[Ham-Computers] Computer Cooling 101

[Dan Violette]

Possibly an AOpen brand case????  http://www.aopen.com  also http://www.newegg.com sells many of them.  Dan KI6X


On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at  9:45 AM, WA5CAB at cs.com wrote:

> I learned a lesson night before last, which in retrospect should in part have 
> been obvious.  Our main computer here is in a large tower case that I bought 
> around 1997.  It's on its 4th system board and 3rd power supply.  As 
> originally supplied, it had a single intake fan in the bottom of the front steel panel, 
> plus the power supply's exhaust fan.  At the top rear, it has mounting holes 
> for two exhaust fans.  About a year ago during the last system board upgrade I 
> was having the random reboot problem and internal temperature was a possible 
> candidate.  I installed one and then two fans in the rear, swapped to a 
> different new system board (hated the first one anyway, a Gigabyte) and finally 
> bought expensive RAM with integral heat sinks.  Some or all of that fixed the 
> reboot problem, and it has run 27/7 since before Christmas last year.
> 
> Last week I began to notice a whine coming from the box.  I assumed it was 
> probably a hard drive getting ready to fail, and wasn't too concerned other than 
> with the cost and probable difficulty of locating a replacement.  Night 
> before last, I decided to open up the box and see whether I could tell which drive 
> was noisy.  Within seconds of sliding the left side cover back, the whine 
> frequency started down and then essentially disappeared into the general 
> background noise.  Turned out to be the intake fan in the front being "pulled" by the 
> three exhaust fans.  The only reason I can think of for why it ran almost a 
> year before doing it is that there was some dust buildup on the front steel panel 
> inside the plastic front cover, and the air velocity through the remaining 
> clear holes in front of the fan must have gone 'way up.
> 
> So I removed the front fan and the dust and things are back to quiet.  I'll 
> have to remember to add cleaning inside the front cover to the PMS card on this 
> machine.  :-)
> 
> I wish that I could find another case like this one to put my wife's Gateway 
> components into.  It's the easiest tower case to work on or in that I've ever 
> encountered.  But there's nothing on the exploded view drawing I got with it 
> except a model number.  And the only ID on the front is a large "A" over the 
> word "Open".
> 
> Robert Downs - Houston
> <http://www.wa5cab.com> (Web Store)
> MVPA 9480
> <wa5cab at cs.com> (Primary email)
> <wa5cab at houston.rr.com> (Backup email)
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