So I’ve begun upgrading my current desktop, and one of the areas it’s become quite dated is it’s cooling systems.

The legendary Antec P180 PC case comes with three 120mm “tri-cool” fans which operate at about 20cfm (silent), 40cfm (slightly annoyingly noisy) and 60cfm (really irritatingly loud). Actually those flow figures are a little optimistic.

Scythe make some good products. Here is an 1,150rpm 37CFM completely silent (16dba - forget it you just cannot hear this thing)  fan replacing an old “tri-cool” model.

They also make some boring products which need savage modification.

Lo, the “Kama Bay”. A good idea - a silent fan in a little holder that fits in 3×5.25″ drive bays with a dust filter and everything.

Drawbacks:

1. Boringly slow 800rpm fan pushes a sad 30cfm
2. The dust filter is very unhelpfully situated in between the fan and the front bezel, so in order to clean the dust filter you would need to unplug the fan, remove the device from your computer, remove the fan, remove the filter, clean it, replace it, put the fan back in and replace the device in your machine, then plug it back in.
3. no Pulse Width Modulation

I like the idea of amping up my front-intake capability on my old p180 so I’ve decided to fix all of these problems at once in the following two exciting steps:

1. Fitting an Arctic Cooling F12 (57CFM @ 24dba) PWM into the device
2. Moving the dust filter to the front, outside the bezel.

Kama bay, as yet undamaged by psychotic geeks. In the background, my keyboard (Razer Lycosa), my 30″ Dell 3009WFP (I’m still in love a year later) and a vacuum cleaner manual.

Four screws hold the fan in place. Pretty easy stuff.

The filter is held in the most stupid position imaginable by two dainty little wire clips which pop out with little to no effort. Just how we like it!

Using the HicksTM patented FourBitsOfClearPackingTapeTM method, I have attached the dust filter to the front of the device. When mounted, I will be able to clean the filter by wiping it with a tissue, like the other two filters the P180 comes with. After you rip their stupid filter doors off anyway, which of course I did long ago.

It’s important to do a sloppy job and leave a little gap to give the dust a fighting chance. Also, photograph your sticktytaped handywork and stick it on the web so that the poor engineers at Scythe can see their horribly mangled product, cry deeply and plot revenge. Scythe is a Japanese company so I expect ninja at any hour (no change there)

There you go, a nice comparison shot between the relatively low tech oldschool scythe fan, 7 blades and 30CFM, and the Arctic Cooling F12 PWM, a nasty piece of work with 9 blades, capable of almost twice the throughput.

Here’s the F12 installed. You can see it’s unique “PWM Sharing Technology” connectors, more on that later. I’m not sure if the “swiss design” is a warning label or what.

Mod complete! And such a professional looking job too, nobody would know you’ve modified your kama bay at all!

Part Two - Install Time!

(click on the image for highres version)

So here’s my master plan, well so far anyway. I’m not telling you about the megahalems and the PhenomII overclocking yet. Above is an outline of how the cooling’s going to work in this thing when I’m done.

Frontal view of my P180 with the DVD-writer removed. It was in the top bay. Additionally, all the drive covers have been removed to facilitate DVD-writer migration to the lowest, isolated 5.25″ bay, and the installation of my wolf in sheep’s clothing into the top three.

Side view of my case. You can see the empty 5.25″ bays, the outdated old Zalman 9500 CPU cooler, the Gentle Typhoon fan at the back, and an extra F12 (exhaust) hanging down from the top.

Close up of the PWM sharing technology. The Motherboard tries to control the CPU cooler’s fan speed via Pulse Width Modulation. The Arctic Cooling F12 fans (one intake, one exhaust) share this PWM input with each other and the cpu fan itself. The result is the intake, cpu fan, and exhaust all spin faster when the CPU heats up, and slower when it cools down again.

Frontal view again, now with the new intake fan installed in the top 3 5.25″ slots and the DVD-writer in the bottom one.

To maximise the dodgyness of this setup, I have run out of or lost the last of my HDD mounting clips for this case, and thus my awesome-looking fan is held in place by… gravity and friction alone. Not even sticky tape. It works just fine, so long as I don’t move the case. Sigh, I’ll need to find me some clips from somewhere.

So how does it all stack up?

Testing:

This machine used to idle at around 40 degrees, and still does. However under load where it used to hit 55-60 degrees depending on the application, it not runs at 50-52 degrees.

In conclusion, you can resolve the lack of intake airflow on a P180 with a Kama Bay, an F12 PWM fan, and some sticky tape.

Digg!   del.icIo.us

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