COOLINGCOOLINGCOOLINGCOOLING
Master’s
Guide to
Most cases include plenty of options to accommo-
date suffi cient cooling—having to actually cut a hole
in your case is unusual. We’re casting our gaze on the
easiest and most effi cient fi xes for this Fatal1ty case:
adding a water-cooling rig to help draw heat from the
entire PC and lowering the general ambient tempera-
ture of the case itself.
Water cooling allows us to directly address the
temperatures across a wide range of areas andshould give us the best possible way to cool the
monstrosity that is this rig’s 8800 GTX card. But we’re
also going to dovetail this watery solution with a few
fans. Right now, the system is running at its absolute
worst, coolingwise; there are no fans pulling cold air
into the case and only the power supply is pushing
out air. Water cooling is a great solution, but it’s not a
one-shot fi x.20 MAXIMUMPC july 2007
65.
60.
56.
52.
48.
44.
40.
36.
32.
28.
24.
20.
̊CThe
temperature
scales in
all photos
of this rig
have been
normalized
to match
the scale on
the right.SCALE
UNDER THE HOOD
CPU 3.2GHz Pentium
Extreme Edition 840
MEMORY 2GB DDR2 Corsair
Dominator RAM,
800MHz
VIDEOCARD Asus EN8800 GTX
HARD DRIVE Western Digital 75GB
Raptor
COOLING Stock CPU cooling fan
CASE Zalman Fatal1ty
FC-ZEA FROSTY PROCESS
If you didn’t know your CPU needed cooling,
please put this magazine down and grab the near-
est fire extinguisher. Even a stock cooler can work
wonders. We were pleasantly surprised to see no
heat issues whatsoever stemming from our stock
Intel CPU cooler. While fancier models can help
you better direct the airflow in your case, you’d
see a lot of red if you were just rocking a passive
cooler, assuming it even worked.VOLCANIC VOLTAGE REGULATORS
To the left of your CPU lie the voltage regulators, a little
hotbed of activity that allows the processor itself to run
at varying voltages, depending on what’s set in the
BIOS. In our rig, these guys are running at nearly 60 C;
for those of you playing at home, that’s literally “hella
hot.” If your motherboard came with a clip-on fan for
this area, you should use it.8800 DEGREES
Graphics cards are guaranteed to generate a
lot of heat. Our rig’s 8800 GTX card is running
at a steaming 60 C up top. While the card’s
built-in cooling system helps move heat from
the GPU to the butt of your case, it doesn’t
dramatically affect the underside—or top—of
the card. Make sure your case’s back-fan is
spinning; it’ll help.A DEAD ZONE?
In this case study, we removed all the built-in
front and rear fans to best simulate the effect
of installing a modern gaming rig into a bare-
bones chassis. Without some fans to help
with airflow, the warm air created by our hot
components has nowhere to go, save for the
power supply’s conduit. There’s no reason to
cut new fan holes, as the case has plenty of
mounts—we just need to figure out the most
efficient way to use them.HOT AND HARD... DRIVE
Even with a limited amount of air mov-
ing around its exterior, our 75GB Rap-
tor drive isn’t exactly smoking. But it’s
still not cool. While we can’t prove that
high temps will shorten a drive’s life,
the combination of heat and delicate
spinning parts is never ideal. That said,
drives don’t require a massive amount
of cooling, just enough to stir the air.(^1) THE EVERYMAN GAMING RIG
It’s not the fastest box on the market, but this rig’s GeForce 8800 GTX can handle anything you throw at it
TEST
CASE