Hey Guys

I'm a frequent visitor of your website and I'm not really new to this silencing "fetish" of ours, but this will be my first post on the SPCR forum.

So I will start right away with the presentation of my new rig. Took me about 2-3 months to choose the parts, buy them and do the thermal and acoustic tuning.
With these parts I found a good balance between performance, powerdraw and heat developpement

Hardware:
Corsair HX-520W PowerSupply
Athlon X2 4850e (2,5GHz; TDP: 45W)
Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe
2*2GB OCZ DDR2-RAM PC8000
Sapphire Ati Radeon HD4850 Toxic (Factory OC)
Terratec Aureon PCI SoundCard
ThermalRight HR-01 Plus
ThermalRight HR-03 GT
4* Nexus fans (3 B/W + 1 Orange)
1* Noctua NF-S12-800
3* Zalman FanMate2

WD VelociRaptor 320GB (inside of Scythe QuietDrive)
WD Scorpio 250GB 2,5" (inside of Scythe QuietDrive 2,5") in the bottom drive bay



Cooling;
The fan mounted on the HR-01 is running at +/-900rpm and the exhaust fans are running at the Fanmate minumum (+/-750rpm reported by the BIOS). The Intake fan is running at +/-780rpm and is blowing directly onto the graphic card.
As you can see the CPU + GPU are cooled in a more or less passive way. I installed some cardboard to optimize the airflow and extract the hot air from the CPU and GPU directly.
BTW: I did some experiments with the ducting and that's the configuration that gave me the best results.



Now let's get ready for the temps:
Idle:
case: 31 C
CPU: 35 C
GPU: 40 C

Full Load (1 CPu Burn-in + Unigine 3D Tropics Demo):
Case: 33 C
CPU: 47 C
GPU: 69 C + 55 C environment
In this case I'm glad I chose the 45W CPU. The exhaust at the top would have to handle much more heat otherwise.

Acoustics:
Since I don't have any testing equipement I will give you my general impressions.
When the Computer is running in my quiet room (2-3am in the morning), I can hear a slight airflow "hum" when sitting at my desk. But the whole rig is inaudible when I'm about 2m away.
During the day when sitting at my desk I can barely notice the rig, the little noise it makes is almost drowning in the light flickering of my Samsung 24" LCD.
Therefore the new rig is not silent, but very quiet.

Some other pics:

I did a bit of modding on the front: I cut open intake vents to get more fresh air onto the GPU

And here the whole desk:

And yes, it is our friend Tux on my desk

Feel free to leave any comment or to make any suggestion

Dux

Looks really nice!

I like how you've turned the (presumably) horizontal orientation-only mounting for the HR-01+ into a smart way to cool the GPU cooler mounted on the backside of the 4850. Does this add to CPU heat much though (particularly with the part of the cardboard duct stopping air flowing between the CPU and CPU heatsinks)?

Do you really need the Noctua fan in the lower chamber though? I haven't got a fan mounted down there in my P182. Just taping up the exhaust holes around the back of the PSU exhaust area was sufficient to rely on the PSU only to cool my HDD. I suppose if the Noctua doesn't add any noise to your system though, you may as well keep it. (Having your HDD in a Quiet Drive may also change this if you need to cool your HDD a little more).

Also, I thought Nexus fans were suppose to not do so well horizontally mounted? What's your experience - do they click a little or something? I went with a Scythe S-Flex for the top exhaust on my P182 for this reason.

2 Questions:
Why such a low powered CPU (4850) and such a high end GPU (4850)? Isn't the CPU going to be the bottleneck of your system? Or is the graphics overkill for what your using it for?

Why do you need the rear 120mm exhaust fan if the CPU and GPU are ducted out the top? The only reason I see is for your VRM's.... if they have a heatsink.

Hi there,
and thanks for your comments.

@JamieG Thanks
I guess I'm lucky, because the vertical orientation of the HR-01+ is due to my Motherboard. On the M3A32-MVP (AM2+ socket) the socket mounting holes are in a North-South orientation, therefore in the perfect position for this top-exhaust cooling configuration.
At the beginning of my testing I only installed the cardboard at the top of the HR-01 and my GPU and inner case temps were significantly higher under load. At top load I reached:
GPU: 73 C + 59 C environment
Case: 35 C
My guess is that without the additional cardboard, there is more air turbulence between the CPU fans and the rear fan. Strangely enough I must say
At the beginning I didn't install any fan in the bottom chamber, but I had the impression that the powersupply fan was ramping up a bit faster when the rig was running under high load for a longer period of time (more than 6hours). I didn't mention it before, but the Nexus fan is running at a very low speed (+/-500rpm) and that's sufficient to create the little airflow that is needed to prevent the powersupply fan from ramping up too fast, even under high loads.
On my side I didn't experience any clicking or other distubing noise coming from the horizontally mounted Nexus fans. I guess I'm lucky, again...

@Speedkar9
You're right, the CPU is the bottleneck of my system right now. I'm currently waiting for more powerfull low-power AMD Phenom CPUs to upgrade my system. If I install the current 110W Quadcore CPUs, my current cooling configuration wouldn't be able to handle all the heat. I would even have to increase to the speed of all the fans and this is against our main objective: quiet operation.
I did not install any heatsink on the VRMs, but I need the rear exhaust fan though. It drags out the heat from around the Northbridge, VRMs and CPU socket; the CPUfan is almost not dealing with that heat.

Dux

Good to see you've done all the testing with your ducts to find the optimum temperature configuration.

If you are worried about CPU temps for a new Phenom later down the track, I would recommend adding a Scythe Kama Bay in the DVD drives area to help get some fresh air to the CPU area. It would mean some re-configuring of your system though, I think.

If you swapped the two quiet drives around and just put the 3.5 inch one on foam in the bottom area of the lower section of the P182 without the drive cage, you could probably mount the 2.5 inch quiet drive behind the Kama Bay. You could even remove the included fan and just use it as an intake area. You would need to do a DIY suspension on the 2.5 inch quiet drive instead of a normal mount to do the installation, I'm guessing. Also, double sided tape and zip ties are useful to mount the Kama Bay in the P182, as it does not play nicely with the drive rails.

With this extra airflow/intake I'd guess that the top exhaust would help drag cool air that hasn't been passed the HR-03GT through the side of the HR-01+ and out the top exhaust, helping your temps somewhat.

If you undervolt or remove the Scythe fan that comes with the Kama Bay, you may be able to avoid turning up your other fans up when you do the install of the new Phenom later down the track.

I see more experimenting with ducting in your future then!

(Wow, in every P182-related thread I post in, it seems I somehow end up recommending a Kama Bay to people. Guess it's because I'm happy with the results I got: adding it as an intake area along with a top exhaust back into my P182 dropped 5C off my CPU idle and load temps and did wonders for my case temps as well after installing a Zalman VF1000 on my 8800GTX.)

Hey Guys,

Right now, I'm thinking about replacing my, crappy looking, cardboard ducting with another material.
I thought about pieces of clearplastic. (we call it plexi over here in Europe)

What do you think would be the best alternative?

@JamieG
Thanks for this suggestion of adding a Kama-bay into the front of the case. I guess it will allow me to add a more powerfull processor to my Rig.
BTW: I'm currently using a Kama-bay in another Rig I did not post in the gallery and I'm quite satusfied with the results too
Nevertheless I'm still waiting for some newer models with a lower TDP than 110W.

Have a look at the ducts that Chris Thomson made out of styrene. You'll find his articles in the DIY-system section on the main site. There's some pictures here for instance.

Your temps are not dangerously high but they are higher than they should be. I have a 95W Phenom processor cooled by a Ninja 2, The Scythe and Nexus fans are all at 5V but temperature stays at 28 degrees idle. My roomtemperature stays at 23 degrees.

Sure the GPU adds a lot of heat but since you've ducted so strict, it shouldn't be a problem. Have you removed the restrictive intake fan filters?

Good start!

With these components, and increased intake cross section (I too am a proponent of the Kama Bay), you could remove two fans and have a much quieter system.

Of course, at this point silencing becomes more of a passion (disease?) than necessity...

Did you record any comparison temps with and without the ducting? That GPU temp seems pretty high for an aftermarket cooler.

the wonders of ghetto mods, it's cheap and effective!

Cardboard rules !!!!!!!!!!!

Let us know if you change your ducting, I'd be VERY interested is seeing what you end up with. I'm saving a link to this thread.

Hey Guys,
time for a little update:
I did not change anything on the ducting yet, but I think I will do it soon.
On the other hand I reduced the speed of my fans. Here a screenshot of speedfan with the details:



Fan1 is the CPU fan, Fan2 is the intake and Fan4 is representing back and top exhaust fan.
Temp1 is the CPU temp, but I don't really know the difference between temp2 and 3.
Does anybody have the same Mainboard and knows what these temperatures are in speedfan?
Anyway good thing is: the temperatures almost didn't increase although I reduced the airflow.
I will need to see if I can keep up these settings over the summer; it's getting quite hot in my apartment over here.

@bozar I must confess, the temperatures I posted initially are most propably not the inner-case temperatures. Asus Probe 2, the tool I was using the last time, announces a MB temperature. I foolishly presumed it was the case temp having no other data, but it's more likely a NorthBridge or Southbridge temperature.

@Mr. B When reading these temperatures you need to keep in mind that there is a 2.5cm gap between the HR-03 and the CPU-fan.
And most importantly: the fan is not blowing onto the GPUcooler, but away from it. Usually these coolers are optimized for direct airflow with moderate pressure, not like the Accelero S1 with widely spaced fins. Considering these details and the power of the GPU, I think the performance is pretty good.

@frenchie Yeah, you're right Does not look that good though. That's the main reason why I want to change the ducting.

Dux