WARNING: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, 'unless your super bored, a little crazy or just curious' I am all of these things lol
DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT CLAIM RESPONSIBILITY OR LIABILITY FOR ANY DAMAGE YOU MAY CAUSE TO YOUR PC WHEN EXPERIMENTING LIKE THIS.
What you need: 3x 120mm fans "low decibel preferred"
So I have an older pc and it was basically running a tiny little stock cooler on my quadcore cpu.
@ around 4Ghz which is what I run the cpu at the stock cooler was basically on full rpm to keep temps relatively manageable but the noise was something bad with that type of setup, the pc had 2 case fans though which did keep the mobo cool and other components too.
Anyway I was first thinking how the hell do I make this quieter, and cooler... I was looking at around a 10 to 20C improvement from an average CPU temp under load better than what I am currently getting with the stock cooler at 50 to 65C,
I wanted to bring that down a bit and also help cool the ram. BUT I did not want to spend a single cent on buying a new CPU cooler for an old computer..
So here is what I did, I found an extra 120mm fan in my box of spare bits. I removed the rear fan which came with the case also a 120 and decided to use this as my components cooler since this fan was actually reasonably quiet the front intake fan was also the same. I put my spare 3rd fan on the rear as an exhaust.
Removing the CPU fan but leaving the heat-sink on, I tried to adapt 1 of the 120mm fans to sit just above the heatsink and memory and blow air downwards onto the components to keep it cool, I used one of the higher quality case fans and re-wired it with some plastic ties to hold it above the components, to secure it so it would not rattle or move I used 1 screw to tie the much larger fan to the stock heat-sink.
Did a few test runs where the new setup was running the cpu fan at around 1100rpm (and fairly quiet), the airflow from the other two fans was good with the exhaust fan extracting at around 1800rpm and the intake fan in front providing another 1200rpm.
While I could not measure the noise the annoying rattle of the old stock fan 'amd one' was gone, I could hear the high pressure air flow within the case but far less annoying noise from the 3 installed and re-arranged fans.
So the results.. well heres a few pics.
Under load the new temps I am getting with this very amusing solution is 41C, in normal situations where I am web browsing, watching youtube and have a few apps running at once the temp is stable around 36C, Motherboard temp does not exceed 28C under load and ram is also very cool.
The temps improved so much with this DIY solution that the components were cold to the touch immediately after switching off the PC.
