so I've been having some performance issues with my media PC it's got a
GeForce GTX 660 Ti um some Core I5 or
something like that in it and basically what happens is I launch a game and it
runs great for a little while and then
the frame rate starts to tank now if you're familiar with thermal throttling you probably know what I'm about to show
you here but if you're not then we'll go
ahead and show you what's going on so you can see here GPU temperatures are
pinned at about 101° and then if we go ahead and scroll
down you can see our fan speed is pinned
at 80% which is the maximum that it'll do and then finally yes this my friends
this is the core clock it should be at around 1 GHz plus and instead it's
hovering between 581 mahz and even
dipping as low as 191 so this system is thermal throttling
and there's something that we need to do about
it the flash Voyager GTX USB 3 drive
from Corsair provides SSD like performance and fits comfortably in your
pocket click now to learn more so this
is the problem even with the graphics card doing nothing sitting and idling
it's at about 50° so modern gpus don't
run much hotter than the ambient temperature which means with this
cabinet closed it is roasting in there even when the computer's not doing
anything so I guess one solution would be to just have it open all the time but
uh that's pretty lame and another solution that I was doing which is
terrible was just hanging the computer out here but you can see I actually
damaged the lip here quite a bit doing that so obviously we need something
better so while I could have concluded that the solution is to put a less
powerful computer in there yeah no we're
going to add cooling to the cabinet instead so I've gathered a drill
soldering iron wire stripper saw Dremel tool measuring tape cooling fans fan
grills fan power splitter inline resistors external power supply for the
fans or perhaps some sacrificial stuff to do like a DIY something or other a
hole saw some miscellaneous nuts and bolts clear and electrical tape a paper
template or for for cutting 120 mm fan
holes and then a vacuum for cleaning up it's going to be a fun day okay so with
the system out i' had actually kind of forgotten the configuration of this case
I thought there was a a vent on the bottom but there isn't other than this
intake right here so that changes how I had planned to put the fans in but what
I want to do is I want to get the exhaust from the case so that's the top
120 mm fan here and then the power supply fan at the back I want to get
that out of the cabinet and then I want to bring fresh air to the intake which
for this case the only real intake is
here on the bottom so what I may end up doing is changing the graphics card from
a an internal recirculating cooler
design to like an open cooler design to one that has a rear exhaust on it so
we'll have to figure that out later let's see if this works first so my original plan was to do 1 120 mm intake
down here and then I was going to do like a side intake over here to account
for the two exhausts that I'm going to do at the top back here but um my wife
actually brought up that if I do decide to put a hole in the bottom of the case
for some passive intake for the uh the fan on the graphics card then if I just
put these both here covering the entire bottom of the case I always have a computer here in all likelihoods so uh I
should just put them both here all right so here we are all the templates are taped into place so I will start by
drilling out the four holes and then
hole sawing the middles all right moment of truth time although we did have a
realization this is a lot thicker than the back material so I'm going to need
some different bolts but
whatever
okay let's check and make sure that these are even the right size
and that's pretty tight I would have to actually screw them through I'd rather
have it a little looser Okay Okay so we've got all the holes drilled except
the big ones and I had kind of a scary
moment here when I realized my drill just
barely barely fits so we want to get
this lined up as perfectly as we can my whole saw is not actually 120 mm it's a
little bit smaller so I guess if I'm off by a little bit it's not a huge deal cuz
we're not making the best use of the space anyway but here we go well I got
started and realized I wasn't wearing safety goggles and the way this spins it
was basically throwing sawdust right in my face so here we
go so uh there we
go piece number one that I accidentally
Drew on it while I was pulling it up is done let's find out if a fan fit shall
we so they're going to kind of sit like there
is although probably on the bottom of the cabinet and then I'll have to I'll
have to filter them with uh maybe like some Silverstone filters or something
like that um so there you go there'll be intakes though but the point is just do
they fit and the answer is yes they do so these fans have little wire
management Clips here and I realized either I can wire manage them under here
which is just going to be kind of a pain in the butt or I can just have just the
one clip hold them down and I can put them in place this
way so I'll bring them up here manage
them together over here and then route them to the fan splitter so well this is
the Moment of Truth where we find out if uh they actually fit so far it's going
really well there we go all right so that's how they'll go on
good helper okay so my project has a helper now helper yeah you're a really
good helper which of course means that I'm making really you know great
progress at this point um anyway all the fans are on so I don't know if you have
an angle to see the ones at the back there we go so all the fans are on and
now I've added the Swift Tac Fan Hub so
this has a moax power in as well as a pwm control lead that I'm actually not
going to be using I'm just going to use this for power cuz I'm going to run all
these fans at full speed they're only 1200 RPM fans so they're they're quite
quiet so I'm just going to use the included Adhesive Mount here to Mount
this in the back corner and other than that the cabinet itself I think uh for
fear of getting ahead of myself is pretty much there uh mostly I didn't use
grills but at the back for these fans I'm using grills just because with all
the wires hanging around here I don't want anything getting caught in them
another thing that I'm going to have to add later is um some kind of a filter
for these bottom ones oh excuse me EXC me just because
without a filter those are going to be drawing air directly off the floor so
I've got a couple options for what I can use I ripped this off a Silverstone case
ripped this off of a Corsair case but I
I'll have to figure out a system for mounting it so I can easily get at it
later oh yeah uh fan control in case I decide the fans are too loud I might use
these inline resistors so as with any project like this um you know wife road
blocks can be a bit of an issue and I got the approval for the time and money
to spend on this little project and then it started taking a lot longer than
originally advertised so I'm simplifying
it a little bit totally my choice this
is the way I wanted to do it not the way that I'm about to tell you so what I
really wanted to do was I wanted to cut
this up here okay and then just have
this power lead lead to a power
connector on the back of the case so I was just going to find somewhere and Dremel out a rectangular hole and then
use these SC screws to secure it there then what I was going to do was I was
going to create a custom adapter so I was going to plug this in here and then
I was going to splice this one on here so that I could get a uh so that I could
have the correct lead to plug into my fan controller so we're scrapping that
and instead we're going to do it what my wife thinks is the more is the less
ghetto way but I personally think is way more ghetto and we're just going to run
a four pin Molex connector out this spot
right here at the back where just like this where
normally this piece closes down on top
of the uh the PCI bracket so we're just going to kind of close it in like that
and we're just going to have a lead like that so I'd love to hear your feedback
was my way cutting holes in the case the more ghetto way or is my wife's way
repurposing this hole and then just having a power supply cable hanging out
here like it's so ugly not that I'm leading you in the direction of which
way I think you should vote but there you go well if nothing else we've got
power out the back of the case now so we're pretty much ready to rock all
right so uh this is I guess a good opportunity to show you guys the
internals of this case so there's a 140 mm fan in the front that takes in from
that filtered intake this down here is what I'm going to have to cut up in
order to get more air flow to this graphics card if it comes to that and
then um other than that yeah I guess we've got this routed over to the side
of the CPU socket here so it's going to be pretty much out of the way just going
to this is my power supply with the custom shortened cables um for Mini ITX
that I had in my old media PC so I changed my mind about how I'm going to
mount the fan controller um I decided to screw it in
just cuz it has spots for that so as long as these are small
enough uh yeah it's not that ideal is it
h as long as they don't split then as I go through
them can they make
itad yeah am I funny my
funny there you go I got an endorsement from my 2-year-old I'm funny I'm funny
to 2-year-olds so everything's wired back
up now overall I'd say the project was uh well I mean I haven't seen
temperatures yet but it went really well went really quickly although there was
one sacrifice that had to be made the receiver dongle for my uh my air mouse
SL keyboard thing that I actually find very very useful um got rolled over when
I was showcasing the PC in the first place so that's a real shame but I guess
now is the Moment of Truth Okay so we've got it put back in there um I'd say it's
not quite as quiet as I'd like and what I'll probably do as a as a V2 of this of
this little mod is get two four pin fan
extensions and then change out the fans for pwm fans and then I'll go from the
uh from the swifttech pwm splitter to the CPU header and then I'll go from my
CPU Cooler out to the pwm splitter so I'll use those two extensions there and
then I'll be able to have my CPU fan and then all four of the cabinet fans
running according to CPU temp with the Motherboard BIOS so that'll be version
two but for now it's it's definitely tolerable but let's see what the results are like so at idle we're looking at 41°
which is a 10° Improvement and uh that is of course not
the real test so let's get Tomb Raider
going on and let's uh let's let her cook for a bit shall we okay so I've had the
same scene running for about half an hour it's time to alt Tab out and see
how we did GP temperature 94
95° okay so that's still pretty toasty
but core clock ah we're even getting
some turbo boost so yes it's still warm um I think to to take it
to the next level I would have to do something about the bottom of that
system or install some kind of a blower
type GPU so that I'm not recirculating the hot air within the system itself but
what we've done is we've lowered the cabinet temperatures enough that the
card is at least able to keep itself under control so there you go mission
accomplished uh guys like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked
it leave a comment let me know do you want to see any more of this kind of of
vloggy here's what I do on my weekends
sort of cuz I probably wouldn't do this on my weekend if this wasn't my job but
I did it because I it was my job and I
kind of wanted to do it so anyway if you want to see more videos like this then
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