cooling down

For the past four days I've been dedicating a significant chunk of my attention to solving a tech-problem: how to make my PC cooler.

I'm not talking about jazzing it up ala Levi's Jeans or buying gizmos and aesthetic upgrades like LED lights, multi-colored cables, or a new metallic casing. I am being literal when I say I wanted to have a cooler PC -- making sure temperature inside the CPU don't go ballistic.

What led me to this general line of tech-thinking began four nights ago when I decided to run The Settlers 2: 10th Anniversary Edition on my home rig (a rig in tech-lingo is slang for PC, in particular what your PC is made of in terms of components, hardware, the works!). We've been talking video-games in the office and all the talk this past week fired up an urge to play one of my PC games after office. And since I was into a micro-management kind of phase, I looked into my array of kingdom-building games and decided to play The Settlers 2.

The problem was playing the game, increased the temps of my CPU -- most notably, the processor and the AGP and this forced the built-in temp sensors to ring out their alarm that one of my zones was already hitting high temps. That's when I recalled that the last time I played The Settlers 2 a year ago, I experienced crashes and auto-shutdowns which were a result of overheating in my system.

That started the internal brainstorming of how to make my PC cooler or in more accurate terms, effectively managing heat dissipation in CPU's thermal-affected zones like the processor, HDDs, and graphics card.

Inept as I am in computer hardware (never mind that I work in an IT-related company, I am a marketing person, not a tech guy), I've been busy the past four days sparing extra time researching on how to solve my heating problem. Thermal cooling solutions and complicated-looking cooling devices with complicated installation instructions were scary to me (just imagine loosing all those minute screws) and were way beyond what I had in mind. So, my attention was focused on fans instead.

But there was more to computer fans than meets the eye. Apparently, proper CPU ventilation was important and fans played a strategic part in it. Edmon, one of our IT guy and resident computer genius (who everyone believes has a career in comedy should the entire computer industry become disinteresting to him), patiently explained (not unlike a patient teacher explaining to a kindergarten) how airflow should be in a CPU.

The most immediate solution offered to alleviate the hell in my PC was to invert the orientation of the side-panel fan. Edmon guessed that it was most likely in an intake-orientation so it was sucking in cool air meant to cool the insides. However, he further surmised that its location was quite near where the processor fan was sucking the heat from the processor so the sucked-in cool air by the side-panel fan was meeting head-on the sucked-out hot air of the processor creating a vacuum where heat stayed and cannot get out. Changing the orientation of the side-panel fan converted it into an exhaust which meant it sucked out all the hot air being emitted by the processor fan.

This suggestion I immediately worked on when I got home. While I'm inept at computer hardware, you don't need much brain to unscrew four screws and flip the fan to its reverse side. In minutes, the fan was blowing hot air out and the PC was cooler. The previous evenings, my processor temp topped 65-66. After reversing the side-panel fan, my processor temp lowered to around 59-61 level even during game play.

Furthering my new-found knowledge of heat dissipation by use of effective air ventilation, I found out, thanks to some websites, that ideally, cool air should be sucked in from beneath or front of the CPU and hot air be blown out of the back. Checking my casing, I unfortunately found out that mounting a fan in the front was out of the question because of my PC's configuration. That left the back which had two grills for two possible fans.

A quick trip to Shopwise yielded an P80 DC fan which I mounted as an exhaust (as suggested by experts) at about the area where the processor was and powered up my rig. Temps started to rise and breached the previous night's high of 65.

After thinking about my setup for a bit, I flipped the side-panel fan to its reverse and original orientation (sucking in cool air) and voila, my temps dropped and my processor has been humming at a 50-53 level since two hours ago :)

And now, all that's left is whether to mount another exhaust fan or not.