CPU duct to reduce air noise

GamingGod · Post by **GamingGod** » Sat Feb 15, 2003 12:38 pm

http://www.thermaltake.com/products/hea ... ingMod.htm
anyone seen this? It supposidly reduce turbulance.

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Sun Feb 16, 2003 6:19 am

Yeah, just last week there was a pretty big discussion about this technique (creating a "stand-off" between the fan and the HS) on one of the many forums I regularly visit. They used this TT adapter to test their theory and it did cool better with the adapter than without. Unfortunately I don't remember the site or any more specifics about their results. Sorry.

counterpt · Post by **counterpt** » Fri Feb 28, 2003 4:45 am

Hi,
Do you know where one can get this? I spent a few hours looking and I can't find an online retailer for the duct.
If it quiets down my thermaltake volcano 9, I might not get rid of it. When I put my hand next to the heatsink, I don't notice much air flow, maybe this will help too.
Thanks a lot.

efcoins · Post by **efcoins** » Fri Feb 28, 2003 4:54 am

This and the Volcano 11 are not supposed to be available until the end of March.

If it was also a 92 to 80mm convertor it would be really good.

seishino · Post by **seishino** » Fri Feb 28, 2003 6:40 am

Hmm... That suspiciously resembles those 80mm PVC elbow joints sold at hardware stores for pipes...

annefromuk · Post by **annefromuk** » Sat Mar 01, 2003 5:20 am

Hi all,

As the duct is at an angle, does this mean you can choose the direction the fan sucks air from?
& would there be any benefit aiming it to front of case where the cool air is being drawn in?

Regards
Anne

counterpt · Post by **counterpt** » Sat Mar 01, 2003 7:15 am

It seems in this French article they point it to the back of the case. I'm not sure they had a choice. I used google to translate:
http://www.nokytech.net/dossier.php?lire=62&page=1
And it looks like it only helps by 1 degree celcius, with and without load I guess. I don't think they mention noise levels. Right now it's looking like just a gimmick, but I'm not sure.
I found a french site you can buy it from, but I have no idea if they ship to US. Anybody here in France?!
http://www.materiel.net/details_TT-A1643.html

GamingGod · Post by **GamingGod** » Sat Mar 01, 2003 9:40 am

yea i was thinking the same thing anne. aim it towards the front of the case

xIRodIx · Post by **xIRodIx** » Sun Mar 02, 2003 10:30 pm

counterpt here is the Thermaltake Ducting Mod for $8. + $6. shipping - I know nothing about this site so check it out.

My idea is to carry this a step further and extend the duct to a fan mounted on the outside of the case. You will then use outside air instead of case air which is several degrees cooler. It's late and I can't think of a material appropiate for this - it needs to be easily formed and smooth inside, maybe cardboard such as comes with a shirt. Ideas welcome. And seishino that PVC idea sounds promising.

xIRodIx · Post by **xIRodIx** » Sun Mar 02, 2003 10:35 pm

Sorry, left out the URL:

http://phamcomputer.safeshopper.com/35/671.htm?62

counterpt · Post by **counterpt** » Mon Mar 03, 2003 3:16 am

Thanks, they're out of stock.

I don't know about extending outside the case. Would it make more noise? With the mod it seems the fan is further away from the board and with a fairly good case (I'm thinking chieftec, antec variety), the air there should be pretty cool (the fans in the back always seem to push air fairly close to room temp)?

jinu117 · Post by **jinu117** » Mon Mar 03, 2003 10:38 am

If it works as mentioned, it could be an win & win situation.
1) Sound insulation thru PVC pipe (highly unlikely from what I can see unless they can minimize turbulance in it... more likely it will generate additional vibration is my guess though)
2) Cooler temp means lower fan speed necessary... definitely some gain here.
I would think it would work with overtaxed HS that requires exotic amount of airflow... now... about those SLK 900s, etc that requires not as much airflow... I wonder how effective it would be...?

Politik · Post by **Politik** » Sun Mar 09, 2003 3:11 pm

I'm not sure if this would work on a Thermalright...

They use fan clips instead of screws. Anyone know if the clips would hold this on along with the fan?

fetaost · Post by **fetaost** » Mon Mar 10, 2003 1:52 am

Perhaps it would be even better if it was made of rubber?

1HandClapping · Post by **1HandClapping** » Mon Mar 10, 2003 9:04 am

fetaost,
I was thinkiong the same thing. Clear silicone rubber would keep the aethetics.

I know it is just a drawing but, I think both cooling and silencing would be better if the duct was mounted rotated 90 degrees from that of the illustration. That way air would flow parallel to the heatsink fins.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Tue Mar 11, 2003 8:50 am

Actually even a straight pipe several inches tall should provide the same benefits. This smacks of 1960's where people put 1 inch carb adapters under their carbs for supposedly better performance.

Ginta · Post by **Ginta** » Wed Mar 12, 2003 11:03 pm

I just noticed today that SVC are carrying these ducts for $9. They have a very good resellerrating.

On a simular note, Directron started carrying the Badong set of duct kits.

GamingGod · Post by **GamingGod** » Thu Mar 13, 2003 12:28 pm

what that clear acrylic dcut bend is cool. Does anyone know of something similar to that so I can an angle a 120mm fan to blow up at a 45degree angle.

counterpt · Post by **counterpt** » Thu Mar 13, 2003 12:50 pm

I don't like the directron one. It looks like the rest of the motherboard (and the case, if it's small) will heat up (if you look at their picture).

Thanks for the other link though. I found it here too ($6) (http://new.3dcool.com/?module=product&sku=A1643) but they want to charge over $11 to ship it... idiots.

So I'm going with your link. Thanks a lot!

Politik · Post by **Politik** » Thu Mar 13, 2003 1:28 pm

counterpt wrote:I don't like the directron one. It looks like the rest of the motherboard (and the case, if it's small) will heat up (if you look at their picture).

Thanks for the other link though. I found it here too ($6) (http://new.3dcool.com/?module=product&sku=A1643) but they want to charge over $11 to ship it... idiots.
So I'm going with your link. Thanks a lot!

Great! Let us know how it goes, this looks like a good product.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Fri Mar 14, 2003 8:54 am

Well the Badong color is awful but consider the thread here that talks about removing hot air ASAP. An 80mm fan above a heatsink that been reversed. The fan sucks air across the fins, and then blows it through duct and out the case.

Now consider this: Unimpeded the CPU fan no longer requires a PC case fan to remove that hot air. Theoretically 1 fan can be eliminated.

counterpt · Post by **counterpt** » Fri Mar 14, 2003 11:11 am

aristide1 wrote:Now consider this: Unimpeded the CPU fan no longer requires a PC case fan to remove that hot air. Theoretically 1 fan can be eliminated.

Meanwhile your northbridge chip fries along with your agp card

SpyderCat · Post by **SpyderCat** » Fri Mar 14, 2003 3:48 pm

counterpt wrote: Meanwhile your northbridge chip fries along with your agp card

I disagree !

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Fri Mar 14, 2003 7:17 pm

Meanwhile your northbridge chip fries along with your agp card

The air that enters the HS has to come from somewhere, as the other poster pointed you, your exhausting the hottest air in the case, so shouldn't the average air temp go down?

counterpt · Post by **counterpt** » Fri Mar 14, 2003 10:47 pm

The air that enters the HS has to come from somewhere, as the other poster pointed you, your exhausting the hottest air in the case, so shouldn't the average air temp go down?

Ok.
So if you blow air in though the badong, the power supply will suck most of it out and the air in the rest of the case is stationary (or just blows around but maybe doesn't exit).

If you blow air out thrugh the badong and so both it and the ps are blowing out (contrary to the picture at directreon), then the air has to come from somewhere. I agree:
If you have front fans (maybe side fans) then you'll probably be OK.
If you have a cheap case with holes in the back (and a weak front airflow), then you'll just circulate air in the back of the case.
It probably depends on your case (pun intended, I know it's bad, sorry).

This is just an opinion.
This is from personal experience: I took the chipset fan off my mb. No problems (Installed Gentoo from scratch, CPU intensive).
I took the same components and put it in a cheap (local crappy computer store genric brand) case (small so it'll fit under my desk at my office) and it froze (crashed) everytime I tried to install Gentoo again. I kept the case door open and problem was solved. This case had one intake fan, one exhaust fan and ps exhaust. CPU temp stayed at 45C but mb temp was 38C.
I just got a new small case to replace it (antec performance plus 660amg, it came wit 2 very quiet case fans, btw, sorry unrelated) with 2 front intakes, 1 side intake, 1 exhaust and ps out (all fans running at lower voltage). cpu stays at the same temp, mb goes down to 29C. It hasen't crashed since. This tells me I have to worry more that just the cpu and ps.

Go ahead get the badong if you want. I never will.

I disagree !

Well, with all the suppoting statements there, I can't imagine winning that arguement

SpyderCat · Post by **SpyderCat** » Sat Mar 15, 2003 4:53 am

counterpt wrote: <snipped>
If you blow air out thrugh the badong and so both it and the ps are blowing out (contrary to the picture at directreon), then the air has to come from somewhere. I agree:
If you have front fans (maybe side fans) then you'll probably be OK.
If you have a cheap case with holes in the back (and a weak front airflow), then you'll just circulate air in the back of the case.
It probably depends on your case (pun intended, I know it's bad, sorry).

That me; I have that cheap case, NO front fan, a Nexus PSU with a slow revving fan in it, a small 60 mm fan on the heatsink, and recently a slow revving 80mm Papst fan in the rear (just below the PSU).
The heatsink-fan dumps its exhaust-air in a duct to the Papst, so in reality the heatsink-fan and the Papst are working in tandem, and effectively I have only two slow revving fans extracting air, and that's it.

counterpt wrote: then you'll just circulate air in the back of the case.

Why would air be circulating in the back of the case?
You have all kinds of cards there that are in fact trying to prevent circulation.

counterpt wrote:This is just an opinion.
This is from personal experience: I took the chipset fan off my mb. No problems (Installed Gentoo from scratch, CPU intensive).
I took the same components and put it in a cheap (local crappy computer store genric brand) case (small so it'll fit under my desk at my office) and it froze (crashed) everytime I tried to install Gentoo again. I kept the case door open and problem was solved. This case had one intake fan, one exhaust fan and ps exhaust. CPU temp stayed at 45C but mb temp was 38C.
I just got a new small case to replace it (antec performance plus 660amg, it came wit 2 very quiet case fans, btw, sorry unrelated) with 2 front intakes, 1 side intake, 1 exhaust and ps out (all fans running at lower voltage). cpu stays at the same temp, mb goes down to 29C. It hasen't crashed since.

Now it's getting very intresting.
You had a small case with 4 fans (1 on the heatsink, 1 blowing in and 2 extracting), and this solution couldn't cope. (This is already 1 fan more than my solution BTW.)
Your mb temp was 38*C (glad you're expressing yourself in the metric system) with 4 fans, and here I am with 3 fans and a MB temp of 26*C. (under 100% load for days from folding@home)
You solved your problem by adding even more fans, up to a total of 6 fans, in a new case. Still your mb temp is 3*C higher than mine.
To me this sounds a bit like a "Buick vs Honda" situation.
Both cars will get you where you want to go, in comfort, only the Honda does it with roughly half the gas.

counterpt wrote:This tells me I have to worry more that just the cpu and ps.

Go ahead get the badong if you want. I never will.

I disagree !
Well, with all the suppoting statements there, I can't imagine winning that arguement

I didn't answer with the goal to "win the arguement".
I had a problem with noise, and searched for a solution without using the internet (kind of stupid!). Later I found "SilentPCReview", and noticed I had come up with a way of solving the problem not (or hardly) being used by the members of this forum. So I told you about my way of doing things. I documented it with photographs, graphs and temp. readings.
Compared to my postings, your initial comment:

counterpt wrote:Meanwhile your northbridge chip fries along with your agp card

was to short, and unfounded.

And maybe I didn't win the arguement, but I haven't lost it for sure !

Regards, Han.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Sat Mar 15, 2003 10:18 am

Whoa there Counterpt!

OK so you blow air in through the Badong

No, exhaust air with it. In my case I have the HS fan right next to an exhaust fan, along with an intake fan and the PS fan. My mb temp is 38C, which will be my reference point. All I was suggesting was my HS fan and my 1 exhaust fan are very close together and perpendicular to each other. The Badong could eliminate one of those 2, and exhaust mostly air from the HS fan which in theory should be warmer/warmest air.

But you make an excellent point, everything has an operating temp range, not just the stuff that comes to mind first. I'd like to add that slowing fans or eliminating fans maybe OK, but doing both would probably leave a pc with little safety margin. That's like running Windows with 0 free memory and relying on your swap file. Good luck.

I'm a little hestitant with the badong because it's 20 bucks (p&h?) for 4 feet of dryer vent hose. The fact that it's coloring is toy-ish is just annoying. Maybe it glows in the dark, but I'm in my 40's, growing up in my time glowing in the dark was a bad thing.

The theory of having just 2 exhausts is so far, for power hungry systems, just a theory. Looking at my case, there's a fan opening at the top of the case, and 1 fan should go there, because that's where hot air will get trapped. As you point out even if the Badong and the PS fan were 100% efficient (and they aren't) everything else makes heat and it will rise. My ps is upside down, like a lot of them. I noticed that there's warm spot on the metal box itself.

Along the lines of your concerns I have 1 after reading many posts here. Seems many people are running their fans at 7 volts, throttling them down to quiet them. How you accomplish that task is up to you, but slower fans move less air, and there goes that safety margin again. Upon doing my online shopping I find there are a great many thermo controlled fans that spin really slow when cool, yet still spin up when things get warm. They do so without manual intervention, which is best, and without PCM, which makes some fans freak out. Vantec's Thermoflow line even has a 60mm fan with a CFM range of 10 to 25 CFM (appx), and it's never gets into the screaming fan category. I listed 3 fans I thought were interesting here:

http://forums.silentpcreview.com//viewtopic.php?t=3400

Since everything is a tradeoff I refused to buy video cards with fans on them. I jumped off the video card du juor bandwagon several hundred versions ago (that would be what? 2 years?). But hard core gamers who want dead silent pc's should understand that their priorities conflict with each other, and the laws of physics won't allow them to have it all. Like all things in life, you gotta compromise[/quote]

Post by **MikeC** » Sat Mar 15, 2003 1:22 pm

my 2 cents here about # of fans & noise...

Currently, I am running the review Stealth XP 2000+ (Palomino) system from ARM Systems (which they appear to have decided to leave in my lab

). It has 5 80mm Panaflos.

They all run at ~5V or less -- 1 in the modded Seasonic PSU, 1 on the Alpha 8045 HS, 1 in the back, in the front, 1 over the MX400 64M VGA (w/Zalman 17CU modded HS). It has a single 40G Barracuda, 2 PCI cards, and I've added more RAM -- 1G. I moved it into my office (from the lab) temporarily to act as a backup machine -- a new backup is coming but I wanted to make a complete drive copy of my main system, which has all the data on one drive. Doing this over the network, not the most efficient way, but I wanted to use the Second Copy 2000 software, which has worked well for me in the past.

The Stealth PC has been working steady with the drive running hard for over 2 hrs. CPU temp is 52C, HDD temp is 37C. Board temp is 37C. The CPU temp may be from the socket thermistor -- ie, the core temp could be at 60C, but as the limit is 90C, it's not worrisome.

I can barely hear it under my desk. It makes the smallest whirr, not clearly audible till my head is ~18" from the front top of the case. This is with the drive constantly writing.

The PSU exhaust is hotter than is probably ideal, but a 4.5V Panaflo IS still quieter (marginally) than a stock Nexus3000, which runs cooler.

Details of case ariflow are really specific; what works well for one setup in one case may not be the best for another.

counterpt · Post by **counterpt** » Sat Mar 15, 2003 2:25 pm

Hi!
SpyderCat, I said

then you'll just circulate air in the back of the case.

because if you have slots in the back of the case then air might come in there and go out though the ps, whereas in the front the of the case air, is trapped (maybe?).

(glad you're expressing yourself in the metric system)

That only makes sense

(I'm a scientist)

To me this sounds a bit like a "Buick vs Honda" situation.
Both cars will get you where you want to go, in comfort, only the Honda does it with roughly half the gas.

I'm a little overclocked (increased voltage, so it's like a Porche?). I know what you mean though (I drive a little Isuzu stickshift!).
Regarding my comment :

Well, with all the suppoting statements there, I can't imaginne winning that arguement

I was just making a bad joke I was curious why you disgreed, Sorry I made that comment. And I'm sure it's not about winning or losing, I just didn't find better words... (I didn't mean to sound aggressive, especially since I'm guilty of the same thing in my post right before that).

aristide1, about the comment:

Whoa there Counterpt!

I thought blow air was better thst suck air but I guess not

My ps was upside down in the cheap case too and I did notice how warm it was on the top of the case, I didn't feel like drilling a hole though (it also came with a cheap warm ps, when I put a normal ps in right side up, I still got the same problem). I have a cheaper geforce 4 that came with a big heatsink and no fan which I'm not sure helpd or not.
I think if you have a good open (air flow, not door) case undervolting is not a problem. The same mb never got above 27C in my full tower chieftec at home (3 fans in front, 2 out (back under ps) all papst at 7V).
I nkow what you man about the colors. I shut my case and put it away, I never understood the window cases with the neon lights and the fan lights, etc.

At the risk of sounding redundant, I agree that each case is different. Personally I will always get cases with big open front intakes (where you can put a fan in front of the hard drive too). You can always overkill with intakes I think and just noit use fans if you don't want to.

Sorry about the long post.

SpyderCat · Post by **SpyderCat** » Sat Mar 15, 2003 3:15 pm

counterpt wrote:
counterpt wrote:Well, with all the suppoting statements there, I can't imaginne winning that arguement
I was just making a bad joke I was curious why you disgreed, Sorry I made that comment.

Hi Counterpt,

I thought I _did_ understand your _whole_ post, but obviously I missed that sentence being a joke.
My mistake.

I would like to find a guinea pig that is willing to build a second cooling-system like mine; just to verify my findings. Aristide1, you perhaps?

Would it be a good idea to use the metric system on this forum as "the standard system"?
It probably _is_ a good idea, but somehow I doubt the majority will concur.

If people are really interested, I could take pretty accurate temp. readings at the Northbridge and around the graphics-card.

Regards, Han.

CPU duct to reduce air noise

CPU duct to reduce air noise

If this works...