Some Like It Cool
July 26th, 2008 by ComputerBob
This is yet another one of my do-it-yourself adventures.
Over five-and-a-half years ago, I built my PC from parts that I ordered online. It was pretty scary the first time I turned it on and nothing happened. But once I realized that its power supply has its own on/off switch, it started right up, and it’s been working great ever since.
Back then, I wrote an article about the importance of keeping your PC’s CPU cool.
The one thing that I’ve never really liked about my home-built PC has been the cooling capacity of its case. Though its power supply is in the back-top corner, the power supply fan doesn’t really move very much air — it moves enough to cool itself, but certainly not enough to cool the whole PC. So, back then, I added an extra exhaust fan to it, but it had to fit underneath the power supply, making it less than ideal for getting the hottest air out of the case.
Now that my PC is reaching “antique” status in terms of normal computer lifespans, I decided to increase the cooling capacity of its case again. This time, I wanted to blow cool air right onto the CPU and exhaust the hottest air right out of the top of the case.
It ended up requiring some very careful surgery with a jigsaw and a Dremel tool. First of all, my PC’s case had a support bar that stretched from front to back right at the height of the CPU, preventing me from putting a side fan anywhere near the height of the CPU. So I drilled out that support bar’s rivets and tested to see if its absence made any difference in the stability of the case. If it had, I would have simply reinstalled that support bar with metal screws. Luckily, it didn’t make any difference to take that bar out, so that allowed me to cut an opening in the side of the case for a 4″ fan at the same height as the CPU.
The other issue was the tight space between the inside edge of the power supply at the back of the case, and the back edge (and connectors) of my PC’s removable hard drives. I measured very carefully several times to determine the exact place to cut an opening in the case’s top for another 4″ fan.
The side fan is the same one that I had originally mounted in the back of the case, underneath the power supply. The top fan is one that I pulled from one of several old PCs that I had found on the side of the road several months ago. The chrome grill for the side fan came from the power supply of another one of those old PCs. I cut the grill for the top fan out of the case of another one of those old PCs.
I’m very happy with the final result, and I know that it’s going to work really well to keep my old CPU as cool as possible:
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