I built a new PC using Fractal Design's Focus G case and ran into a few issues specific to my hardware choices. Namely the position of the top fans caused my AIO radiator to collide with the motherboard's IO panel's shroud. At first I tried mounting the radiator in the front fan position but that interfered with the HDD cage and caused bubbles to collect in the AIO pump/CPU chiller plate. The bubbling was noisy, and the lack of HDD cage limited me to M.2 or a single 2.5" SATA disk for storage.
So I designed an adapter plate to offset the radiator and fans from the mounting holes in the top of the case.
 |
| V1 |
V1 was a simple rectangular gasket that had holes to match the 120mm fan mounting points on the case and holes to match the threaded holes on the radiator. (I prefer a top intake configuration because that pulls cool air through the radiator rather than warm air from inside the case). This setup worked but I quickly noticed that there was a stream of warm air trickling out of the top grill in the area set aside for 140mm fans. V2 added a flange that extended the mounting plate to cover the full width of the top opening in the case.
At this point I also made some front fan cowling to cover all the extra openings in the front of the case. This stopped warm air from exiting through these opening and being pulled back into the case, and it allowed the two front fans to draw air through the entire surface area of the front air filter, lowering resistance to flow and increasing the time between cleanings.
This lead me to re-visit the top adapter plate. V2 used a flange to block part of the upper grill prevented short cycling of air but was throwing away surface area. V3 added 3 plenums that allowed air to be drawn into the radiator from the previously unused areas. The 3mm openings at the edge of each plenum are only about 10% of the newly available grill area, but it's better than deleting that area entirely.
 |
| V3 |
While these are not earth shaking changes they will help with long term performance and dust control, which is good enough for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment