It's time to consider cooling the back of your motherboard (pics are results!)

It's time to consider cooling the back of your motherboard (pics and results!)

(Sorry, I woke up too early and screwed up my title. It should read "...(pics and results!)")

Last night I helped my friend do a little hack job on his case. He is shooting for the best possible air cooling he get without spending much money. The only money he spent was for a small pack of cutting wheels and the part that mounts them on the Dremel. All of these temps are with the stock intel heatsink on 630 processor (84W). We added a low speed 120mm to the back of the MB, a 90CFM or so 120mm fan to the side panel and reversed the direction of the front fan to get these results. Feel free to post any comments or questions. I really hope this makes people more interested in cooling the back of their motherboards.

First I'll post the numbers:

• Processor idle decreased 4C
• Case idle decreased 6C
• Northbridge idle decreased 3C

• Processor load decreased 7C
• Case load decreased 9C
• Northbridge load decreased 2C

Here's a look at what we did to get these results...

First, you take all the stuff out:



We decided that hard drive cage needed to go, along with the swiss cheese in the front:



That's when we decided to use the easy button (dremel):



(excited and scared all at the same time)



Here's how he started cutting the MB tray. The goal of this mod is to cool the backside of the mb with a fan. I told him a lot of people had seen gains from this (a lot of your processor's heat is absorbed by the MB), and he went for it.



This is the right tool for the job. The person at home depot recommended a part that looked more like a drill bit used for engraving. After about 6" through the aluminum it was totally pwned.



Oh noes the hard drive cage has been teh stoled! He left just enough room for his 2 drives in raid 0.



Cutting the side panel:



He also decided to cut the windowed panel to feed even more air directly towards the cpu. This makes it hard to tell how effective the fan was cooling the back of the motherboard when we added one here as well. Tonight we'll see what happens when it is disconnected.

Continued in post 2...

Pretty? No. Effective? Yes.



That's right, clean up your little metal shaving beach...



Fan mounted to cool backside of motherboard.





Side panel attached:



Front fan attached. Notice how there are no restrictions at all on the front fan.



One hard drive was moved the the floppy bay. As you can see the airflow isn't resticted by the hard drive cage anymore.



Results:



and results:




I attached the actual screenshots of the program used to record our temps.

Feel free to post any comments, suggestions, questions.

Thanks!

The problam is that the window fan looks like it may have had more to do with the temp decrease than the back fan. You should try masking over the window fan (remember to disconnect it as well) and see how the temps change.

I'm pretty sure the window fan helped, too. Later tonight we'll unplug it and cover it up. I'll report back on what temps we got.

P.S. - Since there seems to be little interest in this I'm not going to bother him with tests and screenshots. What you see is what you get