july 2007 MAXIMUMPC
TOSSING WATER ON THE PROBLEM
CHILLIN’ YOUR CHIPS
They might look a little funny, but our cooling solutions aren’t
meant to win a beauty pageant—just suck up the heat.Like making a computer case out of cardboard boxes or a coffee
table out of beer bottle caps, sometimes the most effi cient solu-
tion isn’t the most elegant. With a drab exterior and bare-bones
interior, our media PC certainly wasn’t built for looks. But even
the slimmest of setups generates heat, and while this rig didn’t
reach absurdly critical levels like our Quad FX setup, any heat
reduction is a good thing.
While sticking heatsinks to chips isn’t the prettiest of solutions
and our PCI-style cooler leaves us with no room for add-on cards,
such are the trade-offs you have to consider when building a media
PC. If you want something that’s quiet and cool, you’ll have to make
some concessions concerning what goes in your machine. But that
should be the easy part; you don’t need a GeForce 8800 just to
watch DVDs. You don’t need 30 fans either.A keycode left behind by a
recent visitor clearly tells us
who has been in our Lab—and
provides an outsider with
easy entry.For some reason, our motherboard didn’t come with a heatsink for
the integrated graphics chip, so we start our journey down cooling
lane by salvaging a similar heatsink from a dead board and strap-
ping it into our media PC. It ends up smoothing out the temperature
of the area to a crisp 50 C, down from about 60 C.
We decided to cool the other hot chips in the case by attaching
passively cooled RAMsinks commonly used for GPU memory. It’s a
little hoopty, but it drops the temperatures of the affected areas by
10–20 C degrees on average.
Finally, we stuff a trispeed cooler over our unused PCI slots.
Since this cooler pumps air pretty much directly over the top of the
north bridge, the temperature in the area dropped 11–13 C. And
since we’re using the fan’s medium setting, we’re able to strike a
balance between annoying fan noise and cooling potential.Having cooled our media PC to the brink, we can now go back
to watching DVDs in the Lab instead of wor.... [redacted]While it’s
possible
to detect
footprints
left behind
by bare
feet, you’ll
be hard-
pressed
to follow
the trail of
shoe-wear-
ing folk.Just as every individual has a unique
fingerprint, the heat signature left
behind by an, er, behind—be it bare or
clothed—can be very telling. The size
and shape of this imprint will lead us to
this chair’s former occupant.Sam Fisher Fact or Fiction
We use our thermal imager to determine whether Splinter Cell–style investigative methods work in the real world
3 THE MEDIA CENTER MACHINE
You’re kidding, right? You mean we can’t just attach a 22cm fan to the side of our media PC?
TEST
CASE
KEYPAD TEST FOLLOW THE FOOTPRINTS ASSPRINT CHALLENGE