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Silverstone GD05 HTPC Project with oversized Towercooler.

Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2010 12:07 am
by japa
Couple oversized pictures!


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The Story,

The system that im building is going to Silverstone GD05 case, i have allready ordered all and after reading the review here i realized that both of the heatpipe coolers i'm using might not fit the case, but lets not be worried!

im gonna do some modding to the Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme Rev 2. And Ati radeon HD5750 Heatpipe cooler. not going to use optical drive inside so it leaves me with 120mm height inside for cpu cooler according to silverstone. the freezer extreme is 100mm x 130mm x 131mm. so looking the drawings only the top of the fan and the heatpipe endings are blocking its way. same is with the Radeon HD5750 heatpipe, its coming 20mm over the card so thats gonna need some bend too.

couple things im not familiar with,

have ppl modified theyr heatpipe coolers (bend the pipes) with suggess? and should i go with negative air flow or positive in the case GD05 with this oversized towercooler partly blocking the two 80mm holes at back of case.

Here's the system im building around old C2D e6750 and 2 x 2gb of DDR2 memory. with newly bought Asrock P43ME.

its gonna be tight fit to fit the CPU cooler but ive done some drawings and its possible with just shortening the heatpipe around 10mm. going to remove couple of the upper plates and then Bend the heatpipes carefully with a 6mm pipe bender to the sides. the gpu cooler might need a little tweaking too (bending little) but lets see what happends. if i could bend the GPU cooler nicely an 90 degrees it would be straight inline with the top cover air out holes so positive airflow would push the hot air directly out. :)

HTPC System:

CPU c2d e6750 @ 3Ghz+
CPU cooler: Arctic Freezer Xtreme Rev 2.0
Motherboard: Asrock P43ME mATX (21cm x 24cm size.)
Memory: Gskill 2 x 2GB DDR2 800Mhz
HDD: Samsung F3 7200 RPM 1TB + 500GB F1 5400 RPM
GPU: Club 3D Ati Radeon HD5750 Noiseless edition 1GB DDR5 (heatpipe)
PSU: Enermax Modu 82+ 525W
Case: Silverstone GD05 Black
Keyboard: Microsoft Arc keyboard
Mouse: Microsoft Wireless Mobile 6000 Bluetrack
System: Windows 7 Home Edition 64bit
External Dwd/rw Drive later to be replaced with external Bluray Drive

do u thing the memory and cpu will bottleneck the rest of the system or am i ok with it?

how much would u think the total energy usage will be? the old system is with 750W zalman psu with GTS8800 512MB and same processor it seems to idle at 140W usage. and do u think the enermax cooler will hit high fan speeds with the setup?

ps. the reason to do this modification with the cooler is partly cause it was the closest to fit the case (height wise) and with new mATX motherboard layouts i can use it sideways that it will blow the hot air directly to rear. with this older mATX layout its gonna need sideways installation. for the time phenom 1045t with 95W comes market i might have money to upgrade and now tweaking this cooler i can use it later there with suggess.

Thanks for replies and ideas, this is the most best forum ive found for computer building especially not noisy one. :)

couple weeks and i should have the case and rest of the parts then starts the tuning. :)

Best Regards and Happy Summer!

Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2010 12:05 pm
by japa
Done and running, have to say was more work than i expected. took whole day to tweak that cpu cooler fan. the heatpipes were easy, i noticed best way to bend them is to not remove the plates. as the plates did keep them in round shape while bending. they were tight all around kinda like bending spring.

the cpu fan needed some major tweaking, had to cut it from bottom and top and still it was close call.

had to install both hadrives on the front, i used two of the pci slot bars and cut them half and made a two slot rack for the HDD's in front, at least they both now get cool air straight from outside so thats a bonus too. the slot above psu is used for fancontroller and hot air out.



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allso noticed the radeon had really weakly added thermal paste as i removed the heatpipe cooler for bending. After i was done with the gpu, idle temps were 10 celcius lower!

I'd suggest reapply gpu termal paste if idle temps are high. mines running nice 43-45 celcius now.


With all the fans running 900-1000 rpm, cpu temps are close to air temp at idle and 45c at 2h prime (30 degrees air temp). slightly overclocked with speedstep and asrock energy saving enabled. only managed to go 3Ghz with them enables and without tweaking any voltages except pumped memory voltage little.

power usage is 80-90W.

thanks for tuning!