Lian Li 6070 + Athlon 2700+ cooling

[highlanderfil]

I like this case a lot, albeit pretty cramped and not very well cooled...here's my question. I have a SmartFan2 coupled with an SLK-900a heatsink cooling an Athlon 2700+ on a K7N2 Delta-L motherboard. I am getting temperatures in the 47-51 degrees Celcius range under moderate load (AIM, IE, a couple programs, etc). My power supply is a TruePower 430. The fans at the back of the case blow out pretty warm air. Case temp is reported around 35 degrees. My room temperature is pretty low - the place is well air-conditioned. These temps seem to be a bit on the high side...can anything be done? Oh yeah. No overclocking at all and I use Arctic Alumina for the thermal stuff.
EDIT: Just took off the side panel and the temp dropped to 41-43...wow...

 

[highlanderfil]

:=\

 

[mechBgon]

You can do several things to improve the case ventilation Start with the easy ones:

• Remove the bezel, then take off the filter-holder that's choking the front intake fans and keeping them from getting a nice free airflow. This filter holder is removed by pulling it straight up very firmly until it disengages.
• Remove the inboard fan grilles from the front fans and rear fan, because they're choking off a lot of potential airflow too
• If you're comfortable doing so, cut the grillework out where the rear exhaust fan is blowing out the back, and use a chromed wire grille and fan screws instead, for another big boost in airflow. You could probably do this with nothing more than a hand-held fine-toothed hacksaw blade and maybe a half-round file to smooth the hole.
• Tuck your interior cables out of the way as much as possible, so the air can flow through the case easily
• Consider replacing the three stock fans with Panaflo L1A's, which have pretty good punch for their noise rating, particularly when working against "drag"

If you want to get carried away, I can suggest some advanced mods that will let you really clean up your cables, but they involve :Q hole saws and Dremels. Anyway, hope that helps a bit

 

[Tiamat]

quote: "If you're comfortable doing so, cut the grillework out where the rear exhaust fan is blowing out the back, and use a chromed wire grille and fan screws instead, for another big boost in airflow. You could probably do this with nothing more than a hand-held fine-toothed hacksaw blade and maybe a half-round file to smooth the hole."

Agreed. I did it the hard way. I used a dremel and drilled through the 4 connection points of the rear fan grille. Works well.

Although, i use the fan filter still because my place likes dust, and without it, my case built up dust really quickly.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Tiamat
quote: "If you're comfortable doing so, cut the grillework out where the rear exhaust fan is blowing out the back, and use a chromed wire grille and fan screws instead, for another big boost in airflow. You could probably do this with nothing more than a hand-held fine-toothed hacksaw blade and maybe a half-round file to smooth the hole."

Agreed. I did it the hard way. I used a dremel and drilled through the 4 connection points of the rear fan grille. Works well.

Although, i use the fan filter still because my place likes dust, and without it, my case built up dust really quickly.

I actually took the middle road myself... I cut the perforated part of the filter holder out into a huge rectangle, and put some nice edge moulding on it for style points. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a photo of it

 

[highlanderfil]

yeah, some photos would be supersweet

 

[highlanderfil]

ttt

 

[mechBgon]

My Lian-Li is currently at work, and so's my digital camera. If you want photos of anything in particular, let me know and I'll try to crank out a few photos at work and upload them. Here's one that I do have: interior shot, is that clean or what?

If you look carefully at the extreme left edge of the photo, you can see one of the main reasons it runs cool... it has a second 80mm exhaust fan, and both of the rear 80's are breathing easy due to the chromed-wire grilles that replaced the stock stamped-sheet-metal grilles.

 

[bsr]

That IS VERY clean build, where did you get those cables? Very nice work.

 

[Blooz1]

I'll second the results that can be obtained by taking the filter holder off and doing the fan grill mods. It's made a great deal of difference on my PC-65b. I replaced the stock fans with Panaflo 80MM H1A's, which are controlled by a Sunbeam rheostat.

At full bore, it's louder than stock, but 90% of the time all fans are running at 50% and are nice and quiet. With an SK-7 and another H1A, the system runs about 36C idle and 40-41C full load. The suction of the Panaflo's hold the filter in place without the holder! (But I'm gonna haul out the Dremel and try Mech's mod on the holder, just for kicks!)

 

[mechBgon]

Thanks for the props Here are a couple photos of my filter holder:

• On the case with the bezel removed
• Closeup of the filter holder

The PSU cables and the fan wiring are almost all double-sleeved by me, with black sleeving that I got from SVC. That was extremely laborious. I also sleeved the case's Power/Reset/LED wiring and its front-USB wiring, which are the black sleeved wires there at the bottom center of the case.

The sleeved cables coming off the PCI cards there are some pre-sleeved SCSI cables I got from Newegg and then cut down to single-device. That was a little tedious, because I had to carefully peel the terminator plug off of its original location and re-press the cable into it just beyond the HDD plug

The IDE and floppy cables are off-the-shelf Antec Cobra cables, except that I cut one of the IDE cables down to a single-device cable for the Zip250 that's in the top of the 3.5" cage. I cut out a rectangle in the floor of the 3.5" cage to allow me to route the cables straight out the floor for neatness. There are some other mods that are most easily explained by a photo, so maybe I'll add another photo after work tomorrow showing the :evil: cable-bypass mods :evil:

 

[Blooz1]

Ahhh, you had to go and do that, Mech! Now I'm <U>definitely</U> going to mod my holder!

I was going to ask about your abling to the front switches after looking closely at the pic you posted. That must have been quite a job to do! Does it make connecting things more difficult to hook up with the sleeving on the wires? (I've had all these connections apart on my case about 5 times, and have yet to figure out which order of re-assembly would make it the easiest to do!)

 

[Wuzup101]

Damn, I really have to get on the stick here and get my case organized too. I think I am going to skip the window mod in this case b/c I never cared for the way lexen gets dusty all the time (and will do so in 2 seconds in my dorm). I think I'm going to get a wrap kit and make some nice wrapped cables, and I have 4 or 5 92mm panaflow's laying around... maybe I can mod 2 of them into the lower side of the case.

Just wanted to add that you did one heck of a job Mech... it looks nice!

 

[mechBgon]

Thanks, I like it too! Sort of a shame that it's a genuine, boring daily-driver office computer with nothing more exciting than Solitaire... but then, I never claimed to be normal :evil:

It's time to pimp some more Lian-Li goodness. Here's --wait, you guys are all over 18, right? :disgust:







Ok then, here it is with the right side panel removed

• Cable Bypass
• Cable Bypass, take 2 Here's a closer shot.

As you can see, I cut a vertical rectangle out of the 5.25"-bay area, which allows the IDE cable for the two optical drives to be routed back here, as long as the bottom bay is open. You can also route the power cables back here. This mod is a cinch, since there are already vertical slots and you just need to slip a hacksaw blade into the slots and cut downward, then make a horizontal cut across the top and bottom using a dremel or even a heavy-duty utility knife (with patience and repetition).

There's also that round hole up by the power supply, which I rimmed with some rubber edge moulding like I used on my filter holder (FrozenCPU is where I got mine). That was done with a 2" hole saw. I clamped the sheet metal between two blocks of plywood so it wouldn't distort. Naturally, this isn't risk-free, so proceed at your own risk if you try it. As you can see, I stowed the unused power-supply wiring back here where it's out of sight.

The red-sleeved wiring goes from my SCSI cards to my hand-made LED thing in the bottom 5.25" bay, to provide HDD-activity lights for both SCSI cards. I also spliced it into the case's Power LED and IDE LED wiring (the bigger LED is Power On).

The thing that looks like a PS/2 mouse plug is, in fact, a PS/2 extension cord that I used both ends of, so I could quick-disconnect my LED panel if I needed to take the case apart.

 

[highlanderfil]

Wow, that's very impressive! Well, an update on my situation: sold the 6070 and bought the CoolerMaster WaveMaster...so another question for you guys? Anyone wanna be a good guy and help me actually re-wire this stuff when I replace the case? If you're in the L.A. area and have some time before Saturday, I know it's a long shot, but let me know...I'll buy dinner or something...or have my mom cook ya one, better yet...Russian food...heh. Of course I'll buy the necessary supplies as well.

 

[Wuzup101]

I actually did get around to doing some modding over my break. I put in a window mod w/ 2 92mm panaflows (the medium output ones... forget what letter that is off the top of my head). I had the window premade w/ the fans already in it. All I had to do was seperate it from the case it used to be on (which was never used) and add a hole on the lian li for it. Looks much better in person but here's some crapy pics. I really didn't feel like moving my tower to get better pictures!

Side View Sorta

Front View

 

[QueBert]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
My Lian-Li is currently at work, and so's my digital camera. If you want photos of anything in particular, let me know and I'll try to crank out a few photos at work and upload them. Here's one that I do have: interior shot, is that clean or what?

If you look carefully at the extreme left edge of the photo, you can see one of the main reasons it runs cool... it has a second 80mm exhaust fan, and both of the rear 80's are breathing easy due to the chromed-wire grilles that replaced the stock stamped-sheet-metal grilles.

Holy Mother Of Mary that looks cleeean! I just did the inside of mine, it looks 100% better then it did before, but your pic blows my half ass job out of the water. Now I'm going to have read up on how to properly sleeve the power cables so I can hope to one day have a PC I'd be proud of showing people the inside of.

Excellent work, if you don't mind me asking how long did that take? I spend about an hour with some electrical tape to make my pc look clean, err if you look at it with the window panel on