The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Mmm, pretty furry in there already!

 

Furry is an understatement! LOL! Sneezing and coughing comes to mind I thought about blowing it out right there, but dont want the literal cloud that comes with it...

 

I seriously need to inspect my top 4870X2, almost no air comes out of it at all now at max fan speed (and the fan is definitely working fine!) and the emergency overheat threshold came on during a windows install, of all things. On the bright side, the reformat seems to have fixed the HDD LED stuck on bug.

 

Thats strange. The stuck LED that is. I like the activity light myself. Can be informative at times

Probably gonna have to blow that radiator out once a month. The winter time might be ok, but not the summer! I haven't even had it that long.

 

I've not blown my 4870X2s out ever, but then I've never needed to blow out a card before. That said, this is by far the longest I've used a dual-slot cooler for. The only other traditional dual-slot cards I've had have either been replaced in short order (HD3870) or had the cooler replaced not long after (X1900XT). The 4870X2s have been in my system for two years now. That's a long time!

 

2 years without a blow job? That's quite a while LOL!!!

 

Oman7,
When I pulled mine out a couple of weeks ago, I was expecting the Rad to look like yours, but most of the dust is directed and exhausted out the side cover fan. I do have to dust back of the video card as the 70mm fan is what pull's the dust out of the main airstream. the side fan does the rest. The rad showed no signs of dust at all. I vacuumed everything else.

Russ

 

2 years without a blowout is definitely cause for concern. My PC gets blown out every other month or so and it NEEDS it.

 

Estuansis,
All I can say is this is the second build in the same case. I have a Kama-Bay fan occupying the bottom 3 ODD Bays, 30 cfm, low pressure, A 53 cfm high pressure fan in front, blowing over the HDDs. On the lower side cover there's 40 CFM, high pressure fan, with an 80mm fan grill 3 inches above it, left open to equalize the airflow better and to direct feed the 68 cfm stock fan pushing air out through the radiator, with a 63 cfm low pressure fan blowing out of the case.

Here's the theory. The Kama-Bay fan covers the ODD bays, so they act like a duct, closed on all 4 sides so that means as the air exits the "duct", it dissipates rapidly. Since the dust particles are heaver, the 70mm fan on the pump housing helps push the dust out of the slower moving airflow, and the strong side fan whisks them away through the side louvers. It worked the same way with the freezer 7. No dust in the Freezer 64 Pro, but I did have to put the 53cfm fan on the back of the case, and replace it with the stock coolermaster. It now will idle at 24C in a 23C room.

I managed to get a day that the outside temps co-operated so I was able to maintain a room temp of 75F/23C

The idle temps were done at 22C in the early morning, and the stress tests were done after the sun came up. Here's the direct idle link since they are posted already
http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/7107/72f22c.jpg

Stressed link.
http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/4764/72f22cibt.jpg

Some people like DocTY like to tweak memory, and spend months at it, making minor adjustments to all the sub timings. A tedious task, but can be very rewarding in memory bandwidth.

Others like Sam, spend their time trying to make it run silent as possible.

I try to do things with the airflow to get the lowest temps possible, while trying to keep the dust out of the radiator. I haven't cleaned the radiator since I first installed it, and there's no sign of Dust in the rad or on the fan blade. I would say that I had succeeded on both counts. It's just my thing! LOL!!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Now that I have a case with dust filters it doesn't need much cleaning. I took at look at it after 6 months of runtime and the inside was very clean and mostly dust free. The dust filters needed a bit of cleaning but that's easy

 

Gave it a manual blowout. Don't have the courage to take it apart and replace the TIM before I have the funds to replace it, should I break it

Puts out much more air now, still not as much as the second card below though. So far so good on the temps, in the HoN lobby, gone from 88ºC at 4100rpm to 85.5ºC at 2850rpm.

 

Excellent. Both of my cards get physically pulled from the board and detailed out when I clean my PC. I have to do that awesome dragon side window justice

 

Wow, the difference in how much quieter my PC is for doing that is unbelievable. Can't believe I didn't think to do it sooner tbh
It's made so much of a difference I'm contemplating getting my hard disk silencers out again!

 

What's a hdd silencer, rubber mounting?

 

http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_3854.html

 

Dandy unit sam. Probably not as a converter though eh? 3 bays can be converted to support 4 Hdd's, Right?

 

Well, not with those, they're 1->1 boxes.
The 4->3 I use in my server is this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811999163

Not a silencer though.

 

If one were using silent "Green" drives, it would be ok

A shame its deactivated

 

Yeah I think you can still get them here, it's just that newegg have stopped selling them.
Plenty of other similar devices out there though, like the Scythe Kama Bay.

My 4->3 contains four WD greens. The noisier drives go in the silenced bays in the back of the case

 

Yah, I'll likely be searching in the not too distant future. I can see myself having multiple massive drives in the not too distant future Probably with redundancies...

Just blew out my HAF932. Man o man did it have a cloud of dust! I put that off far too long. Temperature difference is very noticeable. My Mobo temp has also been affected. CPU dropped by at least 4 - 5C. I'll likely be blowing it out once a month now Had to be careful with the air hose I used. Mega pressure! I held it a foot back and it PUSHED on one of the radiator fans more so than I liked LOL! Case is clean as a whistle though xD

The poor radiator seemed to house the majority of the dust cloud. I hit that area and nearly lost visibility LOL! Nah, not quite that bad. Bad enough though.