Cooling Areca controller

[Railgun]

I don't expect to get a whole lot of traction on this one, but I figured why not.

My sig doesn't go into detail with my WC setup, so I'll give the short short version.

18x Arctic Cooling F12 and 4x AC F8 fans. When all at low speed, it's quiet enough for me (though I will be swapping out to GT AP15s soon) and the most annoying thing at that point is the fan on my Areca 1880i.

While passive cooling is a little easier, where the card sits in relation to my fan setup, there is virtually zero air flow across/near the thing, though where is it in relation to my top of case exhaust would help from heat escaping, it's not the most ideal solution.

I've seen one thread on the hard forums that used a Zalman vid cooler. The goal here is to be as quiet as possible. I had thought about popping a line off the main loop for it, but I don't necessarily want the complexity and to be honest, I'm sure I'll be upgrading that card relatively soon with some SATA express solution.

That said, I'm curious to know who's done what, if anything, to their controllers.

 

[Automata]

I modified my Perc 5/i cards when I had them. The black heatsink is normally where the gold one is and the left chip is left bare from the factory.



An aftermarket heatsink is probably your best solution.

 

[Railgun]

Heh...I guess a large sink is the only option to get as much passive cooling out of the thing. That'll work I suppose.