The Wind-Tunnel PC
(How to add a big fat mains fan to your computer and
banish your cooling problems forever!)
I lug my computer around a fair
bit, occasionally for work but mainly for frivolity. LAN gaming is a ton
of fun, but kicking the snot out of your friends on a marvellous lag-free
Local Area Network does require you to all have your computers in one place.
For elegant LAN gaming, you
therefore need a high powered PC in as small and neat a package as you can
manage. If you're a big husky person then carting a full tower case around
shouldn't bother you, but this does not describe the average gamer. So a
little case is a good idea. Smaller cases also have a lower centre of gravity,
so they're less likely to tumble around in the back of a car as you head
off to Frag Central. It is a basic tenet of moving machinery that you should
never restrain anything so poorly that you have to drive more carefully
to avoid tumbling the cargo, but gamers violate that rule every day.
Unfortunately, most little cases
suck. Especially for a high powered computer. They're generally badly made,
with lots of sharp pressed metal and poor rigidity. Their weedy power supplies
can be upgraded, but they often don't have enough drive bays for a powerful
system. And, more importantly, they've got lousy cooling. A computer with
an overclocked Celeron, a pile of drives and a steaming 3D video card in
it runs hot, and needs a heck of a lot more cooling than the poor
little power supply fan in a cable-packed mini-tower case can supply.
The traditional solution to
this problem is to buy a bigger case and fill it with fans. In my previous
case I had a PSU fan, an 80mm fan in the standard auxiliary mounting cradle
at the front, the fan on the Celeron heatsink, two more 60mm fans blowing
down onto the processor, another 80mm fan between the hard drives, and a
little slot fan sitting next to my video card and blowing warm air out of
the back of the computer. Oh, and the teeny 25mm fan in my CD writer.
I've now transplanted all of
my hardware into a new case, and banished five of those dinky extra fans.
The PSU, standard CPU and CD writer fans are still there, because they're
standard equipment, but everything else has been supplanted by one, single,
120mm mains powered fan mounted where the front fan is meant to be. I did
this modification to AOpen's neat little HX 45 midi-tower case...
