so one of my followers on Twitter asked for an update on the wife PC as you guys
may or may not recall I rearranged the airflow configuration cuz I was trying
to avoid the default config which is these fans blowing out and these fans
sucking air in um I was trying to avoid the default configs tendency to
accumulate dust rings on the front fan Grill so so uh what I at first had
planned to do was create a positive air pressure environment but that didn't
really help because um anywhere where air was being drawn in I was still
getting that uh that dust accumulation so what I've gone with now is a single
intake at the back so that is running
off of the CPU fan header with a voltage reducer in line so that it's running uh
nice and quiet and nice and slow uh actually the sound you hear right now
isn't the fat but actually it's the coil wi from the GPU cuz I have uh f mark as
well as Prime 95 running right now so that you guys can see what the temperatures are like the fact that it's
off the ground also helps a fair bit in terms of accumulating dust inside so
it's uh yeah far less far less likely far less uh um liable to do that so
let's go ahead and open it up going to show you guys
uh what the guts are looking like these
days so I did end up changing the
motherboard oops there goes the Wi-Fi antenna well whatever so I didn't end up
changing the motherboard right now I've got an MSI z68 a gd80 in there nice
high-end board uh robust cooling on the
voltage regulator modules which is good cuz I don't have a whole lot of cooling
otherwise in this system so the two top fans are disabled they are off and there
are no fans in the front so that is how how I'm keeping those dust rings out and
I'm maintaining the positive air pressure just by having just one intake
fan and it might be positive it might actually be more neutral because this is
also an exhaust so this is pulling heat away from the
GPU which is running quite toasty but that's to be expected it is running firm
Mark which also has a single 120 mm fan
running on the aftermarket cooler that is on there so that is pretty much it
there's nothing really in the front of the case that needs to be cooled all we've got is SSD in here there are no
hard drives this system relies 100% on network storage for its mass storage you
can see the uh configuration of that video card so there's a bunch of heat
sinks and whatnot all over it that's a 5870 it does still have a what is in
there it's a 2600k as well as 8 gigs of Linus Edition
ocz memory and azente X Mystique that's
an older PCI sound card as well as a Gigabyte Wi-Fi Bluetooth card uh in
there as well so the config hasn't changed much I just redid the
motherboard I unplugged all the fans I switched the power supply around so that
this would act as an exhaust for the hot air coming off of the graphics card
because that's really really toasty and I didn't want to blow it the other way
up towards the CPU Cooler because especially in a uh in a heavy load
environment running the CPU passive like that is uh is pretty pretty tough It's
really asking for lot now bear in mind guys this system is not overclocked in
any way sorry I'm just adjusting something there I want to close this up
here before I uh show you guys anymore hold on I'm
just going to let the camera hang for a bit I apologize if this is like motion
sickness inducing because there's just nothing else I can really do with it
right now okay there case is closed up CU I want to show you guys uh closed
side panel temperatures when I show you the prime 95 uh fur mark temps that are
going on in here so again the system's
not very loud that coil wine you hear is
from the graphics card it'll turn off when uh when we turn off firmar fmar
really does a number on graphics cards and I found especially the last few
Generations AMD cards uh well they they whine a little
bit all right here we go so CPU temps
with uh eight threads of prime 95 are around 60° which are Super acceptable
and firm ark's been running for the last little bit here and it looks like we're
going to Peak around that sort of 76 to
77 down to 76 oh look at that good timing we just hit the peak right around
uh right around the time that we stopped uh that we stopped filming here and I
stopped talking about it so you can see now it's really balanced itself out a
fair bit so I think that pretty much uh
covers it so the 5870 is more than happy running at around 75 80° underload and
if we go ahead and turn all of this stuff off so if we stop our torture test
put that away turn off fur Mark you're going to see that idle temperatures are
very very good as well so like I said wouldn't recommend overclocking like
this but if you have a case that is well ventilated in terms of just allowing
passive air flow to go through it you know heat does tend to rise a little bit
um you can get away with very few fans so there's only a few fans okay here
much quieter now that was that coil wine from the graphics card before so very
few fans 120 mil or sorry 140 mil here
120 mil in the power supply and then that 120 mil directly on the video card
and that's about it I mean if you didn't have a video card and you had like a
passive power supply like uh like this x series one from cic here you could get
away with just a single a single cooling
fan blowing air towards that heat sink and that's about it remember guys that
CPU is technically not 100% passive cuz I do have that near nearby fan blowing
air at it so uh I think that pretty much
covers it I think it's going to be a while before this settles down into an
into an idle reading here but whatever you guys get the point Thank you for
checking out this update on my video blog and don't forget to subscribe to
L's Tech tips oh yeah for those of you who are
definitely going to ask that's the fractal design Arc midi
case love it