Add this to the Freezer 64 Pro and the Apack BTF80: I ordered one mid-week and it arrived this afternoon, 2 days later! OK, Iguana Micro is in Oregon. This HSF has been reviewed (see Google), so I'll skip the beauty shots and get to the stuff that interests SPCR folk.

The fan is in the middle, like the much larger Tuniq Tower. I'm one of the people who think that's a good place for a fan to be, if you need a fan. The 92mm fan is replaceable, as you'll see. And the mounting is symmetrical and can be mounted in any 90 degree direction. The HSF does bolt on from the bottom of the mobo, alas.

In this pic, I've removed the high-RPM ball-bearing fan and its shroud from the double copper fin stack:



Here I've installed a low-noise sleeve bearing low-RPM fan, using the black rubber screws that mounted the original fan - they proved to be re-usable. I had the blue equivalents ready had they been necessary:



Here it's all back together and ready for mounting, which I'll do in a couple of days when the rest of the case is ready. The bottom plate is at the upper right, and you can see the K8 mounting details clearly:



I'll be comparing its cooling to a Freezer 64 Pro modded to use a Scythe 100mm fan and now running at 550RPM in another PSI Solo 604 case with a 220mm fan on the left side panel. A 126mm HSF clears this fan with a tad over 0.2" to spare.

This new version of the Spire Verticool is similar to the Asus Silent Square except the Asus is a 141mm part - too tall to fit in my new case.

edit: correct HSF RPM from 800 to 550 - there is an 800RPM 100mm fan in my current case, but it's used to spot-cool the two HDDs, not the HS.

Now to test the Verticool III:

Here I add 1/8" of McMaster neoprene rubber, Shore 30A with adhesive backing, to the front panel. No air or sound leaks!



This is the new chassis with the Verticool III ready for testing. I'm using a Sunbeam Rheostat and a digital multimeter to measure fan voltage (the $5 DMM has been modified so that its test leads plug into a fan Y-splitter for a positive hands-off connection):



I'm using my highest-RPM 220mm fan this time for testing. It starts somewhere between 3.00 and 3.20V, can't tell exactly because I can't resolve that spot on the Rheostat voltage adjustment. So 3.80V is the lowest I was comfortable using, and I ran all tests at that voltage on the big fan - ~300RPM. (The fan runs at 554RPM at 7.38V.)

The PSI Solo 604 on the left is my #1 computer, the one I don't experiment with. The new unit is on the right:



The fan mounted inside the V III is the SilenX 92mm "11dBA" fan, which runs at 1300RPM at 12V. First I made sure everything was working. Setting the 92mm fan voltage to zero, the AMD Sempron 2800+ die measured 29.2C over ambient. With no duct (yet), turning the big fan temporarily all the way up to 6.4V didn't improve the die temp much, so back to 3.80V. At 5.00V on the 92mm fan it ran, and the die rise over ambient dropped to 21.3C - a 7.9C improvement. At 7.00V I got 19.1C delta T, and 17.0C delta at 9.00V.

At this point you have to remember the rubber is blocking sound from passing thru the front of the case. So a slow fan running on the HSF is a lot quieter on this case than on yours, if you depend on airflow thru the front panel to cool your HDDs.

What I learned from this exercise is that the case is quieter using a mix of area cooling with the 220mm fan and spot cooling with the 92mm fan on the HSF and the 100mm fan between the two HDDs than if I tried to use the big fan to cool everything. It wasn't even close.

The AMD 2800+ doesn't run much hotter when I test with BurnK7. So any voltage on the 92mm fan that's comfortably over the minimum start voltage cools just fine - and at that level the fan is very quiet inside the case, and no noise escapes thru the front panel. With the computer sitting on the left of my monitor, it would be silent at 3AM just like the one I'm using now, which is the same except I'm using a Freezer 64 Pro HSF modded to use the 100mm Scythe fan, turning 550RPM. (The SilenX does not have a tach signal.)

The big fan is suspended on both units. My maximum ambient, hottest hour on the hottest day, was just under 30C last summer.

Personally, I think the two HSFs are a wash. I'd need a very low-noise test facility and expensive test gear to confirm my opinion! (I don't think a duct will improve things much based on some previous testing.)