when it comes to cooling efficiency. Cable management is not necessarily a bad thing, but achieving a perfectly laminar airflow through a CPU case generally is.

With that in mind, if the cables are helping to introduce some turbulence, I wouldn't necessarily worry about cleaning them up too much.

 

[poiihy]

A little bit of turbulence is not always a bad thing when it comes to cooling efficiency. Cable management is not necessarily a bad thing, but achieving a perfectly laminar airflow through a CPU case generally is.

With that in mind, if the cables are helping to introduce some turbulence, I wouldn't necessarily worry about cleaning them up too much.

Huh? Why?

 

[bunnspecial]

Huh? Why?

Without sounding too patronizing, I'll just mention that I do have a minor in physics and took a course in fluid dynamics along with several other courses that touched on it.

The explanation of why involves differential equations and a lot of other high level math, so the best explanation I can offer here without typing out a response a few thousand words long is "it just does." If you want a more in-depth explanation, pick up a textbook on fluid dynamics.

 

[eyoungren]

Without sounding too patronizing, I'll just mention that I do have a minor in physics and took a course in fluid dynamics along with several other courses that touched on it.

The explanation of why involves differential equations and a lot of other high level math, so the best explanation I can offer here without typing out a response a few thousand words long is "it just does." If you want a more in-depth explanation, pick up a textbook on fluid dynamics.

LOL!

Well, I had to rework things…again. This new process started on Sunday and I just managed to achieve some equilibrium with decent temps last night. In the process I broke a fan blade on one of my 80mm fans. High CFM too.

However, I've got the 9800 Pro relatively stable without making red pixels all over my main displays due to overheating. The fan is broken on the heatsink (did I mention I managed to burn out that part of the card) so I slapped a bigger heatsink on to it from my still yet to be flashed NVIDIA 5200. That was weeks ago however.

But now HD temps are roughly around 102º for the boot drive (WD Scorpio Black 1TB) and 100º for the storage drive (WD Green, 1TB). That's on the high end of the optimal range 25-40º C but still within the limit and that's with CPU thrashing, so I'm fairly happy with this.

It's not going to stay this way. Once our long delayed tax refund eventually manages to get here the case will change again.

Planning on dropping in an SSD and moving my two SATA drives to my external Thermaltake cradle. Once I can scare up a new CPU the fact that I'm not pushing heat into the case from two spinning HDs will hopefully help. And if I can get a replacement FireGL X3 that will WORK in this Quicksilver then even better.

So, this whole thing was mainly stabilization issues for a visual change I wanted to make (namely the LED fan behind the speaker hole).

 

[bunnspecial]

To give sort of a hand-waving explanation(and not a hardcore fluid dynamics explanation) of why a little bit of turbulence is a good thing:

Basically, if the airflow is turbulent, it will tend to circulate into places that are not directly in line with the fans that are circulating air. This is opposed to a situation where the airflow is perfectly(or near perfectly) laminar, in which case basically the only parts that see air circulation are those that are directly in line with the fan.

Actually blocking the airflow, such as can occur with an IDE ribbon cable(and is even worse with a 50-pin SCSI ribbon cable) is detrimental, and this is a lot of the reason why you'll see so much careful cable routing in cases that use these type of cables(Apple, IMO, was a master at this, especially in the G3 series towers. Smaller diameter cables that still allow airflow, however, can actually induce better air circulation through the entire case.

And, that's the long and short of it.

 

[poiihy]

To give sort of a hand-waving explanation(and not a hardcore fluid dynamics explanation) of why a little bit of turbulence is a good thing:

Basically, if the airflow is turbulent, it will tend to circulate into places that are not directly in line with the fans that are circulating air. This is opposed to a situation where the airflow is perfectly(or near perfectly) laminar, in which case basically the only parts that see air circulation are those that are directly in line with the fan.

Actually blocking the airflow, such as can occur with an IDE ribbon cable(and is even worse with a 50-pin SCSI ribbon cable) is detrimental, and this is a lot of the reason why you'll see so much careful cable routing in cases that use these type of cables(Apple, IMO, was a master at this, especially in the G3 series towers. Smaller diameter cables that still allow airflow, however, can actually induce better air circulation through the entire case.

And, that's the long and short of it.

Wow cool, now I understand it completely.

 

[jbarley]

To give sort of a hand-waving explanation(and not a hardcore fluid dynamics explanation) of why a little bit of turbulence is a good thing:

Basically, if the airflow is turbulent, it will tend to circulate into places that are not directly in line with the fans that are circulating air. This is opposed to a situation where the airflow is perfectly(or near perfectly) laminar, in which case basically the only parts that see air circulation are those that are directly in line with the fan.

Actually blocking the airflow, such as can occur with an IDE ribbon cable(and is even worse with a 50-pin SCSI ribbon cable) is detrimental, and this is a lot of the reason why you'll see so much careful cable routing in cases that use these type of cables(Apple, IMO, was a master at this, especially in the G3 series towers. Smaller diameter cables that still allow airflow, however, can actually induce better air circulation through the entire case.

And, that's the long and short of it.

I recall back in the day spending many an hour painstakingly separating the wires of the IDE drive cables so they could be bundled back together in somewhat of a round cable fashion in the hopes of gaining better air flow.

 

[bunnspecial]

I recall back in the day spending many an hour painstakingly separating the wires of the IDE drive cables so they could be bundled back together in somewhat of a round cable fashion n te hopes of gaining better air flow.

Many years ago-back when IDE drives were the norm rather than the exception-I bought some IDE cables on Ebay that were pre-made that way. I think I still have a few kicking around...

Apple did a similar trick on a few computers-I think it was maybe on the tray loading iMac where the cable to the optical drive was completely separated and had a "ring" around the center of it to bunch the wires-or maybe I'm imagining things. It's been a while since I've had my tray loader apart.

 

[eyoungren]

Think I may have finally cracked this.

For whatever reason I have been under the impression that sticking my main drive right on top of that big fan I stuck in the bottom would prevent the door from closing because the last PCI card would not clear the space.

I think also I just didn't want to block airflow with a hard drive.

Well, I futzed with things again and the final time I just decided "the hell with it" and dropped my main drive right on top of the fan with the secondary behind it.

Very interesting I think. The main drive is solid at 106º and the secondary (a WD Green drive is 100º). Neither have moved even under load!

This is more than acceptable to me considering the wild fluctuations of temps I've had since I started this thread. I think 106º is damn good and about the best I can expect from a WD Black drive.

The kicker is that now the main case fan seems to be pumping out far more heat than it was before.

So, my guess here is that essentially I've created a built-in drive cooler for the main drive and by virtual of blocking airflow above the fan (because the drive is sitting on top of it) I've managed to restore proper exhaust flow through the regular case fan.

If this is the case and temps hold and are consistent then my grand experiment (this Quicksilver was always intended to be my test pancake) is complete and I have achieved the absolute best cooling I possibly can without resorting to liquid cooling.

 

[eyoungren]

Well, the second hard drive climbed to 102º so I made one small adjustment. And now I have at the top range 108º on the main drive and 100º on the secondary.

With the screens off that drops to 102º and 95º respectively.

So…I'm calling this solved - finally!

 

[reukiodo]

So…I'm calling this solved - finally!

No final photos?

 

[eyoungren]

There's nothing really to see now. The drives are on the bottom and that's pretty much it. I didn't think it was worth a pic, but if you'd really like one I can take one soon.