Originally posted by: WoodButcher
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The duckster has done a great deal of tinkering (we old guys tinker, you young pups call it research!) in this area and has some beautiful mods.
Apparently, the OP will have to search for it because the link you posted doesn't work.
Motherboard ducting offers the following advantage to air cooling -- with or without heatpipes:
1) Somewhere in the range of a 3C to 10C improvement in CPU cooling, depending on the thermal power or effective TDP of the processor
2) Better cooling to motherboard components, if the ducting of everything (including the CPU) is done to restrict air-flow over the motherboard, CPU and even the VGA card, and force pressurized air past those components for immediate exhaust from the case through exhaust fans (also included in the ducting scheme or design.)
3) It is possible to seriously reduce VGA temperatures through both ducting and 3rd-party heatpipe designs.
4) You may be able to eliminate noisy Northbridge fans by tedious attention to ducting-details that channel air through Northbridge heat-sink/pipe fins as part of this pressurized, low-volume air-flow. Cooling would probably even improve over application of Northbridge cooling fans in the 40-to-70mm size-range. This would eliminate temptation to apply larger fans, such as those 80mm or larger.
5) In order to have a good ducted-air cooling system, you need marginally higher CFMs on the intake side as opposed to those on the exhaust side. For instance, two or more 120mm intake fans (with decent ventilation) would be balanced against (a) a single 120mm or 140mm exhaust fan, or (b) two 120mm exhaust fans with lower CFMs and (implicitly) lower rpms.
6) To do the ducting, you can experiment with folded, corrugated cardboard, then apply the working prototype's design to a construction with foam art-board, such as you would obtain in 18"x24" panels at Michael's Arts & Crafts or even Target. The Target brand can be of lower quality (Elmer's); the higher the quality, the better the duct construction.
You can bend art-board along creases to form boxes. You must strip away the paper-backing 1/8" wide along the crease line for a neat fold.
You can glue the art-board to bond it in pieces. Michael's sells a "rubber-adhesive-like" tube of glue (petroleum distillate), but it tends to melt the foam part of the board. You can use certain silicone-adhesive-sealants, although the joints will feel rubbery and flex just a bit. There is a special "Foam-Safe" glue that you can buy for art-board made by ZAP -- obtainable at hobby-stores -- which does not melt or degrade the foam while making a super-glue-quality bond with both paper and foam. This latter glue is a bit pricey: $10 or so for a bottle containing 4 Fl Oz or so, but you can get quite a bit of application out of it -- enough for a single project.
7) Instead of art-board, you can cut and fit pieces of 1/8"-thick clear Lexan. Lexan costs around $15 for a 12"x18" piece. (Foam-board 18"x24" or 24"x36" costs around $6 per panel at Michael's and $3 per panel at Target.) To glue the Lexan pieces, use ZAP's "Poly-ZAP." Also a bit pricey, but it is a good bonding/welding agent for Lexan -- perhaps similar acrylics like plexiglas -- but it is a Lexan specialty product.
8) If you can "hang" the lighter foam-board pieces on heatsinks and PCB-hardware so that it is secure, you will be fine. Although Lexan is heavier, you can still do it without fasteners, but you may want to consider affixing the construction(s) to the case or motherboard panel. Velcro tabs are useful for either type of construction material (but use a drop of Lexan glue to mate the Velcro with the Lexan.)
Ducts can be made to fit snugly without posing a danger through tension or stress on components. They can be made to fit snugly enough that you take care removing and replacing them, but not so snugly that any significant stress on components would attend those operations.
9) IN ADDITION TO DUCTING: Although it voids the warranty protection on your processor, lapping the processor cap to bare copper (they are usually nickel-plated) has a significant impact on overall thermal resistance and might produce as much as a 5C-degree improvement in load temperatures for a thermal-wattage around 100W. If you do the CPU-lapping with reasonable care, there is no risk affecting the actual physical probability of CPU-failure -- expected lifespan would be the same. [You just won't be able to RMA it.]
If the heatsink-base is nickel-plated copper, you can also lap it flat and bare, with a resulting additive improvement of similar magnitude. ThermalRight also says that lapping voids their warranty, yet resellers (like SVC) that sell "custom-lapped" Ultra 120 Extremes replace the TR warranty with their own (of more limited duration.) The actual risk of damage in lapping a heatpipe cooler arises from how the unit is hand-held while moving it across wet-or-dri sandpaper -- you don't want to damage the heat-pipe welds. And thus, TR's warranty limitation is most likely addressing the stress-related damage -- and not the removal of the nickel-plate as a product-life-shortening factor.
You can choose to use diamond TIM or thermal paste. For a thermal-wattage of around 100W, you can expect an improvement over Arctic Silver 5 of 2 or 3C degrees. It will also be as good or better than anything other than AS5 -- including some of the newer market entries.
To give an example, I measured room-ambient temperatures with a digital thermometer, asking for comparisons to other enthusiasts who had recently purchased the same Q6600 C2Q B3-stepping, over-clocked to above 3 Ghz in a range of 3.0 to 3.2 and set to similar VCORE voltages. The room-ambients of respondents was reported with varying likely accuracy -- some may have used the wall-thermometer to gauge it.
However, for approximately 80F room-ambient, my CPU cooling was approximately 8 to 10C better at load with a TR Ultra 120 Extreme cooler. This was before IHS lapping; the IHS was lapped later. My VGA card -- mildly over-clocked, does not much exceed 60C under my own gaming loads -- even with ambients around 80F.
Northbridge temperatures cause one of my San-Ace 120 exhaust fans to spin up at around 35C, and only under full loads. These temperatures are measured through motherboard sensors and BIOS, so there is no temperature-lag from use of a tape-on thermal sensor. The airflow aperture for that particular fan is controlled and restricted to the point that any further temperature rise would be significantly attenuated, and the BIOS monitor and other aids seem to confirm it.