P180 with "Passive" 6800 NU

Show off your quiet rig.

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sktir
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Jun 30, 2005 12:29 pm

P180 with "Passive" 6800 NU

Post by sktir » Tue Aug 02, 2005 2:42 pm

I put my system together last tuesday and finished off things at the weekend. As everyone else has suggested it pays to take your time and think about what goes where. It took me about an hour to sort out which slot to put my Sound Blaster in so that the USB headers could be routed neatly ! Having the Hyper modular PSU also means working out which cable is the best lenght !


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I've only got one HDD in the lower bay so have removed the lower fan and placed it in the fan slot in the upper bay. This allowed me to run the power cable through the hole normally taken up by the lower fan.

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I've also run my FDD cable down through the PSU cable hole and back up through the "SATA/HDD drive cable hole/gap"

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My PSU 20pin cable wont quite fit on mobo's that have the connector on the "top left" side. I got an extension and managed to route it under my 6800 :) The 4 pin mobo cable again has an extension and runs over the rear 120mm fan.

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I played around with fans on my Passive 6800 and found that a Zalman fan bracket works well when fixed to the mounting screws for the vga duct. This has drastically reduced it's temps without adding much noise at all. The auto overclock feature would not work without the fan in place.

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The last bit of tweeking at the weekend was routing all the fan cables so they dont get in the way. The two 120 mm exhaust fans have their cables routed under the mobo and into the back of the DVD writer (a good reason for putting it at the top). The intake fan sneaks down to the rear of the HDD - where I deliberatly did not use the SATA power connector but a normal molex.

All fans are on low setting the Zalman heatsink is at it's lowest and the Akasa fan on the fan bracket is running at 1400 rpm. All the vents at the rear are taped over and I have removed the front grills. I make take the fingers guards off after I've stoped poking inside the case every five minutes :D

All in all it's a great case though my temps are'nt that much lower than with the old Global Win case I replaced. That said it is much quieter for the same temps. I have a feeling that my old KV7 mobo is simply a warm one whatever I do with it. I think I'll play some more with fan configurations to see if I can improve things futher. I think this is the key to this case. You need to spend time getting it right....

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