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Noctua i4 CPU Cooler: Great For Cooling High-End LGA-2011v3 CPUs

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  • #11
    The best way to use big air coolers

    The best way to use big air coolers is to customize the case to allow ducting air in a straight-line path both to and from it, like some server cases or the old Apple G5 cases did. I just finished another round of modifications to my Diablo Fly case, moving the HDD hotswap drawer to the bottom of the entire case and the card reader and DVD drive to the bottom of the already expanded (5 slot) 5 /14" bay. That gave three empty bays topside covered with the original screens. The CPU cooler is a modified Thermaltake FriOCK with the fans mounted directly to the fins so it can get in and out of the case, and custom brackets to aim it for and aft on the AMD board. Fans point aft, and both fans couple to tubes made from DVD pack spindle covers. One goes to a rear case fan with the blades removed, sending the hot air straight out a low restriction screen. The other couples to a section of 2 liter soda bottle going all the way to the empty front bays, terminating just behind those screens.

    The result was a nearly 5C drop in CPU temps at the same fan speed under full load. Unfortunately I still have to run the same full fan speed at max load, because the cooling for the voltage regulators is by an air scoop in the rear duct. I could either enlarge that scoop or switch to a dedicated small fan (possibly noisy) to allow running the main cooler fans at a slower speed under max load, where it does not only look but sound like a jet engine when rendering out a video file.

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