Introduction

Last semester I was having serious trouble with my PII 333mhz, Voodoo3 3000, Enlight 7237 enclosed system. It would lock up while playing games, and sometimes just when I was programming in Borland C. For those of you who own a V3 card you are probably very aware of how hot they can get, even when you’re not in games. If you have one and you don’t know what I am talking about, open up your case and stick a finger (preferably one you don’t care too much about) onto the top of the card. Now Systemlogic is not responsible for any burns you receive, so it may be a good idea not to hold your finger there for too long ;)

Well, I got fed up, and decided to add some more fans. I ordered some Panaflos from www.2cooltek.com as well as some miscellaneous smaller fans. These puppies were the 120mm ones I’ve talked about before, they’re nice and quiet, even quieter than you sneaking back into your house through your bedroom window at 4am (yeah I know about you ;) Well after performing some crazy surgery on my case I now have 3 120mm fans in there and 2 80mm fans (counting the one for the powersupply). I also now have my unlocked PII 333 on a 100mhz bus tooting along @ 400mhz, not bad, not bad. That V3 is still friggin hot tho!

Well enough for the life story. Case cooling is essential for a well operating system, it also kicks open the door and lays a solid foundation for the rest of the cooling of your systems’ components. What good does an Alpha P3125 do if your case temps are 40c anyways!! You have to have a cool case to begin with to really overclock using heatsinks (watercooling is another story, and I’ll get to that soon enough).

Cooling is all about airflow, you need to be the airs’ master, you have to control it, tell it where to go. A very well observed practice in case cooling is to enter air at a low point in the case and since heat naturally rises get it to exit at the top. You also want to get the air to move over your hot graphics card (eg V3, yeah I know it’s getting old, but that sucker burnt me pinky ;) and CPU.

A particular methodology which you might want to observe when adding case fans is the creation of blowholes. This is basically cutting out a hole large enough for the fan you intend to use, and mounting it there. Using them to intake air at the bottom and ‘blow’ (hence blowhole) the hot air out of the top. This methodology I am ripping off everyone else who has done it before me, I think HardOCP (what does OCP stand for anyway?) takes credit for the first published one tho.

OH! a special treat for you today, my photographer has summoned the presence of some models, look out for them below in Step 2 Mod ;)

Step 1 Mod

I will be performing mods in three steps upon the FS020, the first one is semi stock, it simply involves cutting out the grills for the 3 120mm mounts. While this might not make all that much difference with airflow, perhaps only 6cfm (from 66) it will however make a larger difference in noise. You see, noise from a fan comes from two sources. Vibration and turbulence. Vibration from the fan will move onto the panels of your case and your panels will actually act like drums, resonating the vibrations from the fan. The way to eliminate vibration resonance is to isolate your fans from the case. The best way to do this is through grommets, which are available at any hardware store. I will use a more custom approach, involving cut up bicycle inter-tubes and rubber washers. This is perhaps the biggest noise maker. However one must not knock off air turbulence. This is especially important with hich CFM fans, like my Panaflos. To reduce turbulence you must get rid of anything restrictive in the path of the airflow.

So for Step1 of the mod I will basically decrease vibrations and decrease turbulence. This setup would just be slightly better than the stock method, so you can go ahead and take my measurements and apply them to the stock case as well if you so desire. The nice thing about 120mm fans is that you can take any cd and use it to mark your cutting hole, just remember to cut slightly inside of the circle and you shall have a perfect sized hole.

I stripped everything out of my case inorder not to get any stray metal fragments where they would do damage, and hauled that puppy downstairs. Eye protection is also a good idea. For the cutting I used a jigsaw with a fine toothed metal blade. Before I got to the jigsawing (verb?) I had to drill a starter hole using the biggest drill bit I have, a word of caution, a drill with a big drill bit becomes a monster, this puppy will pull, yank, toss, snag, just like that pesky chihuahua your grandma adores will at your pant leg. No seriously, take care. It is also good practice to apply some oil to your blade or to the case to keep the temp of the blade down, improving it’s cutting ability. Blades also last much longer this way, as the metal does not heat up, becoming softer. After you are done cutting make sure you clean out all the metal shards, getting metal shards across the wrong electrical joint could easily foul your motherboard or anything electrical in your case. Here are some pics of the finished product before assembly. Click to enlarge:

One thing to note about this Step Mod is that you will be drawing air in through the vents on the side panels, as you have 2* 120mm fans and 1* 80mm fan pumping air out but only 1* 120mm fan pumping air out. This is what I would call semi controlled air flow, as it’s coming in wherever it can, not exactly where I want it to, which would be over the processor and graphics card.

Step 2 Mod

With Step 1 the cooling abilities were close to stock. With Step 2 however, we must truly master the air. We must dictate exactly where it goes, how it enters the case, where it flows and how it exits. First lets mount a 4th 120mm fan on the left side panel, this is a very important fan as you shall see. I cut the hole in the same fashion as the first 3, and drilled the mounting holes then installed it using rubber washers / and strips of rubber from a bicycle inter-tube.

I then used some Kentucky Chrome (duct tape) on the two side panel vents to ensure that the air is coming in through the bottom front and the side blowhole I just made. I punctured a hole in the duct tape to allow the temp sensor through: (click to enlarge)

Another place you are going to have to tape up on the FS020 is the front 120mm fan grill. It is basically one big square mesh, and since the fan does not cover it all, we are going to need to tape it up so that we do not get any re-circulating air, so all the air coming in the case is fresh cool air.

Another thing you are going to have to do is place some foam or similar material between the bezel and the case above the bottom intake fan. This is done so that air is drawn strictly from the outside and is not just pulled down the front of the case along the bezel. This is to avoid re-circulating the air inside your case. I simply cut up a nice size of foam, glued it on and was good to go. For your viewing pleasure: (click to enlarge)

After doing all this I have successfully dictated to the air where it shall go. I am it's master (beware! writer on ego trip). This Step is complete. Here are some pics for your enjoyment: (click to enlarge)

Step 3 Mod

Okay, some of you might be wondering "What could he possibly do next?". Well very simply put: Cable Clutter Removal. Air flow, Air flow, Air flow! Lets tidy up the case and cut those ribbon cables up to get the best airflow possible! Now, two things to do, make round cables and tidy everything up.

Making round cables, well basically it involves cutting up the big ribbon cables into smaller ribbons and stacking them. Since you guys are prolly falling asleep already I think I am gonna make another article on the fabrication of Round Cables, stay tuned if you are interested.

Here is a pic of the before: (click to enlarge)

Here is a pic of the after: (click to enlarge)

Now onto the results!

Testing Methodology

It might be a good idea to let you know how I took the temperatures you shall see in the rest of the article. I used a total of 7 different sensors. Four of them where from an external sensor, and the other 3 were taken off the motherboard. I have pics to show 3 of them here:

The Voodoo3 3000 temp sensor: (click to enlarge): right on the back side of the V3, where it is hottest

The CPU probe: the thermistor is pressed right up against the edge of the cpu slug, it's also covered in thermal paste to ensure the most accurate reading possible

The ambient temp probe: just chilling outside, I was careful not to breathe on it.

The fourth measurement for the external sensor was the voltage regulators, this is directly behind the CPU, directly in front of the dual 120mm fans. I chose to do this on a hunch, and it turned up some interesting results.

The last three temps were recorded off the motherboard, they include the heatsink, case temp and voltage regulators. The heatsink thermistor is mounted beneath the heatsink and comes into contact with the bottom of it. The case temp is mounted near the ram slots, and finally the voltage regulator is mounted right in the middle of the voltage regulator array, not touching the voltage regulator like mine.

I took two sets of measurements per Step, Idle and Full Load. For Idle I simply let the system sit for 10mins before recording temps. For full load I ran Dcyphers' CSC.exe dos executable from a window, again for 10mins. From my experience this program gets right near 100% load the entire time it is running. Q3A on the other hand only gets the cpu up to 100% (if even that) at certain spots. So it cycles and is not constant like CSC.

System Specs
Modded Liteon FS020
400w Zippy Emacs PSU
Gigabyte 7IX
Athlon 650 @ 750&1.6v core
128mb Crucial PC133 SDRAM
Voodoo3 3000 not o/c (AGP)
Adaptec 2940 (PCI 3)
Soundblaster Live! Value (PCI 5)
Quantum Atlas 10k (bottom slot in main drive cage, FAST!!)
Toshiba 40x SCSI cdrom drive (top 5.25" bay)
FD / Generic Keyboard / Razor Boomslang 2000 mouse

Step 1,2,3 Mod Results

I then put the system back together again (does that remind you of a nursery rhime too?). And proceeded to run some the tests as per the methodoloy above. Here are the results:

Alrighty, as you can see, there is a big difference in CPU temp between Step1 and Step 2. Everything between Step 1 and Step 2 seem fine, basically everything is cooler. Due to the more controlled airflow of the blowhole located on the left panel. Now looking at Step 2 and Step 3 things seem a bit odd. The CPU got hotter, the heatsink also got proportionally hotter. Everything got hotter except for the darn V3! Now the Voodoo3 cooled off a bit cuz now it's got that big ass fan blowing right onto it, no longer obstructed by cables. Why? Where here is my thought on it, due to the clutter (particularly the 50pin SCSI ribbon cable) air was being channeled closer to the heatsink, therefore providing better cooling. With all the cable clutter gone, air was just hopping over the heatsink, right over it, not around it. This theory is further reinforced by the fact that the Voltage Regulators (right between the CPU and dual 120mm fans on the mobo) got hotter, meaning less air was circulating there. This leads me to the conclusion that for best CPU cooling you should place the blowhole fan just to the right of the cpu. So that the left edge of the box fan is a couple inches away from the top, or right edge of the heatsink. This way air blows down onto the motherboard right in front of the CPU, and then is pulled AROUND the heatsink by the dual 120mm fans. This would give optimum cooling.

I am not disappointed with my blowhole location, as I am going to be progressing towards watercooling. And was thinking more about cooling my V3 (which worked a bit, bloody thing.....). So the solution for me, or people who have not modded their LiteONcases would be to come up with some ducting methods. Ducting would probably have better results than the best blowhole placement, as I would be FORCING the air to go where I want. Just imagine, over 120cfm of air flowing past your heatsink! This case ROCKS!!! If there is enough interest out there, I'll be glad to perform the ducting and let you all know about it. Why don't I do it for myself? Well, I am heading towards watercooling land... where we're going we don't need.... fans... ;) So it's more for you than for me.

Also, if you could, please keep up posting stuff in the comments and in the forums, so I won't have to answer the same question more than once, and you won't have to wait as long to get an answer. Thanks. ;)

PS: Like 'em models? ;) hehehe

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