120/80 adapter plus 80/60 adapter=??

Here's my problem:
I think the temps are screwing my o/c. My [email protected] is at 56 ºC while running prime95.
I went to a store where they have a 120/80mm shroud. Unlucky me: the heatsink on the CoolerMaster L61 (spins at 3000rpm) is 70mm. So I asked and they also have a 80mm/60mm shroud adaptable to the 120/80. So, I can mount 120/80 on top of the 80/60. Is this adviseable? Will I get better airflow? Here it's impossible to find powerful 70mm fans, so that's my only option if I want to keep bringing up the speed.

I wish it would work !! But no... the flow resistance is too much for an ordinary fan, most of the airstream will be tossed right off the vanes. Just the adaptors might give some "awesome" feel of air wooshing by, but hook it up to a heatsink that is a huge restriction on it's own and your gains are totally gone.

LOL! Has anyone tried blowing on a heatsink with an industrial air compressor ?? Well, it's not phase change, but the decompression from 8-10 bar to 1 bar sure eats up some celsius!!! It's a pity they make so much noise.... and I don't think they like running 24/7.

Boo hoo :-(( How sad. That's why I didn't buy them. I faintly remembered having heard bad things about doing this kind of ...experiment.
How sad. Now I'm stuck with this fan until I find an online store that sells to Europe :-(

Thanks Paxmax for the info. I'm glad I didn't buy the adapters.
BTW, the fan I have is rated at 15 CFM. Would the losses be so massive?

I bought a 120mm-80mm fan adapter from Plycon and it had enough of an inner lip to drill 4 holes lining up with my Volcano7+ corner screws (pulled the top plate and fan 1st). Now I have a 120mm-70mm adapter, something that doesn't commercially exist! And excellent cooling that is almost silent! For a 120mm-60mm adapter, just get 4 fender washers with center holes fitting your heatsink corner screws and drill a hole in each to line up with the stock holes in the adapter. Adapters for an adapter!

Thanks Markst1 for the info. Could you please explain in more detail what you did? The mod definitely interests me because I HAVE to get better cooling.
The 120/80 adapter has sections that coincide with my heatsink but at the same time there are great big holes that are left out in other parts.
AHHHHH, I think I get what you're saying. It would be very easy to explain in person but through a keyboard.... let's see: the bottom part of the 80mm part is flat (what you called lip I think) because it's supposed to hold pressure from mounting the screws to the heatsink. Obviously the 4 corners of the heatsink (read mounting holes) are inside that lip, so you just happily drilled through the plastic shroud at the 4 corners, passed screws through and voila!
How fast does the 120mm fan you have spin at? Does it provide really good aircooling?
What did you do about the parts of the shroud that are bigger than the heatsink? You have to cover those holes up with something, but what?

I got my 120mm-80mm fan adapter and fan from www.plycon.com. The fan is their chromed 120mm unit rated at 84CFM made by Titan. The adapter is semi-transparent plastic. Just remove the heatsink corner screws, lay the adapter on it and use a felt-tip marker pen to make dots on it to afterward drill out. I'm pretty sure you could just put washers on the heatsink corner screws to hold the adapter centered tight on the heatsink if the inner lip isn't wide enough to drill out for them. I like my setup very well. Very quiet. I run my [email protected] idling at 41C, maxxed out at 54C (arctic silver I). The original Volcano7+ fan was unbearably loud and I decided a 120mm was the way to go.

Could you use the 120>80 adapter to work on a Vantec Aeroflow with out drilling?

SYT_Shadowfax said:

Boo hoo :-(( How sad. That's why I didn't buy them. I faintly remembered having heard bad things about doing this kind of ...experiment.
How sad. Now I'm stuck with this fan until I find an online store that sells to Europe :-(

Thanks Paxmax for the info. I'm glad I didn't buy the adapters.
BTW, the fan I have is rated at 15 CFM. Would the losses be so massive?

Click to expand...

Whoa ! If you have 15 cfm now, ofcoz you'd get more even with a 120->60 adapter !!!

What I meant was "If you buy a 70 cfm 120mm fan and duct it down to 60 mm + heatsink you wont get close to 70 cfm anymore..." Maybe you'll get 25-35 cfm. But If I were you, I'd go for a good 80 mm (40-50's range) and *tinker* a little with cardboard and of coz "Duct" tape !!!
Unless you have the 120mm fan already of coz....

Update: I got the 120mm fan with the 120/80 shroud. Using some duct tape I was able to make it fit.
In order to mount I had to stack it onto the old 70mm fan. They both blow in the same direction but I don't think it's efficient (temps actually ROSE after this) at all because the 70mm just pushes 15 cfm while the other one must push a lot more. The only option I have is to cut out the guts of the 70mm and leave only the outside casing (which is all I need to mount the shroud). The thing is once I do that I can never "repent" and go back to the old fan. That shouldn't be a problem, but I'm afraid the 120/80 will perform worse than the stock fan.

Another thing: the 120 is a GlobalFan with a thermister. Is there any way to get rid of it and have the fan always blowing the max. air? If not, where should I put the thermister to keep it hot always?

Duct tape? Is that really the best you can do? Since I wasn't familiar with your heatsink/fan I went to the manufacturer's site to look at a pic of it. Why don't you just remove the fan altogether and use the same 4 corner holes that held down the fan to attach the adapter? Just drill out the adapter,buy some short screws at a hardware store and do it. Leaving the original fan on will definitely mess up your cooling since it can't keep up with the airflow the 120mm fan generates. It slows it down. Really, don't go getto on this. It isn't that hard.

Hehe, hope you didn't think that was ALL I had to do to put the adapter on. I started by unmounting the heatsink and fan. Then I saw the nice 2.4B in the little socket. As it was the first time I had seen one like that (I've stripped apart old celerons and stuff but nothing that really looked cool) I took out the chip and held it in my hands. It's quite an amazing feat of engineering! Anyway, Right away I realised there was no way in hell I'd be able to mount the 120mm adapter right onto the heatsink because of the little plastic thingies that hold the HS onto the chip. It is impossible to put it on directly. If those plastic levers didn't exist it would be a walk in the park.
Well, I saw I'd need to somehow raise the adapter. Only way to do this was using the old fan. Well, when I had it all assembled I realised to my despair that the screws were too short to go through the adapter, fan and 70mm fan. So I got out a file and proceeded to file down the edges of the 70mm fan until the screws reached the HS.
That's why I haven't taken out the old fan. I knew I could either leave it in or rip out its guts and keep the shell to screw the adapter onto it. I chose the first option just in case.
Now I know I have to rip up the old fan to mount the big one right. I'm just worried it might not push enough CFM, but apparently that isn't the case.

Oh, what am I supposed to do about the thermister? Is there any way to short it out to have it spinning at full speed all the time? It goes at 1500RPM because the thermister never gets any heat! I wish it didn't have the thermister.


PD: I have drilled the adapter. Pretty neat job, I managed not to break the plastic.

Most of those adapters suck and restrict half the air.

You'd get better results with a longer tapered duct, probably 2+ inches.